Healthy nutrition is a concern of every parent -- is your child eating enough, and enough of the right things? How do you know what to avoid and what to include? Ensuring your child is eating healthy and understands how to make healthy eating choices is key to achieving a healthy lifestyle. It's easy to learn the answers to these questions and to encourage your children to participate in choosing healthy nutrition on a daily basis.
Understanding the correct mix of foods is an important part of healthy nutrition. MyPyramid is a free, interactive site for parents and children that provides information on how to integrate all of the food groups to create balanced meals. From a custom meal planner to posters and activities for kids, this site is an excellent resource for understanding how to incorporate the food pyramid concept into your daily life. Additionally, visit MyFood-a-pedia to see how your current favorite foods stack up. Enter a food name and MyFood-a-pedia will tell you where the food falls within the pyramid, approximate calories, and how much of your daily recommendation this food meets (or exceeds). You can also compare foods to ensure you are making the healthiest choice.
Nourish Interactive is another fun, free resource for parents and children. This site uses games (appropriate for children who are in kindergarten through fifth grade) to teach healthy nutrition. Parents have access to various tools such as a Meal Nutrition Tool which tells you how much food your child should eat from each group, Healthy Nutrition Agreement Sheets to encourage active participation in making healthy food and lifestyle choices for everyone in your household, and an e-newsletter to which you can subscribe to keep up with ideas on incorporating healthy nutrition into your family's daily life.
If you struggle with picky eaters and need to find creative ways to incorporate fruits and vegetables into your family's diet, visit Eating Well, a site that provides tips on how to transform family favorites such as spaghetti and meatballs into tasty, healthier choices. Jessica Seinfeld has written two cookbooks: Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food and Double Delicious!: Good, Simple Food for Busy Complicated Lives. In Deceptively Delicious, Seinfeld takes recipes that appeal to children and "deceptively" adds in fruits and vegetables (for example, pureed cauliflower in mac and cheese). Double Delicious continues in the tradition of Deceptively Delicious while providing meal ideas that can be prepared in 30-minutes or less.
As you begin your journey to create and maintain healthy nutrition for your family, consider two handbooks that are free to download and can serve as great references: We Can! Ways to Enhance Children Activity and Nutrition (provided by the National Institute of Health) and A Parent's Guide to Healthy Eating and Physical Activity (provided by Healthy Children Healthy Futures).
Deciding to adopt healthy nutrition in your household will provide your children with a foundation of healthy living that will last a lifetime.