In his new book, Dr. Thomas Fras wants to give parents and practitioners a healthy diet of nutritional information.
“Feeding Our Children” is based on Glass’s 30 years of nutritional experience as a researcher and physician. He is currently a pediatrician at Logan Health and has been practicing in the Flat Head Valley since 2015.
Before coming to the valley, Fras worked in Billings and studied medicine in Colorado. Originally from New York, he holds a bachelor’s degree in nutrition from Cornell University and a degree in medicine from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Fras considers himself a “nutritionist pediatrician”.
Based on his undergraduate education, Glass believes that nutritional awareness is “extremely underestimated” in medical education and mainstream health approaches. His mission is to “improve children’s lives by educating children, parents and healthcare providers about the effects of dietary choices on mental and physical health.”
But this advocacy was not always Fras’s passion.
He studied nutrition at university, partly because of his health experience, but he didn’t immediately start his medical career.
After graduating from college, Glass took a slightly counter-intuitive position at PepsiCo. Up-and-coming nutritionists worked on a soft drink company’s fitness program, but eventually fitness declined as a company priority. He said he saw the text on the wall and decided to uproot his life in New York and move to Colorado.
So Glass started a vitamin company that grew from one to nine, but he was gradually pulled back into the academic arena. He holds a master’s degree in nutrition from Colorado State University. As part of his research, Glass worked on a project to analyze the effects of omega 3 fatty acids on brain development.
Then, while he was migrating from the program, Glass encountered a “gobs mac moment.”
A colleague urged him to pursue a medical degree so that he could apply his nutritional knowledge in the clinical setting and meet the gapping needs of nutritional medicine.
From there, Fras said, “Everything has changed.”
Fras noticed that his niche blended his nutritional background with traditional medical training. This combination was only present among other pediatricians. He found that he could provide his own insights into the care of prenatal, infant and toddlers.
He planned to take a unique approach to Montana, because he knew that the area was not particularly well serviced.
Billings’ roommates led him there, and the expansion of pediatric care in Kalispell attracted him to what was then known as the Kalispell Community Health Center.
Upon entering Flathead, Glass participated in a growing outreach program aimed at disseminating health information to various cities and towns in Montana. Fras preached to patients the importance of early nutrition and extensively to other Montana doctors, but he continued to face the disappointment of nutritional awareness in his efforts.
“Nutrition made me feel like I needed to do more,” he recalled.
To reach a larger audience and put all his vast knowledge in one place, Glass decided to write a book.
The ideas began to merge about three years ago, and Glass continued to practice daily, working on “Feeding Our Children” all the time. At work, Fras took care of his mother and young children, and during the holidays he checked over a thousand references and created a comprehensive guidebook on children’s nutrition.
“Feeding our children” depends on three major areas, Flass explains, nourishing the brain, nourishing the intestines, and nourishing genes.
These three principles represent a basic focus for parents and doctors who care for infants. Basically, they help readers find the right nutrients for the right age, balance undernutrition and overnutrition, and create a healthy environment for children to pursue the best possible health results. I will guide you.
The book details, “The relatively simple things you can do, especially in early pregnancy and early childhood, can protect the rest of your child’s life.”
“You can’t regain that stage of neural development,” Glass emphasized.
Eating rainbow-colored foods, maximizing fiber intake, and looking for vitamin D are all Fras’s suggestions for optimizing children’s health, especially for people in climates like Montana. It’s a step.
He intends “Feeding Our Children” as “a book that not only is accessible to both educated amateur parents, but also teaches and has a lot of interesting and highly relevant things for healthcare providers.” ..
Fras focuses on reaching one family and one child at a time in his book. His hope is that for a given child, “feeding our child” will help “make the child reach their full potential.”
Reporter Bret Anne Serbin can be contacted at 406-758-4459 or bserbin@dailyinterlake.com.
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