Full disclosure: I’ve been on all sorts of diets for more years that I can remember. I was definitely that kid who was watching my calorie intake while all her friends were eating whatever they wanted. You might be wondering if I should have been on diets at that age. Well, if you’ve been reading our daily posts, you’ll see that we here at Metro Parent just wrote about how you should not put your kids on diets.
However, Australian celebrity chef Pete Evans clearly missed the memo.
In his new cookbook, Bubba Yum Yum: The Paleo Way, Evan recommends parents swap breast milk for bone broth. You read that right: bone broth. Why? Evans thinks that kids should be following the Paleo diet.
The Paleo diet – for those of you who are not familiar with it – is a diet that is based on foods eaten by our ancestors. It consists of meat, fish, veggies and fruit – no processed food, dairy or grain. Basically, if a caveman ate it, you can eat it, too.
“One of his Paleo formula recipes is a broth made with chicken bones, chicken feet, mashed-up liver, and apple cider vinegar,” notes Take Part. And, it turns out that recipe contains 10 times the amount of vitamin A that’s safe for babies to consume. Australian’s Public Health Association voiced concerns about the book and its recommendations, because well, these recipes could actually really harm your child’s health.
Australian publishing house Pan Macmillan was supposed to publish Evans’ book, but the company has since dropped it, The Guardian reports. Now, Evans plans to self-publish the book digitally.
How can someone think that bone broth is going to be better for your child than breast milk or formula?
Commenter Roxanne Nelson brought up a very good point in her comment on Take Part: “I think the Paleo moms, the real ones living in the caves, breast fed their infants. I highly doubt they whipped up bone broth. If they couldn’t produce milk, or not enough milk, then the baby died (unless another Paleo mom pitched in). But that is the most natural and real food for an infant under the age of 6 months, and this bone broth concoction cannot be considered ‘Paleo’ by any stretch of the imagination. Unless the author can locate a cookbook used by Paleo moms (maybe some wall carvings in a remote cave), then I’d say he is totally off his rocker.”
I agree. This guy is insane. Stick to cooking for celebs and stop trying to tell moms how to feed their babies.
