‘Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it’

As a young teenager I was in the local running club. Every Saturday it was between me and my best friend who would win the women’s race. A couple of times during the week we would go down to the club and Noel, a great runner himself, would spend hours training us to run faster. Looking back, I feel humbled by his dedication. We didn’t pay him and I don’t even remember saying thank-you.

Tonight I am watching the All Blacks, who are NZ’s fabulous national rugby team (as of this moment ranked No. 1 in the world by the IRB), play France. They know all about training – it’s hard work and it takes time. Let’s hope they trained extra hard this week!

So what’s running and rugby got to do with healthy eating? As parents, we need to train our kids to make healthy food choices. Training is more than telling. If the All Blacks coach just told the team what to do then headed home, how well do you think they would do? If we just tell our kids to eat more fruit and vegetables, is that enough? Training takes time, effort and often thankless dedication.

Follow these 10 healthy eating training tips to set your children up for life:

1. Be Adventurous

One of the best gifts you can give your kids is to train their taste-buds to enjoy many different flavours, not just sugar, fat and salt. Children may have to try a new food up to ten times before they start to enjoy it. So don’t give up too soon. Tell your children that when they try a new food, even one bite, it’s a sign that they are growing up. And praise them lots.

Tasting samples at the deli or supermarket is a fun food adventure. I once left my 4 year old with his grandmother at a deli sampling table of various oils, marinades and sauces. A few minutes later I returned to find my son excitedly dipping the last of the bread into onion jam and thyme infused olive oil! They had tried almost every sample and eaten all the bread. That deli doesn’t do samples now!

Let your child choose a new food at the supermarket. Serve it with foods they love and they may love it too.

2. Eat five or more colours a day

All the wonderful colours in fruit and vegetables come from natural plant chemicals that have super-health effects on our body. Different colours have different effects so it’s good to eat lots of different colours each day. If the only colour your children like is red tomato sauce, then this may be where to focus your training.

Get your kids to list their favourite fruit and vegetables and class them into colours. Chose which colours they want to eat at each meal through the day, and give them coloured stickers to match.

If you have fruit trees, a vegetable garden or even a few herbs, involve your children or grandchildren in planting, watering, weeding and most importantly, eating. A child may leave the peas and carrots on the plate and tell you they hate tomatoes but chances are they will at least take a little bite if they have pulled the carrot from the ground, prized the peas from their pod or popped a ‘moon squirter’ (baby tomato) in their mouth. Food tastes so much better with a fun name or if you have just plucked it from a tree, vine or bush.

3. Drink Water

Buy your children a cool water bottle or two and encourage them to take them whenever they go out. Give them only water with their meals. Keep juice and other sweet drinks as ‘sometimes’ food, not ‘everyday’ food. Juice has valuable nutrients and gives a concentrated energy boost for active, fast growing children who can’t seem to eat enough food. But the bigger picture is that we want our children to go for water when they are thirsty, not insist on some sugar sweetened drink.

Talk to them about how their body needs plenty of water for sport and their brain needs plenty of water to concentrate. Put a sponge in some water and compare it to a dried out sponge. If our brain and body are dried out, it’s no wonder we get headaches, muscle cramps, and feel sluggish at school and on the sports field.

Part 2 of this series here…

Is your toddler not growing so well and running to the toilet a lot? Perhaps he or she is eating too much dietary fibre? Sometimes this happens with super-health conscious parents – including the occasional dietitian!

Fibre is the stuff that fills us up and keeps us regular. It prevents over-eating and keeps cholesterol and blood sugar levels normal. Your children can easily get enough fibre simply by eating a good variety of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains.

Where we can go wrong is assuming that our little ones need as much fibre as we do. They don’t. We should have 30-40 grams of fibre a day but a toddler only needs about 10-14 grams. A couple of pieces of fruit, a cup of vegetables and about four serves of bread and cereal will more than cover their daily fibre needs.

For children over the age of five there’s a simple guide to work out how much fibre is enough: age + 10. This means a seven year old needs about 17 grams fibre.

Children who don’t eat enough fibre are more likely to become constipated and spend hours on the toilet straining. At the other extreme children, especially toddlers, who eat too much fibre will be so full they won’t be able to eat enough food for their rapid growth needs.

The three keys to a healthy, regular bowel are fibre, fluid and exercise. Make sure your children get all three – but remember that just because a little is good, more is not always better.

