[Ep. 351] Transform Your Child's Behavior and Moods With This Snack

Stimulating foods loaded in sugar and carbs are everywhere, and especially advertised to our children. These foods cause spikes and dips in glucose which result in an adrenal response. This transforms nervous systems and brain chemistry, negatively impacting dopamine levels. Sometimes we call the result a tantrum, shutting down, or an inability to concentrate. 

We can change so much about a kid’s, or our own, lifestyle, but without a balanced diet the brain chemicals needed to focus and connect are simply not available. 

Luis drops his favorite balancing food options and his four favorite snacks to resource our kids, or ourselves. Chocolate is featured in one option. This is balance at its yummiest. 

You can watch the episode where Luis presents his glucose chart here: https://youtu.be/Y0YNZgXO1PE

You can register for the Embodied Parenting webinar here: https://hln.thinkific.com/courses/embodied-parenting-webinar

You can also read more about, and register for, the 6 month program here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/parenting-group

You can read more about, and register for, the workshop at Kripalu here: https://kripalu.org/experiences/food-therapy-how-eat-your-nervous-system

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You can learn more on the website: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/

You can follow Luis on Instagram @holistic.life.navigation

Questions? You can email us at info@holisticlifenavigation.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:24

Welcome to the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. I am your host, Luis Mojica. I'm a somatic therapist and nutritionist who combines nutritional therapy with somatic therapy to help thousands of people around the world, including myself, recover from stress and trauma. This podcast serves as a way for me to teach you what I learn for free. How can food aid in the recovery of stress and trauma? What does it really mean to be embodied? And how can simple somatic practices help us better navigate this strange and sensational human experience? Let's find out. One of the most powerful changes to your child's behavior will not be anything in the environment like friendships or good education or even having needs of connection met. It will be their diet. Because without a balanced diet, they don't have the brain chemicals to even connect to anything in their environment. Never before have we had such an incredible access to ultra-processed foods. Everywhere you go, the hardware store, the gym, the laundromat, places that aren't where we would eat, are filled at the register with ultra-processed foods. Foods that really are not natural foods, foods that are not in their natural form, foods that are very, very high in sugar and carbohydrates. I wrote a whole book called Food Therapy. So if you really want to learn about this, you can listen to the audiobook or you can buy the book or go to your local library. Most libraries carry it, which is excellent, because that means it's free. But this book teaches something very important that I've been studying for nearly two decades: food-induced stress. And it's important to understand that when your glucose spikes from eating carbohydrates and sugar, a glucose spike or glucose dip will result in fight or flight response. What does this have to do with your child? Children tend to be marketed most heavily to eat ultra-processed foods. These are fun foods: Starburst and gushers and Skittles and MMs and waffles and Pop-Tarts and snackables and uncrustables. All these foods are geared toward children. They are affordable and they are very high in refined carbohydrates and sugars. So these foods cause a massive imbalance to your child's glucose. Every time they eat these foods, it will create a subsequent adrenal response, a fight or flight response, a stress or a trauma response. So their tantrums, their mood disorders or imbalances, their shutdown, their lack of concentration is often coming from how these foods affect their brains. These foods just aren't healthy or unhealthy. They actually transform their nervous system and their brain chemistry. Because similar to screens, which I'll get into in my next video, they mess with your dopamine levels. Your dopamine is your molecule for motivation. It's what gives you focus and inspiration and drive to do the dishes, to do a project, to go get yourself food somewhere, to make something. It's such an important molecule for our brains to move us into action. We only have so much of it, and we only get so much of it from the foods we eat. So we have to eat nutritious foods, foods that are rich in amino acids, these are good proteins, and foods that have a good amount of fiber, like beans and fruits and grains and vegetables. When you have these amino acids from proteins combining with the bacteria made from the fiber and your microbiome, you have the creation of brain chemicals, notably in this episode, dopamine. And when you're making enough dopamine, your brain stores a bunch, but it can only store so much. Every time you eat food that's dopaminergic, every time a child eats Skittles or a Snickers bar or drinks a soda, it's like fireworks in the brain because the brain is caused to just burst and release a bunch of dopamine, partially because the additives and how the food is molecularly created and genetically modified, but also because of how it affects blood sugar. A big uh increase in glucose will release dopamine. And uh an excess amount of adrenaline can also mess with your dopamine stores. So the body dumps out the dopamine it's storing for the day. So your child gets this rush of euphoria, just like we might if we have a slice of cake or coffee and a donut for breakfast. And then it quickly declines within 30 minutes, 45 minutes, two hours. You can actually see this decline on a glucose chart. And I have an episode that shows that. Maybe we can put it in the episode details here. But you will see your uh glucose is going up when you eat something, and then bam, it drops. And when that tanking happens, you experience hopelessness and moodiness and irritability and the inability to focus. Now, adults go through this. Imagine a three, four, five-year-old body or a 14-year-old hormonal body. It is extremely overwhelming to these systems. So when your children, when their snacks and especially their meals, are based in these ultra-processed foods, they are mentally imbalanced all throughout the day, every couple hours, because of how their glucose is being impacted. One of the most