I've imposed some dietary restrictions on my kids, but they're mostly glycemic in nature.

- No sugary drinks; absolutely no soda pop, ever, and very little fruit juice, which is really no better than pop.

- No sugary breakfasts. Breakfast cereal is fucking poison, especially the sweetened varieties.

- No kids-menu food. When we eat out, they've always ordered off the adult menu. No pizza, chicken nuggets, mac-n-cheese, french fries, PB&J, grilled cheese on white bread, etc.

Everywhere I look I see people who have let their kids turn into kids-menu kids-- kids who tolerate only pizza, deep fried food, breakfast cereal, etc. And everywhere I look now, I see fat kids and teens with the beginnings of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Any pediatrician will gladly talk about the growing crisis of metabolic syndrome in kids.

My kids went vegetarian completely of their own accord, likely copying me, but they've stuck with it. The main thing is that they've always eaten what we eat. It took a little training, but their tastes developed rapidly (as all kids' do) and from a young age they could enjoy a full range of healthy adult food with few very few aversions.

For example, my youngest still doesn't love blue cheese, but she can tolerate it. My older teen eats blue cheese from a bowl like ice cream.

And you are a responsible parent for doing that.

I have a friend who was raised on a kids-menu diet, and the poor guy still doesn't like burgers or steak. I'm working on introducing him to the good stuff, but the damage has been done.

I know people like this too; grown up adults with crippling food aversions. Combining it with a sedentary lifestyle is a great way to cut a decade or two off a person's life, not to mention the pain and disability of diabetes.

sometimes a pizza or a coke is not a bad thing you know. if you put all the bad stuff away, there might just come the time when your kids have enough of your rules and rebel and then begin to compensate and overuse those stuff.

been there, done that

Just don't normalize shitty food as something you eat casually, teach your kids to enjoy it like alcohol. A little every so often is fine, too much too often is bad.

precisely.

Yeah, this is an excellent point. You're absolutely right, oppressive rules can definitely backfire. We thought this through early on, and we seem to have successfully threaded the needle. My kids are now teen and tween-aged, with no signs of rebellion (so far!)

The sugary soda pop rule is fucking law-- completely set in stone. Believe it or not, neither of my kids has ever consumed a significant amount of sugary soda pop in their entire lives. However, they're allowed to drink diet soda, and my younger kid does so fairly regularly. My older kid doesn't really like sweet drinks.

The sugary breakfast rule is never broken at home, but I've always allowed sugary breakfasts as a treat when on vacation or when the grandparents take us to breakfast, which happens once or twice a month. The only requirement on these mornings is that they eat their protein first-- usually eggs. This ordering is an important life skill.

The kid's menu is strictly forbidden, whether or not the grandparents are buying. This was a bit of a fight with my younger kid, but we figured out how to negotiate using desert. This made desert a treat that could be earned, which seems to have bred some discipline in her.

At home, I keep the kitchen stocked with sugar substitutes. For years we used Truvia-type erythritol/stevia sweetener, but we've recently started using erythritol and monk fruit (Lakanto brand), which is nearly indistinguishable from sugar in taste. I also keep a jar of the stuff mixed with cinnamon, which we cryptically call cinnamon-sugar.

We make a lot of sweet stuff at home using the sugar subs, and I encourage the kids to cook. Mostly what they make is toast with butter and cinnamon-sugar, but sometimes we get into some crepes, pies, brownies, etc.

We still eat quite a bit of starchy and fruity stuff. Lots of pasta in particular. But I really treat sugar as poison, especially "naked" sugars like sodas. There's research coming out continually about the the deadly effects of the high glycemic load and high glycemic "velocity" of the Standard American Diet.

I know there's debate about the health of sugar substitutes, but it's a tool that I've chosen to use to keep our diet less sugary to the extent possible, while hopefully minimizing the possibility of the rebellion you speak of.

We'll see if it works.

EDIT:

Fuck pizza. If I had my way we'd never eat pizza, but my wife allows it occasionally. I complain about it, and make a big show of refusing to eat it, and the wife and kids all side-eye me while they talk about how good it is. Fucking traitors.

But, to your point, maybe my wife is smarter than me.

Is the pizza sauce to sugary? Or is it the processed meats?