Feed: Children Healthy Diet - AggScore: 71.8

It is hard to believe that mineral deficiencies exist in a developed country, but believe it or not, iron deficiency is still all too common in our society. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), iron deficiency exists in the United States to a degree sufficient to have an impact on intellectual growth in as many as one in fourteen toddlers and one in six teenage girls. This means that millions of children are affected! Toddlers, prekindergarten children, and menstruating teenage girls are three high-risk age groups that need to be ensured an iron-rich diet.

Children and parents might not notice the symptoms of iron deficiency, which can include decreased memory, poor school performance, impaired athletic performance, fatigue, irritability, headaches, and poor appetite. Kids with iron deficiency anemia tend to get sick more often. Children can usually get all the iron they need from a healthy diet; nonetheless, they should be screened at the appropriate ages during visits to the pediatrician to determine if they are getting enough iron.

The foods highest in iron are lean, red meats, raisins, spinach, and nuts, but iron can be found in varying amounts in almost all green vegetables as well as in non-red meats such as fish and poultry. Some children may need iron supplementation in addition to an iron-rich diet. Talk to your pediatrician about your child's individual iron needs.

Small children explore the world by interacting with their immediate environment. Often what they are trying to understand ends up in their mouths. Keeping this in mind, u can do yourself a favor, and your children too, by placing age-appropriate foods in front of them and letting them be kids. Things might get messy, but your kids also might enjoy tasting what you put in front of them. As they get older your children will come to appreciate food as something to explore, enjoy, and share with others. Compare the smells and tastes of different types of foods. Discuss what gives foods their color and ask your kids whether they appreciate the texture of the foods they are trying.

Kids love successfully completing tasks! Give them simple chores that they will be able to accomplish, such as setting and clearing the table. This tip brings up another of the four Ps: positivity. Make mealtime a positive experience. Praise your kids for their help. And now that you are teaching them healthy eating habits, you can also teach them polite eating habits. Teach them table manners such as saying please" and "thank you," chewing with their mouths closed, and talking only with an empty mouth. These habits will make mealtime more pleasant for everyone.

Make mealtime family time. This means no TV, phone calls, or other distractions. Use your dedicated mealtime to talk to your kids and get to know them better.

A great way to introduce your children to nutrient- and fiber-rich vegetables is to involve them in planting and caring for a family garden. Kids love projects, and everyone likes watching the seeds of their labor bear fruit. In some parts of the country most people have a family garden, or at least they have the space in their backyard for one. In even the most urban environments you can usually find a garden plot to rent for a growing season. Start with a family trip to your local bookstore, library, or plant nursery to learn about the basics of gardening and the growing seasons in your area.

An alternative to a backyard garden can be a simple windowsill garden. Plant some pea or bean seedlings in a pot and set it on the windowsill for sunlight. Give your kids the task of watering the seedling daily. They will enjoy watching its daily progress as it shoots up out of the soil and goes from seedling to plant. Then take them to the grocery store or farmers' market and let them pick out some fresh peas or green beans so they can see what their little plant will become. Let your kids help you wash and prepare the fresh green veggies for a meal. Whether you garden in the backyard or on the windowsill, your children's view of the world of vegetables will never be the same.

William Hazlitt wrote, "There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you." Most of us would probably agree that we would prefer to work in an environment open to ideas than in a tyrannical one. The same is true at home with your children. They may be small, but your kids would still prefer to make choices about the food they eat rather than have food pushed at them without the opportunity for input.

As a parent, you need to be in charge, but instead of treating your kids like the peasants in your domain, recognize that they are citizens with some rights. One day they will need to stand on their own and make healthful decisions about their diet, and they won't be prepared to do so unless you start teaching them to make good choices now. A good way to teach them about food choices is to sit down with them and plan a menu a week, two weeks, or even a month in advance. Make a game out of creating a grocery list for your planned dishes. Take your kids to the store with you and let them find ingredients and mark them off on the shopping list. Remember, both now and when they are on their own, your kids are more likely to eat healthy foods if you involve them in the decision-making process by presenting them with healthy choices and letting them take it from there.

