JHF Nutritional Consulting
March 1, 2012
ISBN-10: 0615555152
ISBN-13: 978-0615555157
Ages 7 and up
40 Pages
Fiction Children’s Books Nutrition
Joy Feldman is the author of the award winning book, Joyful Cooking in the Pursuit of Good
Health: Restore and Heal with Nutritional Balancing, a volume dedicated to
helping both adults and children find optimal health. Joy loves healthy food
and feels passionately about children’s health and wellness. Originally from
New York, Joy now lives in Rhode Island with her husband, two beautiful
children, and her English Springer Spaniel Millie, where she creates books with
the purpose of inspiring and teaching both young and old that “they are what
they eat.”
Reviewer: Renee
Hand
In a world
that super-sizes everything, the Blossom family does things a little
differently. Matt and Maddie Blossom’s mom doesn’t allow them to eat junk food.
One day the siblings insist that they’re tired of feeling different from all the
other kids at school because they eat healthfully, so for the first time, Mom
allows them to indulge in whatever foods they want from The Wastelands, a
supermarket with aisles stockpiled with chemical confections of every kind.
After
gobbling up these foods, triumphant over winning the food war with their
mother, the children go to bed feeling sick. Not wanting to tell their mother
how they are feeling, they fall asleep. As they slip into slumber, the children
embark on an adventure in the form of a dream brought on by an overload of
sugar.
With a touch
of powdered sugar and a tad of colored sprinkles, Matt and Maddie’s hair
transforms into large, gooey donuts right before their eyes. Whenever a donut
drops on the floor, another grows in its place, until the children are drowning
in donuts—and of course that means too much sugar. Will the children have to
live with donut hair forever?
Is Your Hair
Made of Donuts? is an innovative way of teaching children about nutrition
and eating healthfully. Matt and Maddie learn a valuable lesson in this story
about overindulging in sweets. The message: Too many
sweets can make you sick.
While the
moral of the story may be a bit heavy handed, Is Your Hair Made of Donuts?
has fun and beautiful illustrations that highlight the theme of eating
healthfully and reflect the old adage that you are what you eat.
The author’s
personal feelings about nutrition are apparent in the pages of the story. A
quibble is that the author pushes the nutrition message a little too hard
leaving no room for compromise. What about creating a dessert using healthful
ingredients, showing children how to indulge a sweet tooth with healthful
alternatives? Cookies and other desserts can be created
to be healthier. A child’s body isn’t going to fall apart because it has
ingested something with sugar in it. Eating foods in
moderation is key, not necessarily eliminating them all together so when a
child desires it they overindulge.
On the other
hand, the author does include healthful recipes in the back of the book that do not include sugar.
