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How to Develop and Promote Healthy Eating Habits in Your Children

By Chloe Waters

Develop healthy eating habits in your children from infancy. There are many things you can do to accomplish this feat.

Breast feed your child for as long as possible. If you work, pump and store. Mix infant cereal with your own milk instead of formula. Breast milk is natural and contains thousands of vitamins that formula cannot match. This will help your child develop a taste for natural foods.

Make your own baby food. Grate apples, or make applesauce (with little or no sugar). Blend a few fruits and spoon feed it to them once a day. Cook chicken soup with whatever combination of fresh vegetables you have, broccoli, carrots, potatoes or celery. Then blend it. When introducing dairy into your child’s diet, do not give them “baby yogurts.” These are loaded with sugar and artificial flavors! Give them plain yogurt and add your own fruit.

If you did not breastfeed or make baby food when your child was an infant and he/she refuses to eat fruits and vegetables, it is not too late to promote healthy eating. Cut junk food out of your house cold turkey. No cookies, cakes, sodas, chips or even fruit juice. Fruit juice, although better than soda, is all sugar. The child is better off to eat the fruit whole to get the fiber.

When you go to the supermarket, never go into the middle aisles. Shop on the outskirts, where products are fresh and healthy. Here you find fruits and vegetables, dairy, bread, meat, chicken and fish (though I buy meat and chicken that was not previously frozen from the butcher). The inner aisles of supermarkets are usually where the junk lies. This is a no think formula for how to buy food in a healthy manner.

Do not become fanatic and deprive children of sweets. Give them treats in moderation. Bake cookies or pie fresh so you can control the amount of sugar that goes into it. Substitute whole wheat flour for white whenever possible.

Since vegetables are not as sweet as fruits, sometimes children, even the breast fed and no baby food ones, are not as likely to eat them. There are loads of creative ways to cook vegetables deliciously! Here is a fabulous recipe for broccoli. Steam one bunch of broccoli. Sauté three chopped garlic cloves with the zest and juice of one lemon or lime in a generous amount of olive oil or butter until the garlic is soft. Be careful not to burn the garlic, or it will become bitter instead of sweet. Add the steamed broccoli and toss. This makes the broccoli so lemony and garlicky that your child will eat a bowl full, guaranteed!

Breastfeed, make your own baby food, do not buy junk and find delicious recipes for cooking vegetables to ensure that your infants grow into broccoli preferring toddlers.