According to the April 2008 edition of NEWSWEEK, kid’s fitness experts have identified their six worst health habits.
If you want to keep your kids healthy and happy you are supposed to avoid Eating in front of a television or a computer. Both habits keep the kid too distracted and they do not figure out when their stomach is full. This can lead to mindless overeating.
Playing too many videogames and watching too much television can make your kid too fat. Way too many kids play hours and hours of videogames instead of getting outdoors to exercise. The problem is getting so bad that The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids under age 2 have no screen time at all. Kids older than two should watch no more than one to two hours of, and that kids older than 2 watch no more than 1 to 2 hours a day of TV. Kids that watch too much television tend to eat twice as much food. Part of this is their exposure to ads for junk food. The answer is to substitute television-watching time with more exercise.
Kids choose foods that they find visually attractive so when introducing new foods that may be more nutritious then that pink cocooned encrusted snowball you need to make it more attractive. You also shouldn’t force your kids to eating everything on their plate at once when introducing a nutritious food. There is something called the two bite rule where you give the child two bites and no more. This can make the child think about the food and request it next time.
You should also not keep too much junk in the cupboard. This is because older kids will raid the kitchen cupboards for food as soon as they come home from school. Fill the bottom drawers of your fridge with healthy foods like carrot sticks and keep the unhealthy stuff out of sight. You can also prepare cheese chunks; fruit slices or celery sticks and make them readily able for your child.
It is also a bad idea to get your kids used to prepackaged meals or frozen dinners. They are usually loaded with high levels of fat and sodium. The answer to this is to make a week’s worth of lunches and freeze them all a head of time. This will reduce the busy mom temptation to send something unhealthy to school with your children.
Another thing to remember is that you are your child’s main role model and they are going to eat in the same way you do. So if you are tearing open a bag of potato chips every time you watch television your kids are going to want to do the same.
I am a little disturbed by a bit of news I read on the Reuters site about the high protein chocolate spread called Nutella.
For years Nutella, which is a chocolate hazelnut spread has been sold as a source of high energy and protein. I have always trusted the product because I have been eating on toast and in sandwiches ever since I was a child. I also give it to my own kids on crackers as a high energy spread. It also goes well in hot or cold chocolate drinks. If you grew up in Europe and particularly if you were Dutch, you probably ate butter and Nutella sandwiches that were put in your lunchbox by your mother. Many mothers also mixed the Nutella with sprinkles to make the food even more attractive. Of course this is a rarer sight but Nutella with pink and blue sprinkles sandwiches were quite a common site in U.K. and European countries. It was okay for kids to eat this much sugar as the hazelnuts used to make the spread were so high in protein.
I have also put Nutella on pancakes because it melts so nicely and it goes really nicely with a bit of whipping cream and maple syrup and maybe even a bit of chestnut puree. I have often thought of making a cake with it and using the nutritious spread as icing. The cookies made with Nutella in the middle are quite famous and there are recipes for it all over the web. You can just buy a commercial pack of cookies and spread Nutella in the center to make a kind of Nutella Oreo if you want. Keep in mind that this is a special treat as Nutella is quite high in sugar!
As I have always been a fan of the stuff it was a bit disappointing to read that it was trying to oversell itself as a healthy food when everybody already knows it is not. A stories on “Reuters Life!” reported that it’s television commercial was pulled off the air for exaggerating its health benefits. This was done after over 50 parents complained about the way it was marketed as a healthy breakfast explaining that each jar of Nutella contains 52 hazelnuts, cocoa and the equivalent of a glass of skim milk. The commercial also claimed that Nutella releases energy slowy to the body.
It is the way that the energy is purportedly released by the food that raised the ire of so many viewers. This is because Nutella is equally high in fat and sugar and eating too much at once would not be very good for anyone. Although it is high in protein that it is a bit cancelled out by how high the food is in sugar.
The upshot was that the commercial got pulled off the televisions screens of the United Kingdom. The people who make Nutella, Ferrero UK also put out a statement that they did not mean to mislead anyone.
