The Blog of P.U.R.E. and Sue Scheff

Today Susan White is a guest Blogger with a great post about, How Healthy is Your Teen .   How Healthy is Your Teen? By Susan White My close friend and mother of two young boys (let’s call her G) was taken to task by both her mother and mother-in-law for the sole reason of getting her teen son to wake up an hour earlier each morning and taking a jog or going for a brisk walk on the treadmill. He had been a chubby baby, but what was cute as a kid was turning out to be both embarrassing and unhealthy as an adolescent. G took matters into her hands when she realized her son showed no inclination to join a sport or indulge in any form of exercise; she brought home a treadmill, and after a few persuasive talks (and bargaining sessions) with her son, she convinced him to get some exercise on it every day. Mother and son would begin the day in the basement – G would go a few miles on the stationary bike while her son jogged along on the treadmill. They not only got...

As Jamie Oliver's new show continues to explode with the reality of how unhealthy eating can effect our lives and shorten them, one of his recent episodes shocked us as he was told that "French fries count as a vegetable". Maybe this is not shocking to some dieticians, however to many people this was a moment of that left us scratching our heads. You mean greasy French fries are considered a veggie? Seems strange, however that is exactly what a food service director stated on Food Revolution in an elementary school in Huntington, West Virginia. So do French fries count as a vegetable? Yes, they do, according to the government . French fries have been on the list of "fresh" vegetables since 1996 under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act . They are considered fresh because they fall short of the guidelines that would qualify them as "processed." " When I found out that a French fry was considered a vegetable, it insulted me, it ups...