“A single chocolate chip gives you enough energy to walk about 150 feet.”
“People are afraid of fat and calories,…Well, the truth is you need hundreds of calories a day just to keep your heart pumping and your lungs sucking in air. And without any fat, your brain doesn’t work.”
“Zits are no fun. But at least you can still eat chocolate and potato chips. Scientists say that eating has little, if any, effect on pimples.”
These are a few of the facts in Food Rules! written by Bill Haduch. From the hypothalamus, (the part of the brain which tells you to eat) through the “Tunnel of Food” (your digestive tract,) Bill Haduch plainly tells us everything we need to know about how we eat, the food we eat, and what we need to eat. Food Rules! is loaded with jokes, poems, fun facts and great illustrations by Rick Stromoski.
FamilyCares thanks Bill Haduch for writing such an informative book on a subject important to all of us – food that is easy to understand and a riot to read. We highly recommend that you share this book or parts of it, with your children. They will love it and you will learn alot!
Q. You have written for science, technology and health care corporations, newspapers, and magazines. You’ve also written several children’s science books, why did you decide to write a book about food for kids?
A. Food is an entertaining thing. Even food noises. Glug, glug, glug. Burp! Aaaaah! Mmmmmm. Yum. Really. What kind of a word is “yum?” So I’ve always been sort of tickled by food. And my mother is a very good cook in the Slovak tradition. It’s hard to be serious about food with names like pierogis, holupkis, goulash, kugel, which we called google. I was very entertained by food as a kid and after I became a science writer and began to understand how food actually worked in the body, I wanted to combine the entertainment with the science.
Q. In Food Rules! you write about how we eat, the food we eat, what we need to eat and what we shouldn’t eat, and have laced it with lots of jokes, poems, and fun facts about food. How did you develop your talent as a writer to make your subject so “palatable” to kids, as well as adults?
A. Thanks for the compliment. I try to never underestimate kids – I know most of them are smarter than me – just less experienced. I have a warm spot in my heart for adults who treated me like a functioning human when I was a kid. I guess I want to be one of those adults. As a bonus, when you don’t talk down to kids, you end up with a product that adults can enjoy, too. I think “The Simpsons” is like that, and “Spongebob Squarepants.”
Q. The illustrations by Rick Stromoski are as amusing as your text. How did you come to work together on Food Rules! ?
A. The publisher put us together. I live in New Jersey and he lives in Connecticut but it turned out we shared some Pittsburgh roots. Pittsburgh is a unique place with its own culture. It’s literally 100 miles from nowhere, so it has its own words and foods and stuff like that. Like Isaly’s chipped ham and Wholey’s Fish Market with fish you don’t see anywhere else. So we were in the same groove. Funny thing. At first I didn’t realize how accomplished Rick was, but my sports-fan-son Will saw some illustrations in “Sports Illustrated for Kids,” and said “Dad, these look familiar” and sure enough – they were Rick’s. Rick did a great Steelers cartoon for Will. It’s on his wall.
Q. What is your favorite chapter in the book?
A. I like the first chapter because that sets the whole thing up. We eat because we get hungry. But most people don’t realize WHY we get hungry and what the feeling really is. That’s the key to this whole eating thing.
Q. If you could choose three pieces of information that you would want kids to gain from reading Food Rules! what would they be?
- Understand that a 100-pound kid is lugging 66 pounds of water around in his or her body – that’s like eight 1-gallon jugs worth. You gotta keep that water fresh, so drink, drink, drink. I think a lot of the aches and pains and headaches kids get are from forgetting to drink water.
- Calcium is really important for kids because they’re growing their skeletons. And it’s really important for adults, too. I talked with an 85-year-old nutrition scientist, Harold Newmark, at Rutgers who’s still bounding around the campus. He’s been trying since World War II to get people to take more calcium. I’m with him. How do you argue with a healthy 85-year-old nutrition scientist?
- First, understand what sugar does in your body. That’s in Chapter 3. Now put nine teaspoons of table sugar into a cup and take a good look at it. That’s what you get from drinking one can of regular soda.
Q. Did your diet change after you researched and wrote Food Rules! ? If so, how?
A. In a way it verified how I had been eating. I traveled a lot when I was younger writing articles for trade magazines. I picked up my “fruit for breakfast” thing about 25 years ago in Trinidad. It was right for me because it was quick and easy and could hold me to lunch. When I was researching Food Rules! I learned that I had been filling almost all my whole fiber and antioxidant requirements first thing in the morning. So I still do it. Four prunes, an apple and a banana. I like sardines for lunch – a heaping helping of omega-3 fatty acids and lots of calcium in a can!
Q. How do you encourage your children to eat nutritiously?
A. Threats and punishment. But seriously, it’s tough. I know my they’re going to eat junk all day. Just yesterday I picked up my son all sweaty from high school football practice and he and his two buddies wanted to stop at the 7-11 for Slurpees. What are you going to tell them? No? They’re bigger than me. In our house the one meal I can really influence is breakfast so I do my best to balance it, include some fruit and fiber and make sure they take a multi-vitamin with it. And I do little things like show my 13-year-old daughter Casey how to nuke hamburger, throw the melted fat away and replace it with canola oil before she browns the meat in a pan.
Q. You have mentioned that advice for eating nutritiously is continually changing. Since the book was published in 2001, is there anything you would add or change in the book?
A. I’d love to update it. Since 2001 we’ve been introduced to Atkins-mania and the government is even talking about changing the food pyramid. Also, I know a lot more because I spent two years since then as a science writer at Rutgers.
Q. Besides being an author, you are a musician, a skyscraper window washer (!), a bicyclist, a handyman and a community volunteer. What type of volunteering do you do?
A. Just last weekend I helped run my town’s annual country fair. I’ve been on that committee since it started seven years ago. Lots of fun bringing the community together. I’m also on the town’s historic preservation commission where I get to make sure, for example, that a new bridge isn’t the wrong style for the look of the town. And this isn’t really volunteer work because we sell ads, but my wife Monita and I are editors and publishers of the town’s monthly community newspaper. So if nothing else, we try to make our town, which 20 years ago was just farms, a more hometown kind of place.
Q. Do you have any ideas how kids can spread the word in their communities about the importance of healthy eating?
A. Sure. Schools and clubs are always asking kids and parents to bring in trays of food for events. It’ll be 9 p.m. after some Cub Scout event and there’s a table full of brownies and soda. It’s like rocket fuel just before the kids go to bed. I have a recipe in Food Rules! which is really just the old celery, peanut butter and raisins snack thing. Bring a tray of that, put a sign on it that says “Cockroaches Trapped in a Rain-Gutter,” and you’ll open up a few conversations.
The following interview was conducted by email in September 2004.
Maureen Byrne
