Most mornings lately, I’ve been tired. Not just sleepy—bone-weary tired. There are a million things I could blame, from a hectic family/work schedule to chronically interrupted sleep (2- and 5-year-olds do not sleep very soundly). In the haze, it’s hard to know what it is I really need. More vitamins? Better exercise? It occurred to me this morning, as I turned up the hot water in the shower for an extra “blast,” that I am simply out of step with the season. Despite the fact that we don’t burrow in mud- and leaf-lined caves and sleep all winter, humans are meant to slow down and rest more in the colder/darker months. And lately I have been expecting myself to do everything as if it were still mid summer with bountiful sunlight and tons of social energy. So when Michael Finkelstein, M.D., got in touch to offer these simple tips for staving off the winter blues, I took note. more

For healthy body weight, nonfat and low-fat milk is the obvious choice for kids, right? Not so fast. New evidence suggests that children who drink whole milk actually weigh less and have lower BMIs compared to kids who don’t drink milk or who regularly consume nonfat or low-fat milk. Like other studies, this seems to suggest that some dietary fat may actually have a positive effect on overall health and weight.

In the release from the University of Gothenburg, dietician Susanne Eriksson, author of the thesis notes: “This is an interesting observation, but we don’t know why it is so. It may be the case that children who drink full-fat milk tend also to eat other things that affect their weight.” The scientists also discovered a difference between overweight children who drink full-fat milk every day and those who do not. Children who often drink milk with a fat content of 3% are less overweight. The thesis shows also that the children eat more saturated fat than recommended, but those children who have a high intake of fat have a lower BMI than the children with a lower intake of fat.

Children’s food allergies have been on the rise for quite some time, with no clear explanation as to why. Some experts blame GMOs, others the timing of introducing foods to kids or the frequency with which we consume certain staples—such as wheat, dairy, soy, and corn. Evidence shows that most kids acquire food allergies within their first couple years of life, which may explain why researchers recently found that kids who started multivitamin supplements earlier (in this case, before age 4) showed a 39 percent reduction in food allergy risk, while older children saw little or no change to allergy risk when taking the same multivitamins. Take away? Multivitamins can in fact help reduce allergy risk, but only if they’re started early.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat (Young Readers Edition) hits shelves next week. With it, Pollan hopes to reach a whole new generation of eaters with the same compelling naratives and statistics in the original book—only in a more kid-friendly format. “I think that if were are going to change this food system and get right with our eating in this country it’s going to involve kids eating in a different way, learning more about their food choices, exercising personal responsibility from a position of knowledge rather than all the marketing illusion that’s around,” he said recently in my interview with him about the book. more

I am thrilled to hear today that Organic Valley, the nation’s largest co-op of organic farmers and producers, has been named the milk supplier for the 28,000-student Boulder Valley School District. As reported in DL’s September 09 issue, chef Ann Cooper, a.k.a. Renegade Lunch Lady, has recently focused her prodigious efforts to improve school lunches here in Boulder, and the organic-milk change is the most welcome new element. “School lunch programs across the nation need to make fundamental changes to improve the health and well-being of our children. Unfortunately, public schools are one of the last places where organic milk is usually found,” she says in the press release. “Not only is organic milk produced without antibiotics, synthetic pesticides and hormones, making it healthier for growing children, but Organic Valley milk is healthier for our local community because it’s produced by local family farmers.”

When people ask me what they should “start with” in terms of organic food, I always say dairy … because all that nasty stuff in conventional milk and dairy products can’t ever be washed off, and kids (at least MY kids) drink a LOT of milk. It was the first thing our family switched to organic, and now our schools have the same benefit. If you want to see this happen in YOUR school district, don’t wait: check out Cooper’s Food Family Farming website, with resources such as The Lunch Box tool to help you get something going.

Thankfully, I never had trouble producing enough milk with either of my own kids (now 2 and 5), but I have known a surprising number of women (among the 3-6 million women worldwide) who have had to give up breastfeeding because they failed to produce enough milk. And some part of me always wondered: Was it a lack of trying? The fact that breast feeding can be surprisingly painful at first? But a recent study conducted at the University of Rochester Medical Center points to another potential culprit: dioxins. more