It almost goes without saying that parents want their kids to eat healthy. Getting healthy foods into your kids, however, is a whole different story. Unfortunately, supermarket shelves are loaded with foods laden with sugar and artificial ingredients that make foods more tasty and palatable for children. Add in the advertising marketing those foods and parents can be facing an uphill battle. There are, however, a number of ways to get your kids to actually be willing participants in eating healthy. Here are 5 ways to get your children to enjoy healthy food.
Hide the Vegetables
From blending up broccoli to put in spaghetti sauce to grinding up cauliflower to put in meatloaf, there are dozens of ways to pack extra nutrition into almost every type of food. Sometimes the reluctance to eat healthy is more mental. Pulling a shade over the healthy options is a great way to have your child forget about the fact that they’re eating healthy options.
Make Food Fun
Most parents have grown up with the idea that food is for eating, not for playing with. If you really want to get your kids interested in eating healthy foods, however, let them have some fun making their own snacks.
Grow Your Own
There may be nothing that will make kids more interested in healthy food than if they grow it themselves. If you have the time, space and energy to help them plant a full garden, then getting them to eat the results is generally a breeze. Even apartment dwellers or those with little time can still help their kids grow a wide variety of herbs and vegetables.
A Little Sugar Won’t Hurt
You don’t need to shovel on the same amount of sugar that most processed kid’s foods do to make them more palatable. Just sprinkling a bit of brown sugar over carrots or on top of a half a grapefruit can make even the healthiest foods more palatable to kids without significantly damaging their nutritional content.
Aim for the 80/20 Rule
It’s unlikely you are going to get your kids to eat 100% healthy all the time, nor should you want to. Candy and junk food on occasion is often inevitable, and that’s okay; especially during special events or parties. Aim for 80% healthy food at home or getting them to eat healthy 80% of the time and let the other 20% go.