Too much sweet stuff can sour kids’ health

“I think adults can tell when they feel inflamed,” she said. “They can articulate it, but kiddos can’t figure out why they’re in a bad mood necessarily.”

By Tibby Plasse

Inflammation, chronic pain, poor sleep habits and general morale imbalances have been connected with diet for adults. But what about children?

The body’s response to a problem is inflammation. When you are sick and run a fever, that’s inflammation. When you eat something and it disagrees with you, that too is inflammation. Nutrition is an easy and controllable first step in trying to dissect the messages that both the body’s immune and nervous systems are sending.

Martha Lewis, the founder and CEO of The Complete Sleep Solution and a certified functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, is also a mom who is sensitive to the inflammation response.

Lewis is devoted to addressing youth diets, which she has found are fundamental to health.

Growing up in a super sugarstrict household, where sodas, chips and processed treats were off the table, Lewis recalls raiding her friends’ fridges and bingeing on blacklisted eats whenever she could.

“We can’t be so restrictive that they develop an unhealthy relationship with food,” she said. “It’s a tricky line.”

If a child’s behavior or health seems out of whack, skim through the nutritional facts of pantry products, taking note of sodium, sugar and food dyes.

“Fruit juices too, there is so much sugar in them, and that’s a big deal, managing blood sugar and spiking cycles,” Lewis explained.

The reason Lewis said sugar should be avoided is it spikes blood sugar. The body then releases insulin, which lowers blood sugar.

Eventually blood sugar will fall so low that the body craves quickenergy foods to return to that prior energy level. Blood sugar jumps again, as cortisol releases into the body to keep energy pumping.

“It’s like they are on a blood sugar roller coaster,” Lewis said of kids who consume sugar.

Without stable blood sugar levels, children are more likely to be emotionally volatile, with impulsive reactions triggered by hungry and impaired decision-making.

Creating meals that have healthy doses of fats is one way to mitigate the sugar-crash-cycle, Lewis suggested.

“We do a lot of smoothies after school, but they are not just fruit,” she said. “When I make a smoothie for my son I add protein and greens powders, with healthy oils like coco nut or avocado oil.”

After school is a tricky time for adolescents, as energy wanes and the temptation to eat easy-access food is high. Lewis encourages parents and caretakers to bring nutritious, whole foods to the child’s plate, especially after school, since decisions at this time can impact success in homework, household chores and how much sleep the child gets.

Elimination diets can be helpful, such as the Gut and Physiology Syndrome (GAPS) diet, for which Lewis is a certified consultant.

Overall, any efforts to limit refined sugar and trans fat intake for children is a step in the right direction, the way the nutritionist sees it.

“It’s not realistic to say there isn’t going to be sugar everywhere,” Lewis said, reflecting on the regular exposure her son has to sugar, from birthday parties to classroom rewards. “I know that now being a mom, but the key is balance.”

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MARCH 6, 2023 AT 5:30 PM ST. JOHN’S CHURCH HANSEN HALL grew to cover carpets and clothing.

The News&Guide agreed to not print Melissa Lyn’s last name — Lyn is her middle name — or the other renters’ names at all because of their fear of eviction in a tight housing market.

Whether a renter, homeowner or landlord, Jacksonites will likely find mold at home eventually.

Mold, a fungal growth of many strains, is prevalent everywhere on earth, according to Ben Shaw, mitigation manager at Blue Sky Restoration, a local company that cleans up mold.

Average relative humidity in Jackson Hole ranges from 50% in August to as high as 93% in January. Microbial growth starts above 16% moisture content and above 60% relative humidity.

Mold is nature’s way of breaking down organic matter. If we didn’t have mold, our forests would be full of dead trees with no room for new life to grow, Shaw said. Since all buildings are built with materials composed of dead organic matter, like lumber, our homes don’t look like forests but are just as susceptible.

“You can find mold on Antarctica,” Shaw said.

Mold might be a miracle for forest regrowth but it becomes a problem when it proliferates near humans, especially in the home. Not all mold is treated equally, however.

As far as home remedies, bleach is more harmful to the homeowner than mold is, Shaw said.

That’s because bleach does not kill all mold but mostly removes the color so mold will be colorless and in a dormant state for a short time: “It will recover its color and will start growing like nothing happened,” Shaw said.

