Published by Tara Muir-Miles

 

Keywords: Picky Eaters, Fruit and Vegetable Intake, Healthy Eating, Healthy Snacks, Healthy Eating Habits, Tips to get Kids to Eat more Fruits and Vegetables, Strategies to get Kids to Eat Healthy

 

(Realinemedia, n.d)

Alright, it’s time for dinner! We’re having hamburgers, hotdogs, baked potatoes, and salad! Unfortunately, as soon as a salad is mentioned, there are a bunch of moans and groans. If this is what happens when you serve fruits and vegetables, keep reading!

If you are like most parents, it can be a real struggle to get your kids to eat healthy foods. Often times parents have to fight, coax, and bribe their kids to eat their fruits and vegetables but there are lots of tips and strategies to get these good for you foods into those young vitamin hungry bodies.

 

10 Strategies to Get Kids to eat More Fruits and Veggies

1.  Offer new foods more than once. Resisting new foods and tastes is part of normal development and it may take 8 to10 of these offers before accepted.
2. Be a role model.The childhood impulse to imitate is strong so don’t ask your child to eat vegetables while you gorge on potato chips.
3. Limit access to unhealthy sweets and salty snacks. It’s much easier to convince your child that an apple with peanut butter is a treat if there are no cookies in your house.
4. Let your kids pick the produce.It can be fun for kids to see all the different kinds of fruits and veggies available and to pick out new ones or old favorites to try. It is also a good time to talk with your kids as to why fruits and veggies are different colors and why it’s good for them to “Eat the Rainbow!”
5. Visit a local farm so kids can have fun and see where there food comes from. You could even create your own garden and if you are tight on space try growing vegetables in containers. Kids love to see food grow and it will likely pique their curiosity about how it tastes!
6. Make it fun! Cut the food into unusual shapes or create a food collage. Cut broccoli florets for trees, cauliflower for clouds, and yellow squash for a sun.

 

(Taste of Home, n.d)

 

7. Have your child help prepare meals—they’ll be more willing to eat something they helped to make.

8. Keep lots of fresh fruit and veggie snacks on hand.Make sure they’re already washed, cut, and ready to go. Add yogurt, nut butter, or hummus for extra protein.

9. Sneak them in! Add grated or shredded veggies to stews and sauces to make them blend in. Make cauliflower “mac” and cheese. Or bake some zucchini bread or carrot  muffins. Add vegetables to a beef stew or mash carrots up in with mashed potatoes, or add a sweet dip to slices of apple.

10. Limit sugary beverages and snacks to avoid filling up between mealtimes.

 

Some tips are straight forward, like having them help you prepare meals, which often makes them want to try it. Think veggie pizza! Others are a little sneakier like slipping spinach into their smoothies without them knowing about it.  What they don’t know won’t hurt them (and it will actually help them.)

Are you ready to stop struggling to get your kids interested in eating more fruits and veggies? Well, follow the strategies listed and you will be on your way to help your child eat the recommend daily allowance (RDA). The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) created MyPlate, which helps parents figure out how many serving of fruits and vegetables their children should be eating on a daily basis. Go to MyPlate for more information along with some additional useful tips.

By the way, my tips and strategies are coming from a person who did not eat a vegetable, without being forced, until the age of 21! I’m telling you this so that you will not be worried and realize that you do have the ability to change your child’s eating habits, just hopefully before they are 21! Since my early 20’s, I have experimented with being a vegetarian, a vegan, a pescatarian, carbs, no carbs, and then I just started to eat a well-balanced heathy diet and pursued my passion and became a nutrition educator.

We all know that eating fruits and vegetables is important but do you know why eating a variety of fruits and vegetables is important?  Have you ever heard the phrase “Eat the Rainbow”?  Did you know that the color of fruits and vegetables depends on the types of vitamins and mineral that they are made up of? “Eat the Rainbow “is a just a simple way to remind people to eat different colored fruits and veggies in order to get a variety of vitamins and minerals that our  bodies need in order to be healthy. Fruits and vegetables are also important because they take the place of other unhealthy competitive foods.  Competitive foods are those that are high in calories and low in nutritional value, and they have been linked to increased obesity rates in our kids (Long, Luedicke, Dorsey, Fiore, & Henderson, 2013). Because of unhealthy eating habits, we are experiencing an explosion in youth obesity rates with nearly one in five children in the U.S being obese (Brown, 2017).  Obesity not only interferes with our kid’s confidence but it can also negatively affect their health now and in their future. To avoid these potential health issues, children and adolescents must develop healthy eating behaviors when they are young.

Parents! Are you interested in having your children excel in academics and sports? Make sure they “Eat the Rainbow”!

 

(Alexander Schimmeck, n.d)

• Students who are lacking important nutrients such as vitamins A, B6, B12, C and calcium, have been shown to have increased absenteeism, lower grades, and increased tardiness (CDC, 2014).
• Students who eat nutrient rich foods have higher academic success (Lewallen, Hunt, Potts-Datema, Zaza, Giles, 2015).

References:

Brown, J.E. (2017) Nutrition through the lifecycle (6^th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, Inc.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2014). Health and academic achievement. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/health_and_academics/pdf/health-academic-achievement.pdf.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2019, June). Childhood obesity facts.  Prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States.  Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

Lewallen, T.C., Hunt, H., Potts-Datema, W., Zaza, S., Giles, W. (2015). The whole school, whole community, whole child model: A new approach for improving educational attainment and healthy development for students. Journal of School Health, 85, 729-739.

Long, M. W., Luedicke, J., Dorsey, M., Fiore, S.S., & Henderson, K. E. (2013). Impact of Connecticut legislation incentivizing elimination of unhealthy competitive foods on national school lunch program participation.  American Journal of Public Health, 103(7), E59-E66. Retrieved from http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/docview/1399924009?accountid=8285