Growing happy little VEGGIE-mites with dietitian Kate Di Prima

Child 1:

My favourite vegetable is carrots and potato, and I like them because they’re yummy.

Speaker 2:

My favourite vegetable is a zucchini.

Child 3:

Carrots, onions, potatoes, olives, tomatoes.

Child 4:

What vegetables do you hate, and why don’t you like them?

Child 5:

Mushrooms. I just hate the texture of them, and I just really don’t like them.

Child 6:

I don’t like eggplant because it’s purple.

Child 7:

I don’t like Brussels sprouts because I think they’re disgusting.

Tracey Challenor:

This is the Life Education Parent podcast. Hello, I’m Tracey Challenor, and some very cute kids there, telling us what they really think about eating their veggies. Well, we all know diet is important and what foods we should be eating, but busy, modern lives, eating on the run, and picky eaters can sometimes get in the way of making the best choices for ourselves and our families. So, to help us sort out the nutrition fact from fiction, we’re joined today by leading dietitian, Kate Di Prima. Kate’s a well-known media spokesperson, author, expert on allergies and fussy eaters, and is on the national board of Nutrition Australia. Hi, Kate. Great to have you with us.

Kate Di Prima:

Hi, Tracey. Lovely to be here.

Tracey Challenor:

Well, Kate, we’ll get into allergies in a little while because so many families seem to be dealing with them now, but I wanted to get your opinion on the dreaded statistic that we keep hearing. And that is that 95% of Aussie kids are not getting the recommended daily amount of veggies. You’d think Australia would be ahead of a lot of countries in terms of nutrition standards, but it seems like we’ve still got a fair bit of work to do to improve kids’ diets.

Kate Di Prima:

Oh, absolutely, Tracey. Look, the one thing is we’ve got a beautiful food supply. It’s bright, it’s fresh, it’s sustainable, and it’s relatively inexpensive. And when you walk into any supermarket, the first thing you see is fresh veggies, fruits, and salads. But unfortunately, this is not transferring onto the home plate. And it’s a big concern for dietitians, especially me. I’ve been in this practice now for about 30 years. And as my lovely husband says, “Well, you’re making a huge impact.” But it’s a worrying statistic and I think even taking it a bit further, somewhere I read recently was about only 4% of adult Australians get their vegetables or salad, and children are even less. So, this is a big concern for us as dieticians and as parents.

Tracey Challenor:

It is a worry, isn’t it? And I guess in a lot of families, both parents are working and you look at these cooking shows and it looks like everybody loves to cook. I’m not really convinced by that, that people love being in the kitchen. I think it’s still a bit of a chore for the average person to think of what to cook for the family at the end of the day. But preparation is really the key, isn’t it? Menu planning, if we want to have a healthier diet.

Kate Di Prima:

You’ve hit the nail on the head, Tracey. Menu planning is everything. I think planning… Planning your exercise. If you don’t, if you try and just live in a spontaneous world, you never do it. And so, I’ve menu planned for years and years and years. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to put the chefing extraordinaire dish on the daily table every single night. It’s about just making sure that you’ve got A, the ingredients in the fridge, B, you feel comfortable cooking whatever you’re doing. Having a bit of variety, because people do get bored. But I think the main thing is, if parents are actually, or if adults are eating veggies and salad, this will translate through to kids. But I guess if they’re not even on an adult plate, children can’t hop into the car and go and get their own meals. They actually are relying very heavily on those preparing the meals.

Kate Di Prima:

And like you said, we all get caught up in those lovely TV shows, but the reality is most people do not cook like that on the night-to-night basis. We have our stock standard five to seven meals that we rotate around and we enjoy the taste of, and the look of, and we can get a little bit creative when we’ve got a bit of time up our sleeve, but for the time-poor parent, we’re grabbing something quick and easy. And if it’s not planned, that quick and easy tends to be convenient, outside food delivered to the door.

Tracey Challenor:

Absolutely. And the fewer ingredients, the better, really, when you’re making it from scratch, I always find.

