FOODS FOR HEALTHY KIDS

The same hobby horse Smith rode to best sellerdom in Feed Your Kids Right (1979), decked out with handy questions and answers (why does my baby always wake up crying? why is my six-year-old girl so aggressive?) and some natural-food recipes that are rated for particular nutrients (four stars to one) but otherwise unremarkable. Once more Smith links crime, poor self-image, hyperactivity, insomnia, ear infections, blood in the urine, fear of strangers, and other ills of childhood and adolescence with poor nutrition; once more he charts his simplistic ""levels of health,"" wherein kids' physical and emotional problems are frequently traced to the mother's diet in pregnancy; once more he points to food (especially milk) allergies and hypoglycemia as ail-purpose bugaboos; and once more he advocates avoiding additives and sugar, substituting high-protein snacks (reasonable but hardly novel advice), and, more dubiously, feeding the kids vitamin and mineral supplements, sometimes in megadoses. What's needed is an ounce of sense.