Nathan Solia
I have been asked many a times by my clients of what they should feed their children, how much they should feed their children and how to get more nutritious food into their children’s diet.
Going on my own childhood experience, it was a difficult task for my mother to get any vegetables onto my plate. I would either flat out refuse to eat my asparagus (where I would secretly throw them into the fireplace!)or when I was rarely served peas and carrots, I would be grudgingly blend them into my mashed potato so I could quickly gulp them down as fast I could and I never realised why I was always sick and tired as a child.
We didn’t have the nutrition information available to us like we do today. We never got the Jamie Oliver’s “School Dinners” nor the “Super Size Me” movie to gross us out and educate us nor the countless books on the links between food and children’s behavior that we do at our fingertips. We now know sugar leads to diabetes and obesity and bad fats (trans fat) contained in biscuits and processed foods damage our body’s cells and also lead to obesity.
So I have been looking at the ways of getting healthy food onto children’s plate AND into their stomach without putting them on a drip......More importantly, reduce (I say reduce because you are not going to stop them) the amount of processed foods(What I mean by processed food is anything that wasn’t around 10,000 years ago) being digested by your child.
One way is to buy healthy and nutritious foods for the household and have recipes to make tasty food by your children, maid or yourself. Food like fruit, yoghurt, nuts, dried fruit, honey, pita bread, hummus, ham, pineapple, tomato paste, mozzarella are great ingredients to have so you can make things like fruit salad, fruit and nut mix, mini pizzas, dips.
Another way to get good food is to not have unhealthy food in the house. The less processed food we have in the house the less they will eat it. In Sweden, families nominate Saturday as “Candy Day”. The children are allowed a chocolate bar, hard candy and a soda and let them go nuts. The great thing is when the child asks for candy we can calmly say “You can have it on "Candy Day” and because it is only once a week because your child is not unknowingly becoming addicted to sugar. I believe the best and most long lasting way to get good food into our children is to educate your children about the effects of food on them. Your children are smart and even though you may not be able to physically stop them from having sweets you can inform them of the benefits of having healthy foods and point out the side effects of unhealthy food like short attention span, hyperactivity followed by tiredness and grumpy.