Feeding Baby Green: The Earth Friendly Program for Healthy, Safe Nutrition During Pregnancy, Childhood, and Beyond

Feeding Baby Green: The Earth Friendly Program for Healthy, Safe Nutrition During Pregnancy, Childhood, and Beyond
By Alan Greene

The new "baby feeding bible" from the award-wining author of Raising Baby Green

Called the "Al Gore of Parenting" by Parenting Magazine, Dr. Alan Greene has written the follow up to his best-selling book and offers parents a definitive guide for making nutritionally-sound decisions for their children. Offers parents green choices for feeding children from when they are in the womb through toddler years.

This unique guide includes advice on how to transform a baby's eating habits that will positively impact their health and development for the rest of their lives. Dr. Greene has included everything a parent needs to know about creating healthy, nutritious meals that help avoid childhood obesity, and prevent childhood disease. This must-have resource

    * Shows how what a mother eats during pregnancy effects her baby's health and eating habits for years after birth
    * Provides the definitive guide to "green" feeding for babies from pregnancy to toddlers
    * Filled with practical tips and advice for selecting and preparing earth friendly meals for babies
    * Shows the health benefits for babies who eat "green" with innate nutritional intelligence
    * The crucial follow-up to the best-selling book Raising Baby Green

In addition to working in his medical practice, Dr. Alan Greene makes regular appearances on the Today show and writes articles for the New York Times.

It’s Time for a Delicious Revolution By Dr. Alan Greene

Konrad Lorenz made his mark by studying a special type of learning where key exposures during a critical and sensitive window of development can have a lasting influence – a process he called imprinting. The famous example of this is imprinting in geese. Newly hatched goslings are programmed to follow the first moving objects they see. They quickly become imprinted on this object and will move their little feet fast to keep up with it. This is highly adaptive. Most of the time. Usually this moving magnet is the gosling’s mother.

Photo by Howard Schoenberger

Lorenz showed, however, that if he were the first mover that a gosling saw, it would be imprinted on Lorenz and follow him about, refusing to follow a goose. A goose could even imprint on a toy train and ignore other geese, even its own mother. Later, as adults, these geese would even choose toy trains for their life partners (which didn't work out well for the geese -- or the trains). Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for this work in 1973.

We’ve known for at least thirty years from animal studies that very early flavor experiences change which foods will later be preferred. Within five years of Lorenz’s Nobel Prize, food imprinting had already been demonstrated in snapping turtles, chickens, gulls, dogs, and cats.

Human babies also learn by imprinting, though ours is more complex, more forgiving, and occurs during a longer critical window. In particular human babies imprint on food. This is a highly adaptive mechanism -- but in the second half of the twentieth century we have unwittingly imprinted our children on the wrong tastes and textures. They will chase after junk food and kids meals, and ignore a delicious, ripe peach or tomato packed with nutrients their bodies crave.

Feeding Baby Green unveils the key windows of opportunities for our children, and how the imprinting occurs using not just taste but all of the senses, from pregnancy through age 2 (and beyond -- with a final chapter giving an overview up to age 9).

At its core, Feeding Baby Green is a revolutionary approach to cultivating Nutritional Intelligence, the age-appropriate ability to recognize and enjoy healthy amounts of great food. Pregnancy and the first two years of life are critical windows for learning Nutritional Intelligence, an important, newly described strand of development. Most American kids of the last few decades are Nutritionally Delayed. Thankfully, this is easy to remedy.

I will have to agree with another reviewer when she says this book is good for beginners. For those who have a fairly decent knowledge of nutrition and healthier alternatives, on the other hand, this book may simply be more of the same.
While I enjoyed what the book had to say regarding the "magical" properties of herbs etc, my largest complaint would be the lack of recipes throughout the book. There are some, and while the text does not call itself a cookbook, I believe more recipes, with a background on why they are the best choice for your child, would have been more suited to my own personal needs.
If you have had children or are one who is extremely health conscious, you are not likely to find a host of profound information here. That being said, it is certainly a viable guide for those who want to change their nutritional lifestyles for themselves, their kids and their environment.

If you're nutritionally challenged, or just aren't sure how to pack more into your meals during pregnancy and while your child is young, this is a great starting place. There are helpful recipes scattered throughout the book including but not limited to:
Cinnamon-Apple Oatmeal
Penne with Broccoli and Sun-Dried Tomatoes (tried it, very tasty!)
Bombay Vegetable Stew
Calabecitas
Spinach Tomato Puree
Black Bean Tomato Ragout


The recipes range from total family eats to baby's first foods and are fairly simple to prepare. We've tried most of them (except the baby foods because our youngest isn't there yet) and they've all been a hit with our two older boys, especially.

One of the things that I like about this book is that it talks about more than just HOW you SHOULD eat. It gives you helpful hints as to how to get your child to eat a wider variety of foods and actually enjoy it. It also gives you a concise biodiversity checklist in the back so you can see just how narrow or wide your dietary scope really is. The last chapter even covers older children, so you won't outgrow the book with the first year like I have found to be the case with several other parent/child nutrition books.

Overall, this was good. There were several points that I didn't agree with or that I felt I could find a better solution than what was being presented. For instance, when Dr. Greene talks about breastfeeding, he says that it is best, but it's like he's afraid to commit to that. Right after that, he talks about formula. Now, I've had 3 children and our first survived almost completely on formula for multiple reasons on both my end, as well as my baby's end. However, our second and third child were solely breastfed. I say that to show that I understand there is a time and place where formula can be beneficial. However, the way Dr. Greene presents the formula is what bothers me. If he doesn't think breastfeeding is best why go so far as to detail the best formulas? The book is about being green, and what, exactly, is GREEN abour formula? He also says in a later chapter that we shouldn't let food marketing and the food industry override our good judgement about what to eat, but it seemed to me that where formula was concerned, he wasn't totally committed to breastfeeding being the best option.

Bottom line: if you're looking for ways and reasons to expand your diet and get a healthier grip in your home, this is great for beginners. If you're already a bit more aware because of things like diabetes, Celiac Disease, or a health field occupation, this book may be less than what you need.


This book caught my eye as I am starting