How to Eat Healthy for Your Kids
By Sara Butler
Your children are inundated every day with messages about food from television and their peers, which can make it difficult to get them to eat healthy at home. Here’s the secret to healthy eating for kids – you have to be a good nutrition role model for them. When you switch up your family’s eating habits and make them healthier, you’re impacting their lives forever. Here are a few tips to help get you started instilling good eating habits for your kids.
The Health Benefits of Healthy Eating
Obesity is a problem in the United States today, and obesity is rising in children at an alarming rate. It is very important to help your child maintain a healthy weight in order to avoid health problems in the future. Eating well can also help support healthy growth and development in your child.
Remember, your kids aren’t born craving candy and pizza with an aversion to asparagus, they learned that – probably from you. Over time, if they are exposed to more unhealthy food sources, then that will be the food they crave. But don’t fret; it is possible to help your child reset their food cravings. And the sooner you can start, the better they will be.
How to Encourage Healthy Eating
It doesn’t matter how old your child is, they develop a natural preference for foods they enjoy eating the most. The trick is to encourage healthy eating by making the nutritious choices more appealing to them. You can do this by:
- Focusing on the overall diet – Give you child as many whole and minimally processed foods as possible. The less packaged and processed the food, the better.
- Be a good role model – Children like to imitate, so if you munch down on some whole grain avocado toast, the chances are increased that your kids will, too.
- Disguise healthy food if you must – You don’t have to trick your kids, but you can add some extra vegetables to their favorite foods if you think it’ll help them to get more well-rounded nutrition.
- Eat at home – Eating out should be a treat, not an everyday occurrence. The more you can cook at home, the more you can control what your kids are eating and the overall health of the food in front of them.
- Have healthy snacks on hand – You need to keep a lot of fresh vegetables, fruit, and beverages such as milk and water on hand for your kids to enjoy. This way they won’t reach for chips, soda, or cookies!
To learn more about your health and wellness, see your local chiropractor at The Joint Chiropractic.