Is Your Hair Made of Donuts?

“The message: Too many sweets can make you sick. . . . While the moral of the story may be a bit heavy handed, Is Your Hair Made of Donuts? has fun and beautiful illustrations that highlight the theme of eating healthfully and reflect the old adage that you are what you eat.”

In a world that super-sizes everything, the Blossom family does things a little differently. Matt and Maddie Blossom’s mom doesn’t allow them to eat junk food. One day the siblings insist that they’re tired of feeling different from all the other kids at school because they eat healthfully, so for the first time, Mom allows them to indulge in whatever foods they want from The Wastelands, a supermarket with aisles stockpiled with chemical confections of every kind.

After gobbling up these foods, triumphant over winning the food war with their mother, the children go to bed feeling sick. Not wanting to tell their mother how they are feeling, they fall asleep. As they slip into slumber, the children embark on an adventure in the form of a dream brought on by an overload of sugar.

With a touch of powdered sugar and a tad of colored sprinkles, Matt and Maddie’s hair transforms into large, gooey donuts right before their eyes. Whenever a donut drops on the floor, another grows in its place, until the children are drowning in donuts—and of course that means too much sugar. Will the children have to live with donut hair forever?

Is Your Hair Made of Donuts? is an innovative way of teaching children about nutrition and eating healthfully. Matt and Maddie learn a valuable lesson in this story about overindulging in sweets. The message: Too many sweets can make you sick.

While the moral of the story may be a bit heavy handed, Is Your Hair Made of Donuts? has fun and beautiful illustrations that highlight the theme of eating healthfully and reflect the old adage that you are what you eat.

The author’s personal feelings about nutrition are apparent in the pages of the story. A quibble is that the author pushes the nutrition message a little too hard, leaving no room for compromise. What about creating a dessert using healthful ingredients, showing children how to indulge a sweet tooth with healthful alternatives? Cookies and other desserts can be created with more healthful ingredients. A child’s body isn’t going to fall apart because it has ingested something with sugar in it. Eating foods in moderation is key—not necessarily eliminating them all together so that a child feels deprived and overindulges.

On the other hand, the author does include healthful recipes that do not include sugar in the back of the book.