Help your children eat healthier!

Every time we watch the news or read the newspaper, we are bombarded with warnings about obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.  Naturally, we assume that these are adult diseases and do not apply these warnings to the way our children eat or behave.  However, doctors are seeing an explosion in the number of overweight and obese children and a huge increase in the number of childhood cases of Type II diabetes and early high cholesterol.  This problem can be directly attributed to an increasingly poor American diet and a horrendous lack of physical exercise for most children.  By improving your child’s diet and maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle, you will significantly reduce their risks of these and other diseases.

Children naturally favor foods high in fat and calories.  The most common foods listed as ‘favorites’ by children are all laden with fat and calories including: Pizza, cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, and French fries.  These foods all have fat content that approaches 50% and total fat can approach three times the total recommended daily allowance for children.  These foods are fine every once in a while, but if they make up most of your child’s diet, they will struggle to maintain a healthy weight.  To start, cut down on fast food and restaurant food.  Fast foods are also loaded with fat and calories and have generally poor nutritional value.  These foods should be consumed less than once a week.  Cut back on other high fat/calorie foods such as salad dressing, mayonnaise, potato chips, ice cream, cookies and butter.

Second, cut back on portion sizes.  These days we judge restaurants not only by taste, but also by hugeness of portion sizes and children will be eating more than a similar meal at home.  Children should also try to eat a balanced diet with some protein with almost every meal.  We should eat foods with healthy protein levels like beef, pork, chicken, fish, beans or soy products.  For instance, try eating broiled chicken, broccoli and brown rice with each of these foods being about the size of the child’s palm or closed fist.  Seconds and thirds should be of fruits and veggies first and remind children to stop when hungry and NEVER force a child to finish everything if they are no longer hungry.  For picky eaters, try having them sample everything with two bites instead of forcing them to finish each food.

Many children also lack an appropriate amount of foods that contain Vitamin D and calcium.  Our skin, with sun exposure, produces Vitamin D daily, but dietary intake is necessary to meet our needs completely.  Children can make sure they get the right amount of these vitamins and minerals by getting 3-4 servings daily of low-fat dairy products.  These include skim or 2% milk, yogurt, cottage cheese or low fat cheese.  Ice cream is a poor calcium source and is high in fat and calories so should not be used regularly for these nutrients.  If your child is lactose intolerant try adding an enzyme supplement like Lactaid to dairy intake or try soy products.  Children who can’t or won’t eat dairy products should take a calcium supplement twice daily that also contains Vitamin D.

Lastly, get your child more active.  Most children today are far less active than even 20 years ago.  We used to be able to rely on walking around our neighborhood and gym class to supply at least some calorie burning, but with school cutbacks and urban sprawl most children don’t even have that minimum amount of activity.  To encourage more activity, limit the use of TV, video games and computers to one hour each weekday and two hours each weekend day.  These activities not only lack calorie burning potential, but kids tend to eat junk foods while doing them as well.  Get you children outside (with proper sun protection of course) as much as possible.  Get them involved with recreational or organized team sports whenever possible.