Ellyn Satter's Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family takes a leadership role in the grassroots movement back to the family table. More a cooking primer than a cookbook, this book encourages singles, couples, and families with children to go to the trouble of feeding themselves well. Satter uses simple, delicious recipes as a scaffolding on which to hang cooking lessons, fast tips, night-before suggestions, in-depth background information, ways to involve kids in the kitchen, and guidelines on adapting menus for young children. In chapters about eating, feeding, choosing food, cooking, planning, and shopping, the author entertainingly helps readers have fun with food while not eating unhealthily or too often. She cites current studies and makes a convincing case for lightening up on fat and sodium without endangering ourselves or our children. The book demonstrates Satter's dictum that “your positive feelings about food and eating will do more for your health than adhering to a set of rules about what to eat and what not to eat.”
Ellyn Satter, MS, RD, LCSW, BCD is an internationally recognized authority on eating and feeding. A family therapist and feeding and eating specialist, Satter has a private psychotherapy practice in Madison, Wisconsin. Her books, journal and magazine articles, teaching materials, seminars and media interviews have made her well-known to the lay public, professionals and the media as the leading authority on nutrition and feeding of infants and children of all ages.
Satter's stated mission is to revolutionize feeding and eating. Her unconventional advice? Do what comes naturally. "As long as adults do their jobs with feeding, children do a good job with eating. They intuitively eat the right amount of food to grow well. They naturally push themselves along to learn to like new foods. We did too, at one time. We did, that is, until it was educated out of us by well-meaning adults and misguided, puritanical rules about eating." Satter knows whereof she speaks, given her 40 years' experience helping people of all ages with their eating and with feeding their children.
Satter's clear and vivid explanations of normal and distorted eating and feeding have made her a popular interviewee and speaker. The author of the Division of Responsibility in Feeding (parents are responsible for the what, when and where of feeding, children are responsible for the how much and whether of eating), Satter has led nutrition, health and mental health professionals as well as the general public to adopt wise and emotionally healthy approaches to feeding and eating.
Satter's books are valued by both professional and lay readers as authoritative, practical, humorous and entertaining. Your Child's Weight: Helping Without Harming (Kelcy Press) recommends solving the problem of children overweight throughout the growing-up years by "doing the opposite of what seems right...feeding children rather than restricting them." Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense (Bull Publishing) helps parents observe and understand their children and translate that insight into good feeding. Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family (Kelcy Press) teaches fast, efficient, delicious and nutritious food management for the "thinking cook." How to Get Your Kid to Eat...But Not Too Much (Bull Publishing) details feeding and solving feeding problems, birth through adolescence.