Colors in foods have no inherent nutritional value, but the natural color of certain foods may give clues to the nutrients contained within them. A visit to any produce section reveals that fruits and vegetables, besides being loaded with the important vitamins and minerals necessary for your growing children, come in myriad colors.

Children like contrasting colors, so incorporate this idea into their meals. When coloring, few kids go straight for the brown crayon, so why should you limit their meals to beef and french fries? Playing the color game is a great way to encourage small children to eat vegetables. The game is simple. See who can take a few bites of the most colors on the table. Everybody wins when your kids eat a variety of fruits and vegetables, even if they are only taking a few bites of each.

The healthful benefits of playing the color game are numerous. Sampling small portions of vegetables adds time to the meal, allowing satiation to occur before children overeat. It also provides fiber in your child's diet, preventing constipation. The only limitation to the color game is your imagination. Top green salads with fresh fruit like peaches and tangerines or with raisins. Stir various fruits and vegetables into pasta salads or create fruit salads using a variety of fruit such as bananas, kiwis, peaches, plums, grapes, oranges, and strawberries.

Make a regular date to walk after meals with your family. It may not be possible to go for a family walk after every meal, but with some motivation you should be able to squeeze in a short walk following dinner. Take ten to fifteen minutes after finishing your meal to sit and talk to your kids before clearing the table. By the time you've done that and cleaned up, twenty minutes to half an hour will have passed and you will have digested enough to get out and walk together. Don't despair if you can't fit it in seven days a week; do it three or four times a week instead. A little exercise is better than no exercise!

The benefits of light exercise following a meal are numerous and undeniable. In addition to promoting digestion, the low-impact exercise of a walk helps you and your kids begin to utilize some of the calories just consumed. Perhaps more importantly, it gives you yet more time to spend together as a family. The family walk can just as easily be a family bike ride. Many families take the opportunity to involve neighbors in after-dinner walks in the evening.

The bottom line is that kids appreciate your spending the extra time with them, and you are teaching them to not eat and plop themselves in front of the television. The more you involve yourself in your children's lives, the more they will benefit emotionally, academically, and nutritionally.

For kids older than two and a half to three years old, parents need to institute an early routine of offering only water, nonfat milk, or sugar-free beverages with meals. Three-year-olds should be drinking from cups, and yet I often see them walk into my clinic with a security bottle filled with juice or soda. Judging by their plumpness and poor dental health, I can tell they probably don't go anywhere without their companion bottle permanently attached to their lips. In addition to promoting tooth decay, these ever-present bottles of juice or soda are simply not providing much nutritional value.

Sure, kids need water, so give them water, non-fat milk, or at worst sugar-free, noncarbonated beverages. For the most part, soda and juices are merely sugar water. I'm the last person to say that flavor doesn't matter, and for most of my life I wouldn't touch any liquid that wasn't flavored. Flavored doesn't have to mean sweetened, though, and sweetened doesn't have to mean sugared. There are numerous options available to parents. Squeeze some lemon juice into water to add flavor, or offer sugar-free Kool-Aid as an alternative to soda. For juice-a-holics, dilute cranberry juice with water as a reduced-calorie alternative. You can gradually decrease the amount of juice in the mixture until your kids be-used to drinking unsweetened beverages.

Children should be encouraged to try new foods on a regular basis, and you should try hard to enforce the one-bite rule at meals. However, you should also respect your kids' tastes when they have tried something and they tell you hey don't like it.

There are many reasons why kids reject foods. Sometimes they are simply mimicking an older sibling or playmate and their aversion has nothing to do with the food's texture, color, smell, or taste. This is very common with younger children, who look up to their older siblings and copy their eating behaviors. Your best chance for success in this case is to enlist your older child's cooperation and help in encouraging the younger child to try new foods, for the sake of their little sibling's health.

