It extends all the way to not only consuming healthy foods but also learning to prepare/cook them as well.

I found out the hard way about the cooking part in College (ate healthy @ home but didn't care for the cooking bit, and it was considered "for girls" so my parents didn't press). Then I tons of allergy and other diet related issues after I moved out until well into my 20s.

I'm now committed to not only cooking healthy for my kids but teaching them at an appropriate age to learn how to make (and procure) the dishes as well.

It is true that cooking is not a focus when raising boys. However, the best cooks in my family were men. Anecdotal of course, but Most chefs are men too, which seems like a contradiction of sorts.

Maybe like the above poster (and myself) men learn to appreciate the benefits of cooking like lower cost, fun family activity, and usually healthier.

Yes, not learning to cook makes it harder to eat right.

The instapot helped me a lot in "grown up" meal department.

I'm one of those kids.

I'm about 30 years old now and my diet is pretty much shit. It's actually kind of funny/embarrassing when my shopping cart has bags of pizza rolls and hot pockets. I take full responsibility, but I must say I'd have a much easier time if I had grown up eating healthy foods from the beginning.

Luckily, I don't overeat, so I'm skinny and somehow have good cholesterol and blood pressure, but I know this will come back to bite me at some point.

There is hope. Tipping my vintage, my mom used to buy 14 boxes of King Vitamin cereal every 2 weeks. My siblings and I ate a full box each day, most at breakfast, with whole milk, the rest after school. We were very popular because we had so many toys that came in the cereal boxes, we'd just hand them to the neighbor kids.

As an adult, I started discovering foods that were startlingly delicious. For example, a fully ripened pear, when all the pears I'd eaten were harder than apples. U-pick cherries in season. Strawberries that you didn't need to dip in powdered sugar. Darker and darker chocolates to the point I can't eat milk chocolate any more. The way my wife prepares salmon, simply broiled with a little salt, pepper and soy sauce is fantastic. Fast food is Chipotle, which for fast food is as fresh and healthy as you're going to get.

Make a point of exploring quality flavorful foods. It's enriching in many ways.

> much easier time

Yes, this is exactly what I was getting at, that it is something "difficult."

Imagine trying to convince a person from the stone age (or even the early 1900s) that an amazing plate of sauteed vegetables, rice/beans, sliced fruits, and steak/fish/chicken were something you had to force yourself to eat.

They'd probably punch you in the face.

> I'm skinny and somehow have good cholesterol and blood pressure, but I know this will come back to bite me at some point.

Yes, our bodies can tolerate almost anything in while young. But if we want to make it thru our fifties and not be miserable or dead, I urge a different tack.

There is more to the story of childhood diet than simple narratives of cheap nutrition, though that certainly plays a massive role. Consider, for instance, eating disorders, including some which may be mistaken for playing into aforementioned narrative, such as binge eating (a common symptom among eating disorders in general and often co-morbid with eating comforting but "bad" food) and picky eating (such as ARFID, also correlated with eating comforting but "bad" food). In neither situation is the consumption of the "bad" food the cause or most even the most harmful symptom.

No one binge-eats a bag of apples. You can't really divorce the nature of the food from overconsumption.

Agree with you on your general point, but i wouldn't phrase it as "no one":

https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines/airline-passengers...

Speak for yourself. I have some issues with food addiction and have absolutely binged on celery, Greek yogurt, broccoli, etc. in an unsuccessful attempt to eat healthier without fixing the root issue.

Of course I prefer to binge on pizza but I’ll overeat just about anything.

These foods are so fibrous it's difficult to have anything resembling a binge, even if the volume seems high.

A large bag of chips contains an average 1200 calories. Anyone can eat that in a sitting. An apple averages 93 calories, it would take you 13 to yield 1200 calories. Broccoli florets have 25 calories; meaning you'd have to consume 48. I don't believe for a second you've ever eaten 48 broccoli florets in a row.

Yes, emotional eating / stress eating is its own problem which isn't dictated by a given food, but is absolutely facilitated by food, to the extent that in absence of ultra-processed foods binge-eating is far less likely, and drastically reduced.

> these foods are so fibrous it’s difficult to have anything resembling a binge

You’re talking about eating too many calories, I’m talking about overeating and binging. They are related, but not the same. It is absolutely binging to eat broccoli to the point where you feel sick and can’t sleep and contemplate making yourself vomit (speaking from experience here), even if calorie-wise it’s less than a donut.

True in some cases, but most people are not willing to eat to the point of suffering and will adjust to avoid this. I remember eating a 16” pizza once as a kid and lying in the car afterwards feeling sick, but I never did it again to that extent. Leaving ned a valuable lesson ... still love pizza though ... gluten-free pizza that is.

Food has a different purpose in your state than enjoyment and taste. Did you have siblings that stole your food as a kid? Any ideas why the compulsion to fill your stomach to that point?

Broccoli is not a "trigger food". That's usually simple carbs, sugar, fat. These facilitate binge-eating in every way. I don't think binge-eating is defined specifically as eating to the point of it being painful, it's overeating to the extent it's habitual and difficult to stop.

How does one overeat celery? It literally takes more energy to eat than it gives you in calories...

Overeating means eating so much your life is negatively impacted in some way. Gaining weight is definitely an example of a negative impact but certainly not the only one.

I would eat until I felt sick. Sometimes I’d have a food hangover the next day.