When my daughter was young, I had to be creative and sneaky to get her to eat a more nutritious diet. I arranged food into little designs on her plate, snuck healthy ingredients into smoothies, and even served up kid-tested snacks like ‘ants on a log’ (celery sticks with peanut butter, dotted with raisins). Every mom knows that when food looks cute, kids are more likely to eat it.
‘Look!’ I said, putting the plate down in front of my then-six-year old. ‘Ants on a log!’
My daughter stared at the plate, then at me. ‘Mom,’ she said. ‘It’s celery with peanut butter and raisins. Ew.’
Okay, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But that didn’t stop me then (and still doesn’t) from trying every possible trick to get my kid to eat better. One thing I’ve learned is that you have to try things again and again, because kids change.
Your child may gag at artichokes at age 9, but devour them at age 12. Conversely, they might eat broccoli happily for three years, then suddenly declare the vegetable the grossest, pukiest thing ever.
When it takes a monumental effort to get your kid to eat a banana, how are you supposed to get her to eat the recommended five servings of fruits, veggies and legumes every day? The answer is to start good habits when they’re young, and then be as creative (and sneaky) as possible.
Introduce a variety of foods early, but choose the right foods. Experts say there’s no reason to feed toddlers bland food, so go ahead and introduce them to a variety of flavors, including ethnic foods. But beware of sweets. The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine says that kids under 2, who are normally satisfied with the natural sweetness of fruit, will quickly become conditioned to more concentrated sweets, and the desire for sugary foods will stick with them.
Introduce new foods at least a few times. Don’t expect instant success. Many kids won’t try a new food until the third or fourth (or tenth) time it’s served.
Be sneaky. Add pureed sweet potatoes to mac and cheese, canned pumpkin to cornbread, or grated carrot or zucchini to muffins.
Give food kid-appeal. Cut fruit into small pieces. Make pancakes into faces. Cut quesadillas into fun shapes with cookie cutters. Who knows, your kids might actually eat ‘ants on a log.’
Blend it up. Smoothies are great for sneaking antioxidant-rich fruit into kids’ diets. Start with juice, milk or soymilk and add fresh or frozen berries, mango, cherries or peaches. Adding quality yogurt (with live cultures) provides beneficial bacteria which aid digestion and boost immunity.
Teach portion control. In our era of supersizing, kids grow up with a skewed idea of what constitutes a portion. Give children smaller portions than adults, and serve them on small plates. Research shows that large plates encourage taking – and eating – larger servings. If kids are eating snack foods, encourage them to pour some of the snack into a small bowl instead of eating straight from the bag.
Out of sight, out of mind. Researchers found that if a dish of candy is within view or – even worse – within reach, people will eat more of it. Don’t keep dishes of candy or other non-nutritious food out in the open. And don’t allow kids to stash treats in their rooms. But do keep fruit and cut-up veggies easily accessible.
Keep sugar in treats, not in everyday foods. Many foods contain far more sugar than you’d suspect. Read labels and look for hidden sugar in bread, crackers, soups, lunch meats, sauces and ‘fruit drinks.’ Sweeteners are known by many names: sucrose, fructose, glucose, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, honey, maltodextrin, maltose, malt and molasses. If you keep the sugar out of foods that don’t really need sweetening in the first place, then indulging in treats now and then won’t be as harmful.
Trade in the holiday candy. Three days after Halloween, some kids forget about the bag of candy. Not my kid. So I made her a deal: she got to save a few pieces, and traded the rest for a Beanie Baby. Best six bucks I ever spent.
Think about a habit before introducing it, because once started, it can be really hard to break. A few rules that can make your life easier and your kids’ diets better:
• Don’t succumb to buying candy at the check-out aisle. If you never buy it, your kids will quit asking for it.
• Don’t offer kids soda. Each can of soda contains 10 to 13 teaspoons of sugar, almost always in the form of high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that may increase insulin resistance and is converted more easily into fat by the liver than regular sugar. One sugar-sweetened drink per day can double a child’s chance of developing type 2 diabetes. Allow soda only on special occasions, and limit refills.
• Decide if you want to be slave to the Happy Meal. Kids’ fast food meals are getting a bit healthier, but the basis of the meals is still fried hamburger or fried chicken nuggets, all sold by enticing kids with a plastic toy. Sadly, by the age of 12 months, 13 percent of babies are eating French fries every day. (Potatoes, incidentally, are the least nutritious vegetable and don’t even count toward kids’ ‘five a day.’)
• Teach kids that there are ‘Go foods, Slow foods, and Whoa foods,’ in other words, foods that should be eaten frequently, occasionally, or sparingly. For a chart, go to ge.ttusd.org, click on Eagle News, and download a copy of the January/February 2009 newsletter.
~ Discuss this article with the author. Email lindalindsay@moonshineink.com.
