This is a guest post by Janie, one of our new readers.
I’ve always battled with an unhealthy diet. I thought I could always get away with it because I was involved in various sports such as soccer, basketball and baseball but the unhealthy snack habits I developed as a kid started to catch up to me. In college I was not able to be part of an athletic team and the result was pounds starting adding up quickly.
That is why educating kids about healthy snack foods during March’s National Nutrition Month is so important. If they can develop healthy eating habits now it will make for a better life later. Snacks have a bad rap because of the high calorie high fat foods but they don’t deserve them because snacks can in fact be healthy. The trouble is directing your kids toward the right snack foods with healthy nutrients and dissuading them from eating the unhealthy ones.
One of the problems is that kids have high metabolisms and burn through the energy from food faster than adults. Now this is actually a good thing not a bad thing, the problem comes from the fact that kids may not start to see the negative effects of unhealthy snack foods till they are much older and cannot escape the unhealthy habits they developed as kids.
The first key for starting off your kid on National Nutrition Month is to start your kid off early with healthy snack food. Give your child a taste for fresh organic fruit which will appeal to the taste buds but will not carry the high levels of fat and sodium that say chocolate. Fruit is great for snack food in that it provides various key nutritional ingredients and is easy to keep around the house. Oranges are a great example of this and provide Vitamin C. Whole grain foods will keep your child full longer and prevent them from snacking out on other unhealthy foods.
Another great snack food to get your kid into is Yogurt. Yogurt provides not only protein but also vitamins b-12 and b-6 and is a great alternative and as nutritious as skim milk. Yogurt also comes in my different flavors to keep your kid interested in, if they get bored switch to the blueberry or strawberry to fulfill their taste buds. One final key snack food is vegetable platters. Vegetables may not sound like your child’s ideal snack food but mixing them with some sort of dip and adding in some cheese will make a great tasting snack.
In the end avoiding unhealthy snack food is not impossible. Those same enticing snack foods with all the calories and fat do fulfill your taste buds and can make your kid develop a sweet tooth. The surprising thing about healthy snack food is that it can accomplish the same effect, you can make those vegetables and some dip taste just as good and sweet as a pack of Oreos. More than just guiding your kid to eat healthier today, you are helping them develop healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime. Pretty soon your children may even automatically associate the word “snack” with healthy food choices.
It’s challenging to get kids (and adults too!) to eat wisely and with heatlh in mind. It’s a mindset that is hard to instill when all you see around you are commercials for junky foods. Keep getting that message out there and hopefully enough will hear that it will sink in.
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