Healthy Eating For Kids – 5 Tricks How To Make Your Children Eat Healthy Foods

Does your child refuse to eat vegetables? Or fruit? That’s a common problem in our time where children are offered chips and chocolates everywhere, and fast food is “cool”. Everyone eats it, so they also want it. Because unfortunately, all these unhealthy foods do taste very nice. If we are honest, we need to admit that we too love them.

But we know how important it is to eat healthy food in general, especially for children because they are still growing. And since we love our kids, we want to give them the best food possible, of course. For us health conscious parents it can at times be a challenge to ensure our children eat healthy, and to prevent sweets and burgers from driving the healthy foods out of our children’s diet and become their main food.

It is actually in the nature of children that they like to eat healthy foods. They just love fruit, yoghurt, milk and cereals. If they grow up mainly eating these, they won’t want to miss them, and then it’s much easier to make them eat healthy in general and having sweets or chips as treats.

But if they now are craving for everything we don’t want them to eat, and at the same time rejecting the healthy foods we serve them, we need to be clever. With some simple tricks, you can easily make your children eat healthy foods, and sometimes they won’t even notice.

Here are five tricks to make your kids eat those healthy foods:

1. Hide the vegetables in foods your child loves
2. Serve the healthy foods with foods your child loves to make them more attractive
3. Serve foods in a way your child likes
4. Make desserts, sweets and chips a bonus treat for eating the healthy food
5. Allow your kids to help preparing the meal

Trick #1: Hide the vegetables in foods your child loves

• Finely chop or even grate vegetables and mix them into minced meat before forming a meatloaf, meat balls or patties. Your kids won’t even notice that they are there. Especially mushrooms and aubergines can barely be seen because they take up a similar color like the meat when you cook them. Which child would reject a burger? Instead of denying it, simply make them a healthy one.
• You can also hide grated vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes or marrows in tomato sauce which kids usually love with pasta. Even carrot cake or muffins with grated carrots and apples in are a good way of serving healthy foods without your child noticing.
• If onions are a problem, grate them instead of chopping them and hide them in potato pancakes.
• If your child likes milk and yoghurt but rejects fresh fruit, puree the fruit in secret and mix it into the yoghurt. If your child asks, you can say it is fruit yoghurt you bought just like that. Or make a smoothie or milk shake. Maybe add some honey to make it sweeter and tastier.

Trick #2: Serve the healthy foods with foods your child loves to make them more attractive

• Serve her favorite ice cream with fruit or fruit puree.
• Mix fruit into the chocolate or vanilla cream that you have as a dessert.
• Serve a small portion of the vegetables that your child doesn’t like together with a larger portion of vegetables she eats and chips. Insist in eating it all, for example she can have a bit of the ones and then a bit of the others, or first eat the ones she doesn’t like and afterwards the nice ones. She then won’t be stuck with the taste of the rejected veggies. At the end of the meal, she’ll most likely think she just had nice food, and she’ll hopefully notice that it’s all not that bad.
• Have vegetable puree with pasta, or make chutney to serve with bread, chips or crackers.

Trick #3: Serve foods in a way your child likes
It’s possible that your child doesn’t have a general problem with a certain food itself but rather with its texture.

• If your child doesn’t want to eat tomatoes, try tomato sauce, canned tomatoes or tomato soup.
• If he doesn’t like a certain fruit, prepare jam or jelly of it and put it on his sandwich for breakfast or mix it in his yoghurt as a snack. Homemade jelly still contains plenty of nutrients because you extract the juice from the whole fruit, peels and core included. You can also make low-sugar or even no-sugar jams to protect your child’s teeth.
• Serve stewed or canned fruit instead of fresh fruit. Prefer buying canned fruit in fruit juice, not the ones in syrup, as the first ones don’t have sugar added.
• Make your child’s plate look interesting and irresistible. Cut the fruit or vegetables and arrange the pieces as a nice picture, maybe a funny face or an animal. Some butchers also sell special polony for kids in the shape of a funny face or a teddy bear.

Trick #4: Make desserts, sweets and chips a bonus treat for eating the healthy food
This strategy requires quite some determination from your side and it might well result in some tantrums, but it should be fairly effective after a while. Don’t ever give in! Eventually your child will give up if he notices that this is the only way to get the things he wants.

• If your child refuses a certain type of healthy food, tell him he will only get dessert once he has finished his lunch.
• Chips and sweets will only be given after having eaten the whole dinner.
• But make certain that you don’t overload your child’s plate, because in that case you might be punishing him for not overeating, and that would certainly be wrong and little helpful in establishing healthy eating habits.

Trick #5: Allow your kids to help preparing the meal
Children are usually much more willing to eat a meal that they have helped to prepare.

• Give your child any task he can perform, for example peeling the fruit, cutting vegetables, stirring the food. The more you can get him involved in the cooking process, the better.
• Allow your child to lay the table. Show him very clearly how much you appreciate this help, and give him the feeling this is a very important task.
• Let your child dish for him or maybe for all family members. Allow him to choose his own plate and to arrange the food according to his liking as long as he takes from everything. If your child can’t dish yet, ask him how you should dish for him. Let him show you what he wants to give him the feeling of being in control over the situation.

With these simple tricks, you can get your child to eventually eat at least some of the healthy foods. It’s a good idea to focus on one food at a time, and once your child accepts this food, then you can move on to the next one. Remember that your child has developed his eating habits over quite some time and will only gradually be able to change them.

When you are really desperate, it’s a good option to hide the foods your child refuses to eat in other meals. But it’s always better to rather make the unloved foods interesting by mixing them with foods that find your child’s favor. After all, you don’t want to be hiding carrots in muffins for the next fifteen years. Your goal is to get your child to eventually eat these foods without tricks and fights.

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• The Thing With Fat - Healthy And Unhealthy Fats

Helpful links

• KookyCulinary gives you plenty of healthy meal ideas for your child’s lunch box (watch it, the list is continuously growing)

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