Professional mold mitigation means cleaning the substrate — or the building material itself, not just the outwardly visible growth — with a “high efficiency particulate air [filter]” vacuum and microbial cleaners like commercial-grade peroxide.

That work is expensive, ranging from $10,000 for a small job up to six figures for a “whole house mitigation,” Shaw said. Then there is the cost of building back, which can also be up in the tens of thousands, and most homeowners insurance does not cover mold.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that there is no “set standard” for what is and is not an acceptable quantity of different kinds of mold. Depending on people’s sensitivities and allergies, mold can be damaging, irritating or not bothersome at all.

As the CDC states, “There is always a little mold everywhere.”

Inhaling tiny mold particles called nanoparticles can trigger an immune response, or the body’s mounting defense against what it sees as a foreign invader. Generally, the more mold, the more likely this allergy reaction is, including symptoms like coughing, sneezing, tight chest, congestion or head- aches. People with asthma could have an attack.

Recent studies have shown children are especially susceptible, the CDC states, with a potential link between early mold exposure and development of asthma in some children, particularly those who may be genetically susceptible to developing asthma.

Though you may have grown up with fear of “black mold” or “toxic black mold,” which includes several species in the stachybotrus strain (not all of which are actually black in color), the danger is somewhat misunderstood.

In 1997 the CDC released a report on sudden infant deaths, studied over two years. The “prime suspect” of acute pulmonary hemorrhage in infants was stachybotrus, or black mold.

In 2000 the CDC corrected itself. There was no proven correlation between black mold and infant deaths — the investigation had been faulty.

But fear of black mold remains, along with the misunderstanding that mold color is an indicator of how dangerous any one kind of mold is.

But just because there is no definitive evidence that black mold is dangerous doesn’t mean one should live with it.

The most common mold types in Jackson Hole are toxigenic, meaning they produce toxins, Shaw said. The health effects from those toxins have been shown to range from respiratory problems, like asthma and emphysema, to cognitive issues and, in one 2020 study, emotional dysfunction, though subjects in that study were exposed to “substantially higher than reported human exposures.”

Getting rid of mold dovetails with existing issues in Teton County’s tight housing market.

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With high supply and low demand, some renters might not feel comfortable approaching their landlord about mold remediation. Homeowners might not have the spare money to remove the mold and fix the moisture problem at the source.

Clare Stumpf, an organizer for housing advocacy group Shelter Jackson Hole, said many tenants who are living in unsafe conditions do not submit complaints that may jeopardize their housing.

At the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust, the builder, manager and landlord are all under the same roof for renters.

Executive Director Anne Cresswell said she receives lots of calls about mold from homeowners and tenants alike. The Housing Trust contracts with mold mitigators and makes sure itself that the project is done in rentals, Cresswell said.

The Housing Trust has also constructed homes with heat recovery ventilators to increase circulation in homes and apartments, before they were a requirement in the building code. That cuts back on moisture problems, Cresswell said, but there are still issues with old construction, mishaps with water, and “operator error,” like people not properly using a shower curtain.

“Even the highest-end homes have mold,” Cresswell said.

To help mediate disputes between landlord and tenant, Shelter JH helped create the Town Housing Ombudsman program.

In the long term, Stumpf said, she hopes to help the region adopt livability requirements beyond building codes that cover all units — deed restricted and market rate — to help with mold, among other standards.

In southeast Wyoming, Laramie recently adopted a new rental housing habitability checklist as part of its rental housing code.

The last of 19 boxes to check is that “there are no visible signs of dangerous concentrations of mold.”

But adopting any stricter standards would be tricky, Stumpf said, since the goal would be to avoid price increases or the risk that a landlord would kick someone out to make improvements.

After all, flawed housing is usually better than no housing.

In the short term, Shaw with Blue Sky Restoration said he recommended people keep an eye on problem areas: leaks, busted pipes and faulty roofs.

“We never know when a pipe behind a wall will develop a leak or when a roof shingle is going to fail,” Shaw said.

Roof inspections and using heat strips on roofs to prevent ice damming can also help, as can humidity detectors and electronic leak detectors placed near water sources and around hot water heaters and under sinks. Contact Sophia Boyd-Fliegel at county@ jhnewsandguide or 307-732-7063.