Kate Di Prima:

Oh, absolutely. And fewer ingredients doesn’t mean missing out on veggies and salad. So, veggies and salad should be a really dominating part of the meal. And look, the ironic thing, Tracey, that we see as dietitians is all children who start solids around six months of age love them. They love veggies. That’s their first thing that pops into their mouth. It’s the first thing that most parents, caregivers, guardians give their little ones around that six months of age is veggies. Blended veggies, and they love them. But somewhere between six months and 25, it all goes a bit pear shaped.

Tracey Challenor:

And Kate, what is the best way to get children interested in good food habits from a young age?

Kate Di Prima:

Well, I think if a child sees that food, if they’re around that food, so… You know, we’ve got the typical Italian, like the good name Di Prima, we’ve got the typical deck garden. We don’t have a large amount of property where we live in Brisbane. So, we’ve actually done little raised garden beds on our deck, out the front of our house. And my husband has got some cherry tomatoes strung up and he’s got some snow peas. We’ve got lettuce. So, for our family, you can see it growing. You can see where its primary source comes from. You can pick it there and then, and eat it straight from the vine. So, I think getting children involved in cooking. I know there’s lots and lots of programs that are run through schools and even daycare centres and childcare centres have their little veggie patches and children get very excited by that. Taking them along to the shops and giving them the opportunity to see the finished product sitting there in its bright colour, shape, size, smell, et cetera.

Kate Di Prima:

But do you know, Tracey, I’ve seen in the past, I’ve been pottering around through the supermarket aisles and in the fresh veggie and salad and a little one has sort of reached out and pointed to a carrot or celery or whatever. And I’ve heard parents say, “No, you won’t like it. So, I won’t get it.” And it’s like, I need to go, “No, this is the one opportunity”-

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah, missed opportunity.

Kate Di Prima:

Give them a chance. “We’ll go around through the aisles and get you a packet of something, like some salted biscuits or something, because I know you’ll like those.” So, these little ones, just give them the opportunity to be exposed to all these lovely tastes, textures, and smells. Give them that opportunity. But I remember a number of years ago, Tracey, that there was a PhD student did some assessment on why families are just not eating veggies and salads as much as say a piece of fruit or a packet of biscuits or a muesli bar.

Kate Di Prima:

And it came down to convenience. So, if things aren’t cut up in the line of sight ready, available, the minute you open that fridge door, it’s right in front of you, they’ll go for something that’s quick and easy just to undo a tube and throw a squeezy yogurt into their mouths rather than grabbing at a carrot stick. So, I do know that supermarkets are now doing those things. They’re making them ready, prepared, peeled, chopped up. It cannot be any more easy than that, but it just means that we’ve got to put things at eye level for little ones, as well.

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah, that’s true. We have become a bit lazy, haven’t we, with food preparation?

Kate Di Prima:

Yes.

Tracey Challenor:

Kate, we know that one in four Aussie kids are obese or overweight and a recent study by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute found that children as young as 11 were showing signs of cardiovascular disease. Knowing that heart health worsens the longer a child is obese, how do we as a society address the national obesity crisis?

Kate Di Prima:

Programs where you’ve just got things that, in the papers, in your weekend papers and on TV and radio… I think I’ve spoken to clients and I say, “Do you listen to those? Do you see those? Do you feel that they’re impactful?” And a lot of people say to me, “I just tune out now.” It seems to be a droning kind of thing. Yes, we’ve got adult obesity. Yes, we’ve got childhood obesity and they just tend to… I think we’re getting a bit numb to that kind of conversation. But when I actually start to talk to parents and say, look, the obesity crisis is due to poor food intake and poor food intake is the intake of very highly refined foods, processed foods, foods with not a lot of nourishment, foods that you can eat a large amount of before you fill up.

