To Eat, Or Not To Eat?

Do you have a kid who just won’t eat anything? Here are some tips and snacks to provide nutrition to those picky eaters.

By Mia Barnes

Promotional packaging and efficient marketing techniques make healthy eating for kids a bit complicated. Fruit chews featuring “Paw Patrol” will make your son scream for Chase’s gummies.

On the other hand, this can be an asset to provide more healthy snacks if used in the same context. Without promotion, good foods can be a battle for some little ones. Here are some effective ways to marry healthy and delicious. This way, you both win.

Value the Vegetable

Encouraging your children to eat their vegetables before they can have dessert has the potential to backfire. Making them eat veggies to get a reward takes the emphasis off the healthy food and causes it to lose value. In the future, kids might associate vegetables with something they have to do only to get something better.

This takes away from how good vegetables taste and how they benefit your health. Instead of forcing them to eat fruits and veggies, center your focus on teaching them how good these foods are for you and why, as well as how delicious they taste.

Encourage Snacks and Smiles

It’s common knowledge that too many sweets can lead to cavities, but most people don’t know that healthier foods promote better smiles. According to an article by Dr. Albert Song, a dentist at 172 NYC Dental, foods with high pH levels packed with nutrients lead to stronger and healthier teeth, while lower levels tend to make teeth appear dirty and pale.

Ensuring children eat higher pH foods that are unprocessed and uncooked will lead to brighter smiles by stimulating teeth and gums. Eating healthier is excellent for oral hygiene as well as overall health. Almonds, carrots, berries and pumpkin seeds are ideal choices. Try to incorporate these into your kids’ diets.

Try Realistic Recipes

You can try to promote healthy snacks all day, but if you don’t invest the time to make the snacks appealing, odds are your little ones will object. Making healthy foods seem fun and appetizing is over half of the battle. If your kid wants to eat healthily but doesn’t consume enough, figure out how to make them eat more or pack enough nutrients into smaller snacks.

Here are a few ideas to make food more fun for your littles.

PEANUT BUTTER AND BANANA QUESADILLA

This recipe is good for you and tastes great, too. You just need a wheat tortilla, half of a banana, 1 / 8 teaspoon of cinnamon and 2 tablespoons of peanut butter. After you spread the peanut butter on the tortilla, place banana slices on half of it. Sprinkle cinnamon over the bananas and then fold it in half, and you’re done. It’s as easy as that!

FROZEN FRUIT POPSICLES

Blend some of your favorite fruits or berries with juice. Pour the liquid mix into little paper cups or popsicle molds, and cover them with foil. You can insert popsicle sticks through the foil if you’d like. Freeze them overnight, and you’re golden! These are not filled with refined sugars and artificial dyes like the ones from the stores are, and they taste so much better.

ENERGY BALLS

Energy balls are a perfect example of packing a bunch of nutrients into a small snack. This recipe requires a little more effort since it has multiple ingredients, but it is well worth it. You will need 1 cup of oats, 1 / 3 cup of honey, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1/ 2 cup of dried fruit, 1 / 2 cup of flax seeds and 1 / 2 cup of

almond butter. Put all these ingredients into a large bowl and mix them up. Then, roll the mixture into balls and refrigerate them.

Enjoy Eating Healthy Snacks

You must teach your children how to enjoy eating well. So many nutritious, healthy foods like fruits and grains can be incorporated into sweet treats to instill that what is good for you can also taste delicious. Getting picky eaters to eat well is an uphill battle, but it is definitely worth the climb.

Mia Barnes

Mia is a health and wellness writer and the Editor In Chief at Body + Mind. She specifically enjoys writing about women’s fitness, as well as mental health-related topics. When she’s not writing, Mia can usually be found reading poetry, taking a dance or cardio class, or hiking.