Sometimes kids reject a food because they experience Bid discomfort when eating it. Especially with milk, egg, fish, or peanut-containing products, your child may be rejecting the food you're offering because she has a mild allergy to it.

Punishing your kids for not liking foods leads to strife at meals and unhealthy food associations that can strain the relationship between you and your kids and foster unhealthy patterns of eating. Instead, simply ask your child to one bite. He may never want more than that one bite, but you'll have set a consistent standard for behavior at your table.

You don't have to trek hours into the woods lugging a backpack and camping supplies to get the benefits of hiking. Hiking and walking are essentially the same thing. Although briskly walking around your neighborhood for thirty to sixty minutes, three to five times a week, is good for your heart, taking in some scenery other than your neighbor's landscaped yard can be good for your mind too. Your family hike can be something you do once every couple of months or something you do weekly. Studies comparing people who don't exercise to those who incorporate light to moderate exercise into their lives at least three times a week have demonstrated that the benefits include decreased heart disease, lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, decreased obesity, prevention or control of diabetes, and improved longevity.

Keep it fun and plan ahead whether you are going on a weekend camping trip or just out for a day hike. Start by packing healthy meals and snacks. Trail mix isn't just for the trails, it can be a delicious and nutritious snack for around the house, but why not take some on your family hiking adventure? Half of the fun is making it with the kids. Let them choose the ingredients they want. Make a trip to the market and buy granola, nuts, pretzels, unsweetened cereals, and air-popped popcorn. Mix and season to your family's taste.

When your small baby cries, it isn't always because she's hungry. Sometimes she just wants to be held. Nonetheless, if you put a sweet-tasting bottle of juice in her mouth, you might just make her stop crying. Good, right? Wrong. Don't start the vicious cycle of associating boredom, sadness, or anxiety with food.

As your baby grows into a toddler she will have an arsenal of energy and curiosity. This can make running errands both in and out of the house difficult. It is tempting to still your child with a sweet snack, but resist the temptation. It's true that your toddler or young child might be cranky because she is hungry and needs a snack. In that case, offer her a nutritious snack, either one that you have prepared in advance or something easy to eat on the go but nutritious as well, like fruit or nuts. However, if your child is cranky because she is tired or bored, don't hand over a snack to occupy her time. If you do, you will be reinforcing in her a bad habit of eating when she has nothing to do or feels bad about something.

Instead of sticking a lollipop in her mouth when she gets fidgety, give her a coloring book and some crayons. Let her use her energy and develop creativity in positive ways instead of trying to distract her with non-nutritive calories from juice or unhealthy snacks.

Parents sometimes need to be reminded that adolescence is difficult and that older children and young adults are appropriately battling to find out who they are and where they fit in. They want to make choices on their own, but at the same time they are not always ready to handle the responsibilities that go along with those choices.

As might be expected, younger teens need more help in making decisions than older ones. As she gets older, and with practice, your child will become better able to weigh and understand the possible consequences of her behaviors, but this will happen only if you allow her to make decisions. Making personal food choices is a great way to practice making responsible decisions. This doesn't mean you should agree to throw the food pyramid out the window and serve up burgers and fries every night. Initially offer reasonable and healthful foods from which she can decide what she wants to eat. If you have laid a solid foundation for healthy eating and living centered on activity, moderation at mealtime, and variety, the transition to making her own decisions will be smoother.

Most arguments between parents and children are about everyday things or differences in personal tastes and choices, not about serious differences in values. Don't let food choices become a barrier between you and your child.

So you always try to cook healthy and you limit screen time in front of the TV, the computer, and video games to one to two hours on school days, but your child is still overweight. How can this be? It must mean he's just genetically programmed to be fat, right? Wrong. The answer often lies in a detailed dietary history. First of all, what does he eat in the morning before school? Well, nothing, he's too rushed to eat breakfast. Okay. What does he eat for lunch? I don't know. I give him five dollars to buy his lunch at school.