Kate Di Prima:

And those foods tend to be lacking in fibre, lacking in vitamins and minerals. So, I’m starting to take a little bit of the tactic of talking about the gut, talking about children’s constipation. Sorry if anyone’s actually having their breakfast or lunch at the moment, and starting to talk about the gastrointestinal system as a by-product of the problems that we’re seeing in society today. And this will spark up parents… They start to listen again. They’ll go, “Oh yes, actually, we’re having a lot of trouble with so-and-so moving their bowels or they’re very constipated, or they’ve got a lot of stomach upset and problems,” and you can actually then start looking back into their diet and see that their fibre is very, very poor.

Kate Di Prima:

And it’s just highly-refined processed foods with not a lot of nourishment. So, I guess, as a society, we have a wonderful GP population that is now starting to take a little bit of a more proactive in benchmarking and highlighting to parents, “Look, this is possibly a little bit of a concern. Does it concern you, should we take this further?”

Kate Di Prima:

And that doesn’t necessarily mean going straight to a dietitian, but just highlighting that they may be in that overweight category, or they may be starting to look at a slightly higher blood pressure than they should have at that age group. And then parents need to sit up and take note and maybe do something about it before it becomes problematic, because what I see as the end point is those tweens turning into teens with a big weight problem that may have been part of a fantastic sporting group. Might’ve been the debating captain. Might’ve been the choir captain, but because they’re very overweight or they’ve been branded as lazy, or not taking care of themselves, or just out of breath, they never get picked for those positions. So, it can actually change the pathway for a child.

Tracey Challenor:

That must be really tough. I guess food marketing is a big part of the problem, isn’t it? We’ve got all these big brands. They spend a lot of money trying to convince us that their products will make our lives easier. But as we all know; a lot of convenience foods contain loads of sugar and salt. Even something like juice poppers and muesli bars and sultanas have large amounts of sugar. Apart from checking the food labels before we buy, it’s really important to educate kids about making those good choices and becoming food detectives themselves, so they know how to read a food label and make that link between nutrition and a healthy mind and body.

Kate Di Prima:

Absolutely. Tracey, I say to parents and children, if you actually go into your supermarket and just go right around the outside, so ring the outside, you’re generally in what we call the core food section. You’re going to your fruits, your vegetables, your salads, your meats, et cetera, your dairy section, your breads and the bakery section that’s got some whole grain breads or some seeded breads and rolls, and then more meats, et cetera. Eggs and coming around that way. It’s that central part of the supermarket aisles that tend to have more of your boxed items and more of your processed items. And as one client actually said to me, one day, “I’ve actually worked out your core foods don’t actually incur a GST. It’s your non-core foods. It’s your packaged, processed foods that are more expensive with a GST attached to it.”

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah.

Kate Di Prima:

So again, actually in my clinic, I take people on a supermarket virtual tour. So, we go into… And look, I don’t know how I survived without it, to be honest, but now I’ll go into either Woolies or Coles and they’re online and I can show people how to read a label. I think it’s a big hole in most people’s education set. We can look at an apple and know that it is just an apple, but if you’re looking at your muesli bars, you’re looking at your cereal, you’re looking at your pastas, et cetera. We can now go through and I can highlight what people should be looking for in terms of fibre, in terms of salt or sodium, in terms of carbohydrates and proteins, so you can make a better food choice within that category.

Kate Di Prima:

And then when I go into some of the more, what we call discretionary… And in my 30 years it’s been party foods, junk foods, sometimes foods, discretionary foods, the name changes, but it’s all the same. It’s the food that we shouldn’t be having a large portion in our diets. And some of those, like what would you call them, sort of just party… They’re not chips, they’re sort of like a biscuit, a flavoured biscuit in various shapes, et cetera. And one of the biggest ingredients is a flavour enhancer. So, it’s an MSG or equivalent. And these have numbers like 620, 621, 635. And once I draw that to parents’ attention, they go, “I didn’t think MSG or flavour enhancers were allowed in our foods,” but they are. And unfortunately there’s little ones, as young as one and a half and two, having these foods. And once they actually have foods with flavour enhancers, and an incredible large amount of salt, of course, they’re going to move away from vegetables and salad because their taste buds have actually been a bit thwarted by this.

