Motherhood: hypocrisy edition

Motherhood has changed me in many deep ways .

One of the aspects that has changed the most in me, hand-in-hand with the fierce will to protect our daughter, is an almost fundamentalism when it comes to food.
 
I've read, I've watched documentaries, I consider myself well-informed. We try to eat healthy food most of the time, but we also love our sugar, our salt, our dairy products, our meat.

We do get organic products whenever possible and we are on a mostly (70%) vegetarian diet. We do not buy pre-cooked or frozen meals and we try to avoid fast food. There is no ketchup in the house (at this moment).

And yet, when it comes to the child I have the tendency to become extreme.

We do not give her products that contain sugar. At some point the health center recommended "baby cookies" but I still refuse to give her those because they contain high fructose syrup. I make all of her food at home, we avoid salt (as her kidneys are still immature and can't process it yet); we do not, except on very rare exceptional situations, get her baby food in pots. I haven't dared to give her ham or other curated meats yet because nitrates are a known carcinogenic factor. She has had some yoghurt and cheese, but in small quantities. I still have trouble getting my head around the new tendencies that say dairy products, and particularly milk, are not the perfect product I was taught (The Harvard school of Public Health and Medical School have excluded dairy products from their daily dietary recommendations). Breaking paradigms is hard.

I know very well I can not protect her from everything, and that very fast she will be exposed to all kinds of risks and dangers. It is life. I can not attempt to keep her pure, perfect and sheltered. And while I have all these strong feelings regarding food, particularly, I sit there with her eating cake while she eats her vegetables, oh the hypocrisy.**

Has motherhood changed you in ways that you did not expect?

**(while at the same time my feeling of self, of who I am, remains intact).
** (I won't be able to do that for long though, because these days she tends to steal whatever it is I am eating. Which I guess is a good thing because she is forcing us to make better choices).