There’s no one way to parent in this world, but there sure are a lot of weird ways.
Take Shan Cooper, mother to Grace Cooper. She feeds her baby the way she thinks is best—and that means feeding her baby a paleo diet.
If you’re somehow still unaware of what a paleo diet entails, it’s a diet that bans processed grains and dairy for foods that “cavemen could scavenge for,” like meats, fruits and veggies, fish, and eggs.
A regular breakfast for 13-month-old Grace consists of eggs fried in coconut oil, sweet potato, carrots, steamed broccoli, a quarter of an avocado and sauerkraut.
Many parents would not look kindly on this diet, but Shan insists that not only does Grace love it, but she’s only gotten sick once.
This mom has a book of healthy recipes that she released online, and has a degree in agricultural science. She says her baby’s paleo diet is the reason she never gets sick,
“She spends a lot of time around other kids who are sick all the time—who have snotty noses, coughs, colds—but she just doesn’t pick it up,” says Shan. “It’s certainly not because I’m shielding her from any of that stuff. I absolutely think a nutrient-dense diet is giving her a strong immune system.”
Shan herself has several food allergies, including dairy and gluten allergies. She cut these from her diet, and eventually cut out processed foods too.
“I just got sick of not feeling great,” she said to Daily Mail Australia. “That had become my normal and (I decided) that wasn’t going to be normal anymore.”
So when her daughter was born, she fed her daughter the same diet.
But this doesn’t mean she plans to restrict her daughter from having other foods.
She describes her daughter’s current diet as “Not weird, not anything strange, that normal people wouldn’t eat.”
“I’m not going to not let her go to kids’ parties. She’s going to go to kids’ parties, and eat what’s there. I’m never going to go to Grace, ‘You can’t eat anything at this party, but I packed you some kale, here you go.’”
She wants her daughter to be raised to choose what she wants to eat.
“I want Grace to eat what makes her feel good,” she says.
When criticized about the lack of grains in her daughters diet, she gets a little offended. “Why eating real food is such a scandalous topic is just bizarre,” says Shan, who also breastfeeds her daughter to get dairy in her diet. She questions why it isn’t scandalous to feed your kids McDonalds, which is far worse.
“You do the right think you think for your kid,” she says.
