I like what Mike Eades said about this article - more or less, it would be hard to put more mis-information into an article this size if you were trying to do so.
The toxic food environment believers - who think that there's just too much good food out there, we eat too much of it, and we don't exercise our kids enough - just throw up their hands and say you cannot intervene, you'll make Maggie anorexic, therefore we should just teach Maggie to love being fat and pre-diabetic. Or, we should teach Maggie to eat less. Or, we should teach Maggie to eat only lean meats, fruits and veggies, and whole grains (if that works for you, bless you, thank the heavens). In short, they have no real template for why Maggie is fat, and without any framework for analysis, they will accept the flimsiest of ideas; such as the one that says the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us all we need to know about complex human behaviors like eating and moving.
I know this - parenting a child, and helping a child learn to deal with food is going to be hard, no two ways about it. The food environment is indeed toxic, and there's questionable virtue in teaching your kids that "bad" foods are always to be avoided. Nontheless, there are few things you can do as a parent that are more likely to impact the quality of your child's life than to give them useful knowledge about food.
I still have some hope that there will be a longer term impact of the emergence of the Paleolithic Model of Nutrition - if the concept reaches critical mass, kids won't have to sled up hill to practice eating in a Paleolithic style. Your kids won't have to turn down the sugar laced food bars and gatorade style drinks after they chased a soccer ball for an hour - because more parents will realize how counterproductive that is. Your kids won't be hit by the chance to eat cookies and cake as often. Every kid they know won't have sugary, carb laced meals, "heart healthy low fat snacks", and desserts every single day.
Eating is influenced by individual genetics and experience, but it is also a cultural human phenomenon, which has more impact on kids than adults. It's tough enough for adults to find their way into an unusal but effective approach to eating, but it's triply tough for kids, and they are paying for it with their health. The near epidemic of childhood metabolic syndrome and obesity is a predictable and tragic outcome of the mis-application of government and pseudo-science - the one should never presume to act on the later. If you pray, pray that a better way can be found to help these vulnerable little folks with so much at stake. I'm going to pray for the grace to forgive those that let food become a political fight with so many caught in collateral damage.
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