Lift the Shame: The Podcast - Mothering Free From Diet Culture, Food Guilt, and Body Shame · Crystal Karges, MS, RDN, IBCLC

Stop Calling Food Healthy if You Want Your Kids to Have a Good Relationship With Food

·41 min

Crystal comes back from the podcast hiatus with a straightforward message for parents trying to raise intuitive eaters. She opens by thanking listeners for their patience, then turns to the work of unlearning diet culture in the home. The episode rests on a simple claim: kids do not need food sorted into a healthy or unhealthy hierarchy. Crystal argues that this language flattens health and makes it seem like one food choice can stand in for well-being. She points out that health is shaped by far more than what ends up on a plate. Genetics matter. So does the environment a child lives in. Access to health care matters too. Those realities are not fixed by giving food better labels. From there, she challenges the idea that children need nutrition concepts explained to them in order to eat well. Her view is that kids can get confused when adults bring those ideas in too early, especially because nutrition concepts are nuanced and complicated. She is especially wary of language that sounds helpful but still smuggles in a hierarchy. Words like healthy, unhealthy, quick energy, and slow energy may seem educational, but they can train children to treat food like a status system. Crystal keeps coming back to the hidden message inside the words. She wants parents to ask what a child hears when food is described that way, and whether the goal is support or control. The episode stays close to family life and everyday food conversations rather than abstract theory. In those familiar moments, she shows how easily food commentary becomes part of the air children breathe. She does not frame parents as villains for using those words. Instead, she treats the habit as a learned script that can be changed. The tone stays warm, measured, and quietly firm. By the end, the goal is clear: parents can support their children better by dropping food hierarchy language and trusting that kids do not need constant nutrition coaching to build a good relationship with food.

As heard by us

A steady case for dropping food rankings at home.

Crystal makes a plainspoken case against sorting food into healthy and unhealthy buckets around children. Her point is not that nutrition does not matter. It is that this language flattens health into a label and leaves out genetics, environment, and access to care.

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Why you'd press play

Stop sorting food into good and bad and let the table get quieter.

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