Digging around I  found these nuggets…

Fat chance of tough love on the obese – Health – NZ Herald News …  Finally, an expert on human nutrition brave enough to tell us what we don’t want to hear …

Cindy here: article is opinionated, totally non-PC – and sensible! It backs up those good old sayings: ‘You are what you eat’ and ‘You reap what you sow’… (here’s my take on this story)

Row erupts over lap-band surgery to combat obesity | The Courier-Mail … OBESITY has become a financial battleground, with heated debate over who will pay for the soaring burden of the overweight on the public purse. This week, the parliamentary report Weighing It Up described obesity as “one of the last bastions of discrimination in our community”. Estimating thousands of morbidly obese people last year cost Australia $58.2 billion, the report urged the Federal Government to recognise obesity as a chronic disease and provide taxpayer-funded treatments – including lapbanding surgery …

Cindy: The numbers may stack up – saving so much on each person who has the operation – but people aren’t numbers. Who’s to say they won’t re-gain the weight?

The Human Condition : Stop Doing Sit-Ups – Why Crunches Don’t Work … Of course, it won’t matter how muscular your torso is if your body fat is too high. The best way to build strong, visible abs isn’t through repeated sit-ups, but by engaging in circuit training that has you working your entire core while you’re burning calories – and to keep yourself disciplined during meals. “If you want to burn your fat mass, make sure you have a combination of weight training and cardiovascular, but 90 percent of good abs is your nutrition …

Cindy: Great – I always hated sit-ups!

Multivitamins linked to younger ‘biological age’: Study

Cindy: Before you rush out to buy some multi-vitamins, read the story. Even the authors say that it could simply be that people who take multivitamin supplements are more healthy anyway.

Why Restaurants Make You Fat – Page 1 – The Daily Beast … Restaurant Syndrome: 1. Eat out. 2. Eat too much. 3. Feel bad. 4. Repeat. The Daily Beast’s Susan B. Roberts on why you do it—and five ways to minimize …

Great story from the USA with some practical tips. But I’m not sure how my family would react if I ‘accidentally’ spilled water on the chips!

Push for nutrition labels on junk food menus | The Courier-Mail … FAST food restaurants could soon be forced to display nutrition labels on menus, as part of the Rudd Government’s crackdown …

Cindy: Hmm… if I was hanging out for a burger and fries I don’t think I’d bother trying to work out which was the healthiest.

Men roasted in the kitchen | The Courier-Mail … ONE in three Australian men barely puts a foot in the kitchen and when he does he tends to be a monotonous cook trying to hog the limelight and demand movie star-like attention. That scathing description has been served up by corporate food producer, Nestle, in a new survey of …

Calcium is essential for young growing bodies and dairy foods (milk, yoghurt and cheese) are the best source of this bone-building nutrient. The NZ Ministry of Health recommends that children under the age of five drink 500ml (about two cups) of milk each day. Make it full-fat milk up until the age of two – they need the extra fat and kilojoules for growth.

If your child isn’t into large glasses of milk, try these calcium-rich food ideas:

• Sprinkle cheese on food
• Turn old bread into Cheese Crispies – slice bread into fingers, thinly spread with Vegemite or Marmite, sprinkle with cheese and bake at 160C for 20 minutes until crisp
• Yoghurt – a handy snack. I buy natural yoghurt and add honey or fruit. Fruit yoghurt often has preservative which I try to steer clear of, especially for little ones. Check the use-by date: the fresher the yoghurt, the more live, healthy bacteria are in it.
• Custard
• Milk puddings
• Rice pudding – turn left-over cooked rice into pudding by adding milk, a sprinkle of brown sugar and some sliced banana. Or beat an egg with 2 tablespoons of sugar and a cup of milk, pour over 1/2 cup of cooked rice and bake at 160C for 20-30 minutes
• Smoothies and milkshakes
• Milk ice-blocks – beat a little sugar and vanilla essence (or Milo) into milk and freeze in ice cube trays with an ice-block stick in each
• Make porridge with milk instead of water
• Make creamy soups with milk (not cream – it doesn’t have much calcium)
• Mashed potato with plenty of milk
• Broccoli or Cauliflower Cheese – Make a quick cheese sauce with milk, cornflour and grated cheese
• Sardines on grainy toast
• Salmon fried rice – make sure you eat the bones!
• Oranges
• Orange almond cake – oranges and almonds provide calcium but not as much as dairy foods
• Calcium enriched soy drink – I like vanilla flavoured So Good
• Play outside in the sun for a while each day. Sunshine stimulates bone-friendly vitamin D, weight-bearing exercise builds bones – and playing is more fun than house-work! Enjoy these bone-building moments with your children.