MARCH 2009

Early Eating Habits 

 

Culture, especially entertainment culture, is an incredibly powerful ‘influencer’ of nutrition trends and opinions. If your children watch Saturday morning cartoons, perhaps as when you were a child, sit and watch the cartoons and the commercials for an hour with them; better still, bring a pen and paper and list every healthy food and every unhealthy food commercial. The nutrition message delivered in almost every commercial break is an unsound one, although each breakfast cereal, waffle mix or breakfast sausage tries to masquerade as a wise food choice. Parental lifestyles also influence children’s eating habits. Eating on the run, grabbing a take-out meal at the last minute, or a skipped breakfast because you ‘just don’t have time’, all have an effect on how children perceive the value of taking the time to plan, prepare, and enjoy the meals and snacks that keep us living in optimum physical wellness.

If you don’t consistently make wise nutrition choices, chances are your children will make even worse choices, as clever marketing is passed for nutritional advice in mainstream media and a generation is left with few role models worth emulating. Some children like trying new foods...they are in the minority. Most children have a natural aversion to new foods, especially vegetables, especially broccoli, and especially, especially Brussels sprouts. And every Mom and Dad has a plan to entice their young reluctant ones to try, or continue to try, vegetables not to their liking with varying degrees of success. One idea that you might want to put in practice is to take your children grocery shopping with you, using the time in the store to teach your kids. Rather than simply telling them about how to shop with nutrition in mind, enlist their help. Teach them what to look for when they pick a head of broccoli, or a when they choose a small bag of Brussels sprouts. When it’s time to prepare the meal, enlist their help again in the washing (explaining to them why you wash the vegetables), cutting, and cooking of the vegetables they’ve carefully chosen, explaining what nutrients are in the vegetable and why the vegetable is important nutritionally. Let them have a few raw pieces to eat while you are talking and preparing. By including and teaching this way, most children will put aside their reluctance to try new vegetables. For those with young children, you’re probably thinking, “like I have time to do all that!” as you scramble to find enough time in each day as it is. Having been there, we know how you feel. We felt the same at the time. But looking back gives perspective, wisdom, and a wish for certain ‘do-overs’, only this time we would spend less time on things that, in hindsight, really don’t matter much at all, while focusing more time on the fleeting gift that is parenthood. When we are young children, we assume in all but the most extreme cases that the food choices of our parents are a proper and healthy way to eat and maintain a healthy lifestyle. When our parents make poor nutrition choices out of economic necessity or simply not knowing differently, then we grow into adulthood, have children of our own, and repeat the cycle of teaching our children by bad example. Breaking that chain will be a generational gift, teaching your children, and their children in turn, how to make wise nutrition choices that will serve them for life. Educating yourself and teaching your children the value of good food choices and supplements becomes the bolt cutter that breaks the chain, making it worth the effort searching and sifting the internet or the library for quality nutrition and wellness information. The articles and papers you will read in your research will be a basis upon which you can plan, write, and implement a family nutrition wellness program that, over the course of time, you and your family will refine, as the needs and goals and circumstances of each family member change. Learning any new skill is absorbed best while we are still young. By teaching our children healthy eating practices while they are in their formative years, they will grasp and quickly build on the knowledge that you give them. That wellness lifestyle, passed along to coming generations, may well be a most treasured family legacy many decades from now. For your sake in the ‘here and now’, and to set an example that can have a tremendous generational wellness impact, give it a go.

Sponsored by: http://fitnesstown.greenmaplewellness.net/new/articles/article.html?artid=1283