Who said 8-year-olds can’t cook? I’ve just spent the afternoon helping a group of them grate carrots, slice cabbage, measure out vinegar and finely chop garlic and parsley. We made coleslaw – the real way. No store bought mayonnaise for us. The kids made it from scratch – an egg, vinegar and garlic whisked together. Then the oil very slowly drizzled in while the cooking teacher whisked until it became thick and creamy. What a fun way to teach the science of emulsifiers.

I knew it would happen eventually: my eight-year-old is finally asking for sandwiches. Not just any sandwich, mind you, it has to be avocado and tomato. Perhaps it’s all the activity of the past week on holiday at Whakatane and Lake Rotoma. We’ve been boogie boarding at the beach, water skiing, biscuiting, kayaking, swimming and jumping off scarily high rocks into the lake – fun! All that water and sunshine sure stimulates the appetite but I think the recent call for avocado and tomato sandwiches is just an age thing.

Toddlers who eat fruit as a snack rather than with meals are three times more likely to have iron deficiency. “But I thought it was healthy to give my child fruit as a snack,” commented the health professional sitting near me. “It is,” replied Dr Clare Wall, one of three child nutrition experts speaking at a seminar I attended this week. “But it’s also important for toddlers to eat fruit with a meal because it increases iron absorption from that meal.”

One in six Kiwi toddlers are iron deficient and around two-thirds don’t eat enough iron to meet the recommended daily intake. For most, it’s not bad enough to cause anaemia but it is bad enough to affect their behaviour and brain

Eighty percent of our adult brain is formed by the age of three. So just at the time when our toddlers have learnt that saying “NO” causes the big people around them to act in all sorts of funny ways, we need to make sure they somehow get enough brain nutrients into them, particularly iron, zinc and omega-3 fats.

Iron carries oxygen around the body. If a muscle is deprived of oxygen, it dies. If a toddler doesn’t get enough iron the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. It can’t develop so well – and the damage is irreversible.