Tracey Challenor:

That’s so true. And it is quite confusing reading the labels, isn’t it? Even hard to figure out how much sodium is too much and how much sugar is too much.

Kate Di Prima:

It’s because there’s nothing that gives people an indication to say, all right, your upper limit of sodium for an adult is 2000 milligrams of sodium. So, if a piece of bread is 120 milligrams of sodium, it’s not bad. But if a thing of soup, like a pot of soup, is 900 milligrams of sodium, you are almost half your upper limit for the day. So again, people can read a label, but they need to know what they’re comparing it against. And I always say to people, do you actually know how much fibre you need in your day? And the average adult is 30 and the adult male’s 30, and the average adult female is 25. And a youngster still needs between 15 and 20 grams. Now, again, finding that fibre in an apple or a pear or a mandarin or kiwifruit can be anywhere between one and a half and three grams of fibre in a piece of fruit. But you know, 15 rice crackers can be half a gram of fibre.

Tracey Challenor:

Not great.

Kate Di Prima:

Exactly. It’s kind of menu planning, knowing what to look for and putting it all together.

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah. Kate, I read a stat recently that said that if every Aussie ate just an extra half a cup of vegetables a day, the nation’s health bill would reduce by about $100 million a year, which I think is staggering. This might sound bizarre, but are we all a bit confused as to what constitutes a vegetable? You’ve mentioned before growing salad leaves and things on your deck. That counts as a serve of vegetables? Doesn’t it?

Kate Di Prima:

Oh, absolutely. And you know, when you say a cup of salad items or half a cup of cooked vegetables is a serve, everyone’s eyes roll back in their head and they go, “Oh my gosh, that’s five serves a day. That means five cups of like lettuce or-”

Tracey Challenor:

Or broccoli.

Kate Di Prima:

Exactly. You’ll be there for hours just chomping away at your vegetables. So, look, it depends. I try and make it in a really easy way. I’m saying to people these days, try and choose four to five different varieties at your lunch and your dinner. Now this may be, for someone who never eats any vegetables, a cherry tomato, a pea, a bit of corn, or like a baby spinach leaf. Something is better than nothing. As we saw, those percentages, more than 95% of children are not having the required amount.

Kate Di Prima:

So, let’s start small and we can start by looking at your plate and your plate should be at least half of that plate should have vegetables or salad on there. And so of course, lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes, they fall under the word salad, but there’s still a serve of salad or veggies. So, they come under that group. But I guess the confusion is we’ve been saying for many, many years, eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, and many families feel that the fruit falls in exactly the same category. And so I’ll get children who were coming in having four or five pieces of fruit a day and no vegetables and parents looking longingly at me saying, “is that okay?” And unfortunately, it’s not.

Tracey Challenor:

No, we seem to be doing all right with meeting the fruit quota, don’t we? It’s the veggies that we’re falling down in.

Kate Di Prima:

Yes, it’s definitely the veggies.

Tracey Challenor:

Kate, let’s just touch on food allergies. I was really shocked to read that Australia has the highest rate of confirmed food allergy in the world. One study found 9% of Australian one-year-olds had an egg allergy, while 3% were allergic to peanuts. You would see a lot of this in your practice. Parents of children with allergies live with constant fear and anxiety about a severe allergic reaction or a potentially even fatal attack. I know there are a lot of different theories about allergies, but what do you think is the reason for the rise in allergies in Australia and how difficult is it becoming for parents to manage these allergies day to day?

Kate Di Prima:

Yeah, Tracey, it is a shocking statistic to see. Why should we here in the Western world have these huge allergy surges year to year? And it’s very concerning and fearful for parents who think, if my child has been diagnosed with an allergy, does everyone have to stay away from them? Where I work at Allergy Medical, we have a psychologist there to help with these kinds of things, because many grandparents, say, “Look, I don’t want to touch my little grandchild just in case I’ve been eating peanuts and if this is anaphylaxis, I don’t want to be the person that’s causing these problems.” And that just makes me so saddened to hear things like that. Our biggest allergies are peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, eggs, dairy, wheat, and soy.

