Kids love ‘kids’ food: fun, colorful, mini-sized, cartoon-covered, ready-to-use, TV-advertised snacks that are easy to buy and convenient to pack in a lunch box. Unfortunately, these foods are often packed with bad nutrition: fat, sugar, salt, and additives. Even foods that appeal to you as a parent because they claim to be healthy are often expensive and almost always unhealthy. Often the power to tease wins out, and since other kids are allowed chocolate chip cookies and chips, it seems unfair to deny your child these fun treats. We can all take positive steps to make our children healthier and better if we work together as a team. Let’s try to squash annoying power and ban garbage.
Here are some ideas to help you provide a healthier lunch box:
1. Throw out the trash, go back to basics, and start preparing home-cooked meals with fresh ingredients. This food will be nutritionally far superior to anything you buy prepared.
2. Buy some greaseproof paper snack bags (plastic food coatings can be harmful to our children’s health), small reusable containers and fun stickers. Use them to create attractive packaging to keep your interest and help the environment at the same time.
3. Get the kids involved, they are much more likely to eat something they enjoyed making. Buy or make pizza, cut it into smaller pieces, and have the kids make their own mini pizzas to eat cold. Provide healthy toppings like mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, red and yellow bell peppers, snap peas, and mushrooms.
4. Make fruit fun. Shop for vitamin-packed strawberries, blueberries, kiwis, and grapes. Jelly them into baby food jars, skewer them on wooden skewers, or turn them into a delicious salad.
5. Kids love dippers but they’re full of rubbish. Make your own, with hummus jars, mackerel pate or cream cheese, prepare vegetable sticks such as carrot, cucumber, pepper, celery or use breadsticks and crackers. Pack some veggie sausages and a small pot of ketchup.
6. Cook pasta, noodles or rice for tea time and reserve some for a healthy salad containing tuna, chicken and fresh or cooked vegetables. Encourage children to feel grown up by trying new, more grown-up things.
7. Try alternatives to sandwiches to add variety. Kids love pita bags or rolled tortillas. Fill them with grated cheese and carrot, or avocado, tuna, a little chicken or baby spinach.
8. Pack a small salad box. Try cherry tomatoes, shredded carrots, baby spinach leaves, lettuce, cucumber sticks, lightly cooked baby corn and green beans, and sprinkle on sunflower and pumpkin seeds to boost the brain with essential fatty acids.
9. Encourage them to drink water or a bottle of fresh fruit juice, much healthier than pumpkin.
10. Buy as much local and organic food as possible. This food will be higher in important vitamins, minerals and enzymes. You can guarantee that organic food will not contain dangerous additives, pesticides or hydrogenated fats. Try visiting the organic section in your supermarket.
I can understand that you may think that this will be expensive and time consuming.
First, it is worth considering the cost of not improving our children’s diet and stalling for time; lack of concentration, bad behavior, skin problems, allergies, weight problems and associated emotional stress, adulthood plagued with health problems and possible heart disease, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, I could go on. Second, you might be surprised at how much money banning litter saves. Supermarkets like Tesco now have a wide range of organic produce at reasonable prices, and the local fruit and veg shop will offer local, in-season produce cheaper than the supermarket. Give it a try, fill the house with delicious healthy food, set an example and improve your diet, the whole family will feel better and be healthier.
Good luck!
