On this episode of Food for Thought, I’m with Patti Wood Author of Helping to Heal, a book that supports the parents of ill children. It’s a lovely little book that covers nutrition and natural health advice. She’s also a Visiting Scholar at Adelphi University’s College of Nursing and Public Health, the author of The Child Safe School, an award-winning program that provides a framework for a comprehensive approach to reducing environmental toxins in schools. Patti’s also co-produced the documentary film, Our Children at Risk.
Patti has developed a really interesting body of work all aligned to our children’s health and the environment. We talk about The Child Safe School programme that her organisation is running and how there are resources for free available that would allow it to be replicated in the UK and Northern Ireland.
We discuss how the book Helping to Heal came about, and how we both can see how children and the increasing issues around their health are like the canary in coal mine, a clear indicator of how things are going very wrong in our environment.
The levels of chronic disease state that our children are now experiencing leave me in particular worrying about the future of our planet if our children are this ill, that doesn’t bode well for them in adulthood. When I was a child we discuss how my parents only had to consider the nutritional value of the food they would have been preparing for us, but how there are considerable considerations now to be made, from their source, the processing methods and the presence of pesticides, dyes, and other chemical additives. We discuss how little the general public realise how it’s impacting on their child’s long-term health prospects.
The insight into the schooling system and how profit is coming before care is alarming, and how parents need to start to get involved in changing this.
We also discuss mobile devices how they are replacing so many activities that children would have done previously, and how the WHO classifies them as a class 2 carcinogenic which in reality need to be used as little as possible but with WIFI being a factor in some schools this message isn’t trickling down.
This interview highlights how children, as well as ourselves, are surrounded by toxicity, it’s about being vigilant with what you are using and putting in your environment because even at school children are not safe.
Patti Wood can be contacted through Helping2Heal.org
