Saturday, March 3, 2012

Review for Is Your Hair Made of Donuts? by Joy Feldman

Is Your Hair Made of Donuts?
Is Your Hair Made of Donuts? by Joy Feldman
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.

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