powerful changes to your child's behavior will not be anything in the environment like friendships or good education or even having needs of connection met. It will be their diet because without a balanced diet, they don't have the brain chemicals to even connect to anything in their environment. They can't focus on homework, they can't take in a task or a chore or even connect with you because their brain is already so overwhelmed from food. The food is inducing so much stress in their bodies, they can't even be in their bodies. So, what's important here is to not think you have to clean out everything they're eating, but start bringing in some balancing options. Balancing foods are foods that don't stimulate that adrenal response because they don't cause such a rapid influctuation with blood glucose. And my top favorite balancers are greens, beans, and proteins. And we can add a bonus balancer here, which is kind of above them all, actually, fats. So, my favorite thing for kids, I'm gonna give you three really, really simple snacks to start with because having snacks in between meals that are balancing will change your life. I mean, you will notice behavior changes within a couple hours. It's not gonna take months. You will see it in the day one of trying this. I want you to get a tray or a plate or a bowl, and I want you to fill it with a variety of the following snacks. One or two beautifully colored fruits. It doesn't matter what kind there are. Yes, I know it's sugary, but it's nothing compared to a candy bar. One or two salted nuts or seeds of your your choosing. Obviously, something your child likes, so you might have to find a bunch of different ones. Most kids tend to love pistachios and peanuts and cashews because they tend to be a little sweeter and they're really rich and fatty. So roasted salted nuts of those varieties, really useful. Beef jerky or fish jerky, if they eat meat, throw that in there. And some kind of crunchy vegetable, two crunchy vegetables, cucumbers, celery, carrots are the first that come to mind. I want you to have this on the counter or in your child's lunch bag when they are going to school or when they're at home. So if they're going to school, if they're out of the house, pack it in their lunch bag, that's their snack. When they're at home, put this in some kind of bowl or dish or tray, and that's the snack that's available. Don't have chips, don't have crackers, don't have cookies, none of that should be in the house. You can go out for that stuff. That can be like fun food when you go out or you go to a party. But have these foods as your main foods on the counter. And I'll give you some top three that tend to work for every child that comes to our house and for my daughter. Celery with nut butter and little pieces of dates or raisins. We used to call these ants on a log as kids. You can put a little salt on it. It's an incredible balancing food. The celery with the fat and protein with the nuts and a little bit of the natural sugar from the dried fruit is such a delicious flavor in the mouth, so many good textures, but so balancing for the nervous system because of how it doesn't amp up that glucose response because there's so much good fiber and nutrients and minerals and antioxidants and fats and proteins that all help ground glucose. So celery with nut butter and a dried fruit and some salt sprinkled on top. Excellent. Cucumbers with hummus. Find a hummus your child likes, add extra olive oil to it. Extra fat will make it even more grounding. And have the cucumbers sliced just like chips and let them get used to dipping that and eating that. Or you can use carrots. Carrots are a great, great option. Another thing that works beautifully is dark chocolate. I'm talking 75 to 85%. It's gonna be very low sugar and it's gonna be high antioxidant and it's high in fat because it's bound to cocoa butter. Dark chocolate, maybe like half an ounce, up to an ounce, depending on how big your kid is, how much they eat, with nuts of their choice. So some kind of uh trail mix here. A bunch of nuts salted with some dark chocolate thrown in, maybe a couple pieces of dried fruit if you need to. Excellent takeaway snack, excellent snack to eat on the go, excellent snack to grab and eat while you're doing homework or running out of the house or going to some kind of practice or game. These snacks will create such an incredible balance for your child's body that then will ease them into eating more balancing foods for their meals. Now, like I said, I wrote an entire book on this. You can get my book right now. Again, we'll put the link in the episode details. You can get the audiobook, you can get the physical copy, there's a Kindle version, you can get it right now and start learning how to incorporate these foods, other balancing foods, into your actual meals more. But my upcoming parenting group spends an entire month on this. I'll be teaching you how to incorporate balancing foods that are child-friendly. And the best part about my group is you get one-on-one support with a trained SCP, my colleague, friend, and co-teacher, Camille Leek. So the whole six months, she is there one-on-one for you on circle. You can DM her whenever you want. So if you have a two-year-old or you have a 22-year-old living with you, she will give you options custom tailored to your experience and circumstance so you can learn how to incorporate this. When you understand how processed foods affect your child's mental health and behavior, you find one of the most incredibly useful tools in parenting that few people talk about, nutrition. And you start reducing their stress response, increasing their focus, and then balancing their moods just by what you feed them. So if you want the actual support from me and my team, you'll have to join the upcoming six-month group. Otherwise, I have a shit ton of podcasts and YouTube videos about food as well as my book. So go check those out if you want a little more information about nutrition and to start trying it out yourself. I hope this helped you. Let me know in the comments what you think. That's the end of today's episode. Take a moment to notice where you feel the episode. Take a breath into that place. Maybe even put your hand over it and let whatever wants to come up come up. And remember, our bodies speak through sensations. What's yours saying right now? For more information on any upcoming events, please visit holisticlifenavigation.com. And feel free to check out my YouTube page where you can watch any of these episodes, leave a comment, and even request a future topic for me to dive into. I'll see you next time.