What's happening here? Part of the answer is right in front of you. After skipping breakfast, your child is ravenous by the time lunch rolls around, and the five dollars you gave him in the morning for breakfast can go either toward a well-balanced, government-approved, boring meal with a carton of milk from the lunch line or toward a cheeseburger, bag of chips, piece of pie, and soda from the snack bar.

You can't be with your child at all times, but you can ensure that he eats breakfast before school, and you can encourage him to eat healthy at school by setting a good example in the meals you eat together. Furthermore, you can buy a meal ticket for your younger children and get them into the habit of eating the nutritionally appropriate and balanced "government-issued" school food.

Despite our best intentions, children are consuming far more juice than is good for them these days. A daily four- to eight-ounce glass of orange juice with breakfast is fine, and you might even give your child a little more juice when she's constipated, but overall, cutting down on juice consumption is the right trend.

So how much juice can your kids have? Children ages one to six should have only four to six ounces of juice a day. Children ages seven to eighteen should have only eight to twelve ounces of juice a day. In the short run too much juice can cause diarrhea, abdominal pain, and gas, and it can even lead to malnutrition if the juice replaces milk or formula. Over time too much juice consumption leads to obesity and tooth decay.

Something to be careful about is the deceptive marketing for beverages that are labeled as "juice flavored" or "a fruit drink." These beverages usually contain only a small percentage of actual fruit juice and are instead loaded with sugars and artificial flavors to make them appealing to children, while not offering the nutritional benefits you were hoping to give them.

It's great that you want your kids to get the nutritional benefits of fruit, but juices often have the fiber strained out and sugars added for flavor. You should encourage your kids to eat whole fruits instead.

Have you ever noticed that crayon sets for the smallest children come in boxes of four or five while boxes meant for older kids have as many as one hundred crayons in them? Children need to develop a framework for success whether they are coloring or eating. Younger kids accept their four colors while they are still learning to color within the lines, but as they master these basic skills they grow to crave variety.

Of course, children of all ages need variety and a balanced diet, but smaller kids accept that you, their parent, are the one to decide what colors will be in their crayon box or what food will be on their plate. As they get older, however, start involving your kids in the decision-making process. This doesn't mean giving your eight-year-old twenty dollars and setting him loose in the grocery store. If you do that, you shouldn't be surprised if he selects twenty dollars' worth of snack cakes! What this does mean is that you should give your child options, healthy options, and let him choose from them. Do you want peas, green beans, or broccoli tonight? Do you want rice or potatoes? Would you like strawberries for dessert or watermelon? Offering your children choices encourages them to eat what you are preparing and makes them feel that you care about their preferences and desires.

When I was a child, I was as picky an eater as they came. However, my mother had one trick that worked on me every time. She purchased a plastic plate with a picture on it of robots battling in space. I loved that plate. My mother didn't serve my meals from that plate every night but saved it for those nights when she was going to pull eggs, fish, or broccoli on me. I still don't like broccoli, but I'll still eat it if it's served off that plate!

You don't have to limit yourself to purchasing silly, or in that case, very cool, dishware. The point is to make meals fun. Kids like variety, whether we are talking about the color, taste, or texture of foods. Why not give your toddler a piece of paper and a crayon to doodle with during dinner? The distraction could be helpful, and he may also be encouraged to draw what he does and doesn't like.

Also, try giving your dishes funny names. Who can resist sparkleberry soup? Let your kids come up with the funny names and make sure you obediently call the dish by the name they bestow upon it. The only rule is that they have to taste the food to name it. Another tip in my mother's bag of tricks on days when she wanted me to try a new food was to not let me snack between lunch and dinner. That way I was hungry enough to eat anything, as long as it was on the right plate!