Kate Di Prima:

And what we see is the allergies that children are diagnosed with, they take through to their adult life. It’s generally more the peanuts, tree nuts, and shellfish. They’re the ones that stick with you for life. The dairy, wheat, and egg allergies, they tend to, thank goodness, children tend to grow out of those ones, anywhere from 18 months to three, four years of age. I’m involved in things like egg ladders and dairy ladders, which help parents to just give little ones, tiny, tiny amounts on a regular basis to try and desensitise the overworked immune system. It’s just an immune system that’s just gone a bit haywire and thinks that that egg or dairy or wheat or soy or whatever is actually attacking them.

Tracey Challenor:

Right.

Kate Di Prima:

Now, there’s so many theories on this and whether it’s late introduction to these more allergenic foods. Children with eczema, their skin is very, very dry and it’s open to food proteins, basically disappearing through the skin and in triggering the immune system that way, topically, rather than going intestinally where it’s a little bit less of a reaction.

Kate Di Prima:

Are we over sanitising our life? Are we not letting our immune system do its job so the child is not being exposed to the dirt and pets and those things, because we tend to see a decreased allergy state in more of the country areas where children are growing up with cows and grasses and seeds and dogs and probably more dirt and things like that than the urban child?

Tracey Challenor:

Rolling around in the hay, so to speak.

Kate Di Prima:

Exactly. And throwing poo piles, and what is it, the cow poo pats pet at each other.

Tracey Challenor:

And it’s all good for the immune system.

Kate Di Prima:

It’s all really good for the immune system, and also the immune system, the bacteria in your gut bile, and we need to keep fuelling that. And we need to fuel that with good fibres, soluble and insoluble, and guess where that comes from? The vegetables, the salad, the fruits. So, we’re still scratching our heads, trying to work out why this is on the increase. But I think that we can look to countries that have a very low-allergy response rate and learn from those.

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah, it must be really baffling for parents when an allergy appears from nowhere, but I guess ultimately, it’s not so much about how it came about. It’s about managing it, isn’t it? And keeping your child safe.

Kate Di Prima:

Yeah. And also, I do see, Tracey, a lot of misdiagnoses. I see parents who say, “My child has got an allergy to milk.” And what it actually is, is more of an intolerance to the lactose part of milk, or it might be an intolerance to the milk fat. And so that child then starts their journey as an allergic-to-milk child. Now, working their way through the childcare, daycare system with an allergy branding or emblem. And that child then is sort of disassociated from just the normal standard diet. They’re on a special diet. They haven’t been exposed to lots of different varieties because they might have an allergy to eggs or a misdiagnosis of something.

Kate Di Prima:

So, I’m really imploring parents to go and make sure that you get allergies and intolerances diagnosed properly so that it just doesn’t start a child on a pathway that they don’t need to be on. I do work with a company that supplies some food to some childcare centres and we’ve got one childcare centre that’s got more than 50 different intolerances-slash-allergy-slash-food preferences in one centre, which is just horrific.

Tracey Challenor:

My goodness. Wow. Kate, you’re also an expert in general food fussiness, which can be so frustrating for parents and a source of a lot of conflict. And you’ve actually seen a surge in this in the past 20 odd years. How do you deal with a fussy eater in the family? Is it just a case of perseverance?

Kate Di Prima:

I probably would have said that 10 years ago, I would have said, look, as most parents do, they say, “Right, well, that’s all we’re giving you or we’ll make you sit at the table for an hour or,” et cetera, et cetera. I think just in my practice and I guess working with wonderful speech therapists, occupational therapists, learning a little bit more about chewing and also the psychology of eating, there’s not just a one size fits all. And I think many parents have tried multiple different avenues. And by the time they get to me, they say, “Listen, I’ve now got a five year old who is completely refusing to eat this food group, or won’t do this. Or we’ve got this battening down the hatches and screaming and tears every single night.” They’ve tried everything. And so, I’ve got to offer up something to help these families go forward.

