… continued from yesterday’s post

4. Eat Breakfast

Eating breakfast is one of the most important habits to develop. Even if it is just a banana and a glass of milk, teach your children that some food in their stomach kick-starts the body for the day making it easier to control weight and giving them energy for work, study and play.

5. Listen to your tummy

“If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.” Children are born with the ability to stop eating when they are full. But we sometimes unintentionally over-ride this natural regulating mechanism when we make them finish their meal. I do encourage kids to take a few extra bites of the nutritious bits of the meal if they have left too much. If they insist they are full, I let them off – but they don’t get dessert.

Teach older children to listen to their tummy and ask themselves both quantity and quality questions: “Is my tummy full? Will I feel sick if I eat those extra biscuits? Is this what my body really needs right now?” You are training children to be aware of the many cues around them enticing them to eat, even if they are not hungry. Just because they are at the movies or passing the food hall at the shopping centre, do they really need to eat? If an advertisment shows a gorgeous model eating chocolate biscuits or a famous sportsman eating fast food, ask them if they think eating that food will really help them look like that model or be as fast as that sportsman. Do they eat that stuff in real life? What else do they do to look or perform like that? Will eating a certain food or drink give them the same lifestyle and friends as on the advert? If the answer is yes, are they the type of friends they really want?

6. Sit at the table to eat

There’s a time to play, a time to work, a time to rest and a time to eat. All too often the ‘time to eat’ is all the time! We balance dinner on our lap in front of TV, we stuff in a sandwich while continuing to work, and we grab snacks on the run. Train your children to focus on food when it’s meal time and then forget it until the next meal time. This means eating regular meals, sitting at the table – with no distractions. It not only reduces snacking, grazing and the risk of choking as you run around with food in your mouth, it also teaches social skills such as table manners, how to use a knife and fork, how to talk over a meal and patience to wait while others finish.

7. Eat Slowly

I spend my professional life telling people to slow down and enjoy their food, then find myself at home telling the kids to “hurry up and eat!” As much as we would love our children to finish their meal in minutes rather than hours, it won’t be too many years before we will be nagging those same kids to slow down and chew their food ‘properly’ rather than inhaling it. This is a good time to remind them that it takes about 20 minutes for the message to get from their stomach to their brain that they are full. So eating slowly is great for weight control. It also gives them time to chat – preferably without their mouth full!

8. Enjoy Cooking

Children are more likely to become discerning, adventurous eaters if they know how to cook. OK, we all know of overweight chefs but at the very least your future son or daughter-in-law will thank you! Give children their own apron – it’s half the fun of cooking – and let them help you in the kitchen. Buy a kids cook-book for inspiration and as they become more confident let them cook dinner once a week.

9. No routine visits to fast food outlets

As a child I used to think the kids who had fish and chips every Friday night were so lucky. As an adult I am glad this wasn’t part of my childhood training. If kids are trained to associate fast food with good feelings – as a reward for winning Saturday morning sport or as a fun family outing – what are the chances they will go to the sushi bar as adults?

10. Be a role model

Actions speak louder than words. What we teach should be what we do. Like any elite athlete, put the effort into training your children now and you are sure to reap the rewards later.

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.

My son spent at least a year of his toddler-hood refusing all meat and chicken. As he had been the ‘perfect eater’ up until that time I was in shock! I was fanatically aware of the importance of iron for his brain development, as only as over-caring , nutritionally trained mother can be, and had to use great amounts of self control not to panic and force-feed him!

I tried to feed him every other source of iron possible – iron-fortified cereal, peanut butter on wholemeal bread, hummus, spinach, eggs, dried apricots, figs, baked beans, all served with vitamin C-rich fruit to enhance absorption.

