The Suburban Dad

Vitameatavegamin: Do you give your kids a multi-vitamin?

We give our son a multivitamin each day. Little did I know that I've been buying the expensive name brand vitamins all this time.

1 ml a day.  50 ml bottle. Lasts 50 days.  At $18-20 a bottle, Enfamil's PolyViSol costs about $120-$140 a year depending on whether you can get it on sale.

It didn't occur to me that there are generic brands for children's multivitamins.

Safeway has it's own Select Brand Multi-vitamins for $6.99.
Shopper's Drugmart has it's Life brand Multi-Vitamins for $10.99.

I don't think there's much difference in any of these brands except the price.

Do you give your kids a multi-vitamin?

We are what we eat

At 10:30 p.m. last night, I was hungry and craving my all-time guilty-pleasure food: bacon.  Mmmm...bacon.  We don't keep bacon in the house for the sole reason that I would be consuming it at every opportunity I get. Instead, I fried up an egg sunny-side up and ate it with some white rice. 

My wife and I are really making the conscious decision to eat healthy: more fruits and vegetables, less red meat (we barely buy beef as it is), and more whole grains.  We follow the rule of only shopping around the grocery store since that's where they keep all the fresh foods. 

We do indulge every now and then at not-so-healthy choices such as pop, sugar-rich desserts, and the incredibly convenient choice of fast-food.

Over lunch today, my coworker was talking about this book called In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.  She just gave a brief run-through of some of the points that stood out to shocked her the most:

• Almost all processed food has some sort of corn-derived by-product in it.  For example, a milkshake at your McDonald's will show up in a mass-spectrometer as "corn". 
• Your Chicken McNuggets isn't really made up of chicken and has a thin layer of butane.
• Cows nowadays are made to eat large amounts of corn to fatten them up instead of natural grasses and hay. This is to fatten them up so they can be butchered in 18 months instead of at 5 years (normal length for a cow to grow).
• Coke used to use real sugar but now use high-fructose corn syrup because it's cheaper.

Please note that this is an anecdotal account of the book. My friend Renee, was quite mortified about it and I am a little bit too.  Yesterday, I got home and my sister was eating chicken nuggets. I ate one and gave my 14 month old son some as well.  I shudder to think that I just gave my son some 'butane' yesterday.  I'll probably pick up this book and share it with my wife.

I have to admit, my wife and I have been less discerning to what our son eats these days.  Most of the time it's just whatever we have prepared for dinner.  Back when my wife was on maternity leave, we would prepare vegetable purees for him.  There's been a lot less of that since both of us are now working full-time.  This is not to say that we're feeding him junk but I think the conversation over lunch was a wake-up call to maybe pay attention a little bit more than we have lately about 'what we eat'.

We are what we eat...