Kate Di Prima:

So, what a speech therapist, Dr. Julie Cichero and myself did years ago, when we wrote More Peas Please: Solutions for Feeding Fussy Eaters, we split it into seven different categories. So, it’s not just the child that is fearful. There’s one thing called neophobia and they’re just fearful of new foods. So, they look at something like broccoli on the plate with all the excitement of a hand grenade, and it’s like they refuse to try it. Now, once broccoli cools down, it does taste a little different to broccoli that’s nice and warm or hot. So, making a child sit there for more than 25 minutes, trying to eat that broccoli, many of them do get very worked up and very, very stressed by it. So fearful children need one sort of management technique.

Kate Di Prima:

Children who have maybe gone on the pathway of just eating very soft, blended, fine foods. They actually haven’t built up the chewing muscles. So, they might chew on a piece of meat and then spit it out. And then the parent says, “Oh, well, they don’t like meat. And they don’t like vegetables.” And what’s actually happened is over that period of time, that child hasn’t been able to chew the food properly, so they’ve gone on to more of the blended foods. So, we need to build up that chewing muscle, and that’s more of that OT side of things.

Kate Di Prima:

Then there’s ones that don’t… They might be a bit of a super taster. They just don’t like lots of slimy, saucy kind of things as well. By taking a diet history, I can see fairly quickly which pathway that child’s actually on. And we can then offer up some solutions for trying to help these families move forward. But the number one thing for a dietitian is to try and balance the diet the best way we possibly can, filling in nutritional gaps while we work on the psychology or the physics or the mechanism of eating.

Tracey Challenor:

I’m sure a lot of parents would like to get their hands on your book, Kate. It’s called More Peas Please: Solutions For Fussy Eaters.

Kate Di Prima:

Absolutely. It was such a joy to write because I think Dr. Cichero learned a lot from the dietetics side of things and I learned a lot from the speech therapy and the art of swallowing and chewing and beginner chewing, intermediate, and then the big rotator chewing that we don’t really learn how to do until we get those big molars, which is about two and a half to three years of age.

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah, so there’s a lot of different approaches in the book that parents can try. Kate, we so often hear that it’s important to set a good example for our kids and if they see us making those good diet choices – you mentioned earlier, we need to have those fruit and veggies and things on our plate – then hopefully it rubs off on our kids. But many of us had a bit of a tough year last year, probably gained a few COVID kilos and we’ve just had Christmas as well. What are some really quick and easy ways to get the diet back on track without too much of a radical overhaul?

Kate Di Prima:

I love the little A4, A5 chalkboard or whiteboard that you can put in the kitchen. So, it’s really only about the size of half an A4 piece of paper, and you can write Sunday through Saturday, write down a few meals. For those children who are a bit fearful of the unknown, they can see things coming up and the parent can talk about them. It helps mums and dads do a little bit of planning, so it’s not just meat, meat, meat, meat, meat each night. It could be meat one night, fish one night, chicken one night, and beef or lamb the following night. It just helps to give some variety. It also means that in the morning, either mum or dad or the guardian, or whoever’s actually coordinating dinner that night can check the actual plan and say, “Right, do we have the veggies to go with the stir fry tonight? Do I need to pull the mince out and thaw it through the day so that when I get home, there is something to prepare?”

Kate Di Prima:

So, we don’t all get home at quarter to six, when everyone’s blood sugars are very low, we’re very tired, and we want something to eat. And everything that we have is either gone back to its maker in the crisper or it’s frozen stiff. That’s when we will be putting phone calls through to pizza places, et cetera. So, I think planning your meals and snacks, really looking at plate size. What’s probably happened over this Christmas New Year period is a few more dinners out, which are lovely, or going to people’s places, and what happens in those situations, we start to get a bit of that meal size distortion.