Meanwhile I tried disguising meat in pasta sauce, mini-meatballs, meatloaf, tiny morsels hidden in fried rice, chicken liver pate on crackers and finely sliced fillet steak delicately arranged around the plate with other choice morsels. Most of my efforts were rejected. Each time I fell into frantic visions of my son’s brain atrophying from lack of iron I reminded myself that this was a stage that would end. Not many 15-year-old boys refuse steak.

“I don’t like carrots; I want animal biscuits!” My three year old nephew screamed as his grandmother and aunty unsuccessfully tried to feed him dinner. “You need to eat something healthy. Here, just try a tiny bit of this yummy mashed potato”. “No – I want pasta!”

For 20 minutes we struggled. Tears were falling, tempers were rising, time-out hadn’t worked. Then against every sense of healthy eating we gave in. “Hey, we’re not the parents. Our sanity is more important than meat and veges.” So we served plain pasta (no sauce allowed) artistically surrounded by coloured animal biscuits, poured ourselves some wine, and finally relaxed.

Every parent has moments like this – where giving in is easier than taking a stand. Sometimes we have to do it for our emotional health and sometimes for social reasons – to avoid World War III at the café!

But making the effort to teach our kids healthy eating habits is one of the best gifts we can give them for their long-term health.

Why do we feel guilty if they eat pasta & animal biscuits for dinner?

Instinctively we know that the food we feed our children has a huge effect on their growth, behaviour and health. Otherwise why would we bother goading them to eat vegetables, resorting desperately to sayings such as “Eat your carrots, they make you see in the dark” (based on the fact that they contain beta-carotene, a type of vitamin A of which a deficiency causes night blindness) and “What about the starving children in Africa?” (based on no logic at all – finishing your dinner unfortunately doesn’t help them). Why do we feel so guilty if they eat pasta and animal biscuits for dinner?

Here’s some of the science that supports our instinct:

Babies who are breast-fed have less risk of developing allergies
Toddlers who are deficient in iron can have impaired brain and intellectual development, which is permanent and irreversible
Children who have a lower saturated fat intake in childhood are less likely to develop insulin resistance – a key predictor for diabetes and heart disease
Babies who are underweight in their first two years of life and who then gain weight rapidly have a greater risk of insulin resistance and heart disease in adulthood
Around two out of every three obese children will become obese adults, especially children who are still obese after the age of 10.

How our food habits are formed

The food we grow up with is often the food we prefer as adults. Think about the foods you like to eat; many of these will be foods you ate as a child. My mother went through a health phase when we were kids. She decided we didn’t need salt but we did need wheat germ (a great source of vitamins B and E). So we all had wheat germ sprinkled on our salt-free porridge every morning. What started as taste bud torture soon became normal, and we all still eat porridge that way!

Food routines can also carry over into adulthood. If you grew up in a family where you all sat around the television enjoying fish and chips while watching the rugby, chances are that as an adult you will not sit down to watch the rugby with a bowl of carrot sticks.

Take these first two steps to encourage healthy eating habits in your children.

1. Eat together as a family

Eating together as a family is important. Even if your busy schedule doesn’t allow for eating together as a family every night, try to have at least one night a week where you all sit down together.

This is where children learn the social aspects of food: how to set the table, how to use cutlery, table manners, and how to chat over a meal rather than grunting a few syllables while mesmerised by the television. They see how you eat and what you eat.

It’s also gives you a chance to give children more control over what they eat: place the food on the table buffet-style and let them help themselves. They may be tempted to try the hated courgette when they see everyone else enjoying it.

2. Get kids involved

Life is a great adventure for young children and food can be part of it.

Let them pick herbs or vegetables out of the garden, if you have one.
Point out interesting fruit and vegetables in the supermarket and let them choose one to take home.
Let them help you pat out the scones or measure out ingredients for baking. Be prepared for some mess and the odd spill. Fruit smoothie on your clothes and egg shells in the cake mix is worth it if the children grow up viewing healthy food as fun.

Original article written by me (Cindy). Reprinted with permission Healthy Food Guide magazine.