Wednesday, September 22, 2010

0 comments

Get kids to eat healthy

  • Introduce new foods into your child’s repertoire by taking him or her shopping at the local farmer’s market. When kids meet the people who grow, raise, or make the food, they are generally more willing to taste samples, and are often pleasantly surprised at how good fresh fruits and vegetables—or even goat cheese—can be. Knowing how hard farmers work to produce food will also make kids think twice about tossing their half-finished or untouched lunches in the trash.



  • Try suggesting, instead of insisting, that kids taste a new food. The biggest mistake adults make is telling a child interested in tasting a new food, “Oh, you won’t like that.” With juvenile obesity rates at a staggering high, children need all the encouragement they can get to expand their food choices to include the healthy options found at most markets.
  • If you don’t have a farmer’s market in your area, or your market isn’t open year-round, it can be equally enlightening to take your child to a supermarket’s produce department, especially if it offers sustainably grown items as well as conventional ones.
  • Provide shopping guidelines that involve compromise, such as, “You can have pudding, but let’s make it from scratch” so you can control what goes in it or “You can have baked potato chips, but not fried ones.” In this way, you can still encourage children to select their own lunches and snacks, but exert some control over the purchases.

0 comments:

Post a Comment