Kate Di Prima:

We start to get a bigger size and we’re eating bigger meals. We need to just pare it back a bit, especially if a few of the kilos have just crept on slightly over the Christmas New Year period. And so, going down to just the side plate serving size is really important to come back to what is a proper serve. And I’m basically saying, taking a step forward, not even looking at a palm-sized piece of meat anymore, because some of my clients, their palms are twice the size of mine. It’s about the size of a deck of cards. So really getting a bit more of a feel for what a serving is and look at some of those party foods that have just kept trickling back into the shopping over that Christmas New Year period into January and making sure that you don’t keep buying those sort of treat foods every single week, because if you buy them and you put them in the cupboard or the fridge, you will eat them.

Tracey Challenor:

Oh, that’s so true. And there is a growing body of research, isn’t there Kate, that says we should all be eating more plant-based foods more often, that that’s really the key to a healthy diet?

Kate Di Prima:

Absolutely. Half your plate should be some veggies or salads. And if anyone is super keen to have a bit of a read about that, if you Google ‘blue zones.’ Now blue zones, a whole lot of scientists sat down, in years gone by, and they basically had a blue pen, believe it or not, and they just circled the countries that had the best health statistics. And when we talk about health statistics, we’re talking about longevity, over the age of a hundred, more of the population is living longer, less dementia and psychological issues, healthier bodies, less diabetes, less heart disease. And really those zones were blue zones and the key factor between all those zones were a very high plant-based diet, along with fish and good olive oils, et cetera. But it really was, this key was lots and lots of plants. Not just vegetarian, but lots of vegetables, lots of salad as part of their main meals.

Tracey Challenor:

Was Australia in the blue zone?

Kate Di Prima:

Unfortunately, not, but have a guess where the closest blue zone statistics came from, here in Australia.

Tracey Challenor:

Oh, in Australia? I don’t know, Queensland?

Kate Di Prima:

I was hoping it was going to be Queensland, but no, it was actually Bondi, believe it or not.

Tracey Challenor:

Is that right?

Kate Di Prima:

Yeah, Bondi came up as close as possible as our… It wasn’t actually a blue zone, but there seems to be a bit more of a health focus. I guess it’s more seaside, getting a lot of exercise, social connectivity, incidental exercise, and lots and lots of plant-based foods.

Tracey Challenor:

Kate, as a dietician and nutritionist, what’s your vision for the next generation when it comes to diet?

Kate Di Prima:

I just think we need to… The generation that is in control of food now needs to really have a good, hard look at ourselves and look at what kind of role modelling we’re doing for the next one down. Now, Tracey, I’m one of the older set of dietitians. I’m just over 50, and so I have a 20-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter. And I look at them and think, right, have you got the same health values that I hold? Or to the people in my immediate family, whatever health values you have, what are we translating to our next generation? And once we leave, is that generation going to continue on with a healthy attitude towards food and themselves? And I think that’s what we have to do.

Kate Di Prima:

There’s the two ends: is nurture the mind and nourish the body. So, if you’re nourishing the body and you’re nurturing the mind, you can’t go wrong. So, I guess lead by example, be a great role model, just clean up where you think you possibly could and see if those kind of values then move to that next generation, because they’re the ones that are going to take the world forward for us.

Tracey Challenor:

Great advice, Kate, and not older, just experienced.

Kate Di Prima:

Experienced. That’s what my husband says.

Tracey Challenor:

Kate, it’s been wonderful to have your expert advice today. And even the healthiest diets sometimes go a little off the rails, so really good to reset for the New Year with some practical and positive tips to achieve more balanced and healthy eating habits. So, thank you for joining me today.

Kate Di Prima:

My absolute pleasure, Tracey, it’s been a pleasure.

Tracey Challenor:

My guest today was Kate Di Prima, practising dietitian, author, and spokesperson for Dieticians Australia. You’ve been listening to the Life Education podcast for parents. To hear our other podcasts, go to the Life Education website, or you can find us on your favourite podcast platforms. And if there’s a particular topic you’d like us to look into, you can find us at podcast at lifeeducation.org.edu. I’m Tracey Challenor. Until next time, thanks for joining us.