Healthy nutrition for your child

Healthy nutrition for your child

As a parent, it can be frustrating trying to get your child to eat certain foods. The young palette doesn't often appreciate new colors, flavors and textures in food. However, when children learn good eating habits early in life, they can continue to make healthy choices throughout their lives!

Every child is different. Some happily eat three meals a day filled with fruits and vegetables, while others eat many small portions and are extremely picky. There is no “right” way to eat as long as your child is gaining weight and developing with appropriate measures. However, it's important to continue to offer your child a wide variety of foods, even if he or she is extremely picky about what he puts in his mouth. This will round out your child's weekly diet, even if they don't have a balanced diet on certain days. Remember that as long as healthy choices are modeled by the parent and continually offered to the child (without pressure), the child will eventually try them too!

Here are some tips to ensure your child gets enough nutrition:

– Feed your child a variety of fruits and vegetables. Include foods that are different colors for nutritional and aesthetic reasons.

– Offer a variety of fruits and vegetables from a young age. This helps the child establish healthy eating habits early on

– Model healthy eating habits. Children often want to eat whatever the parents are eating, so make sure it's nutritious!

– Add fruits and vegetables to your child’s favorite meals. For example, a pasta sauce rich in diced vegetables or adding cucumbers and sprouts to a sandwich.

An important step to a healthy diet is reducing the amount of processed foods in your child's diet. Cookies, candy, and other packaged snacks contain large amounts of sugar and artificial flavors or colors. Even fruit drinks belong to the same unhealthy category! Processed foods contain high calorie content without much nutritional value. Not only that, but all the chemicals in these foods can cause hyperactivity, restlessness, low attention span, and obesity in children. Parents often notice that once processed foods are removed from their child's diet, overall physical and mental health improves significantly.

Here are some tips for eating whole foods:

– Avoid processed/sugary snacks: chips, cookies, donuts, candy, etc.

– 100% fruit juice instead of sugary drinks (soda, iced tea, fruit drinks, etc.)

– Baked potato instead of fries

– Use whole wheat instead of white bread/pasta/flour

– Oatmeal instead of sugary breakfast cereals

– Leftover chicken or turkey meat instead of processed cold cuts

– Breaded chicken breast strips instead of store-bought chicken nuggets

– Air popcorn instead of fries

– Popsicles made from 100% pure fruit juice

– Fresh fruits and vegetables as snacks: apples, bananas, berries, grapes, celery, carrots, cauliflower, etc.