As a mom and nutritionist, I completely relate to the challenges of feeding our little ones in the healthiest possible manner, given the constraints of a busy and demanding schedule, especially when you have a picky eater at hand. Here are what I call, the ‘Golden Rules’ to help improve & broaden your child’s diet by introducing healthy foods and teaching them the relationship between health & food in a fun way.

1. Set a good example

• Your child imitates everything you do. If you eat a variety of healthy foods, your child is more likely to follow suit. Your job is to offer nutritious food choices at meals and snack times.
• You decide the what, where, and when of eating.
• Your child’s job is to choose how much he or she will eat of the foods you serve. This will encourage your child to continue to trust his or her internal hunger gauge.

2. Respect Your Child’s Hunger

Young children tend to eat only when hungry, so don’t force feed. As growth slows its pace, kids tend to eat less.

3. Be Persistent in the Right Way

Most children need to try a new food 10-15 times before they develop a taste for it. So if your child has refused something once, does not mean that he will never eat it. Keep trying at different times.

4. Make Every Calorie Count

Offer your child foods that pack lots of nutrition into small doses like eggs, dates, prunes, nuts & dry fruits. Keep the empty calories like biscuits and cakes away.

5. Leave Taste Out Of It

Talk about the color, shape, aroma, & texture – not whether it tastes good.

Also Read: Have a Berry Nutty Christmas this year…..

6. Make it Accessible

You can designate a low shelf in the fridge or a small cupboard with you some of kids favorite (nutritious) foods and drinks.

7. Recruit Your Child’s Help

This is one of the best. You can get your kids help you select fruits and veggies in a store or with rinsing vegetables or stirring a cold batter or setting the table. Basically with anything that connects them to food in a better and fun way.

8. Minimize Distractions

Emphasize a strict no to TV, Ipad and any other distraction during meal and snack time. Emphasize on the relation between food & hunger, and food & health.

9. Share it

You can invite friends who ‘like to eat’ over for meal. Group feeding allows your child to learn from other children’s positive example.

10. How to make food fun for kids?

Call these finger foods playful names such as:

• apple moons (thinly sliced)
• banana wheels
• broccoli trees (steamed broccoli florets)
• carrot swords
• cheese building blocks
• Cucu   O’s (o-shaped cucumber slices)

Place the food on an easy-to-reach table.

Hope this helps. If you have any queries you can email me on umanutritionist@gmail.com or call me on +91 99676 35556

Snacks are not only fun treats, they’re an essential part of daily eating, as they provide nutrients which will help kids reach their full growth potential. Snacking can help kids keep their energy up, make up for skimpy or skipped breakfasts, and provide fuel before after-school sports or other activities.

Good snacks provide carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and some healthy fat. Generally speaking, foods rich in protein or fiber help kids stay fuller for longer, and they’re packed with the nutrients kids need to thrive.

It’s important to be a snack role model. What do your kids see you snacking on? As kids get older, they generally follow your lead, so choose your own snacks wisely. The easiest way to do this is to use the same guidelines for snack planning as for meal planning; feed your child the same types of foods you would at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, including low-fat dairy and other lean protein sources, such as eggs, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Think of snacks as mini meals.

There’s debate about how many calories a child’s snack should provide, but it makes sense to aim for about 100 calories for smaller children, to upwards of 300 calories for active teenagers. Let your child’s hunger rule what he or she eats.

Here are a few healthy snack ideas for your little ones:

1. Prunes & Dates mixture
2. Roasted Makhanas (Lotus Seeds), peanuts, cashew mixture
3. Boiled potato or Sweet potato chaat
4. Whole wheat flour pancakes
5. Cheese Dosa can be served with nutrition packed chutneys-: Walnut chutney, Amla Chutney

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6. Omelets with veggies/scrambled   eggs/sunny side up
7. Whole wheat wraps/Rolls /frankie with fillings like: Cottage cheese/cream cheese/grated cheese/chopped or mashed veggies
8. Paneer dhokla sandwich
9. Homemade Srikhand/fruit yogurt/smoothies
10. Carrot kheer /carrot halwa
11. Home made Walnut cake
12. Home made Milkshakes
13. Atta laddoos
14. Til Laddoos
15. Mix Fruit Chaat
16. Air Popped Popcorns
17. Peanut Chikki
18. 18. Besan / Moong dal Cheela

Being a Mother and a Nutritionist, how do you balance the two when it comes to your daughter?

My real practice as a Nutritionist started with the birth of my daughter. I soon discovered the truth behind the “Practice What you preach”.

I tell all my clients “You need to be a role model, if you want your kids to eat healthy you better be eating healthy too.”. My daughter readily followed what I practiced rather than what I asked her to do.

This was demonstrated in the following incident: My daughter had gone on an outing with a family friend. At lunchtime, my friend laid out the food and was surprised to hear the comment from my 3-year daughter “Aunty you have forgotten the Salad”. At our next meeting my friend mentioned “seeing your daughter enjoy the salad and veggies, my son started to eat veggies, which he earlier avoided.”

My daughter checks with me before eating any packaged food for it’s nutritional quality. I was taken a back on her conclusion in regards to some of the packaged food when she commented while seeing an advertisement, “Advertisements are for our money but the food they talk about is really not healthy”.

I am glad that my child has associated food not only with hunger but also with health.

This does not mean that she does not have temptation for eating junk food. I allow her to indulge in junk food once a week. On this day the mother in me wins over the nutritionist. 🙂

Can you share some tips with us to help parents develop healthy eating habits?

1. We should respect our child’s hunger.

A child will eat as per their hunger. If you remember when the child was born, he/she would only feed as much as required to fulfil their hunger. When a child grows up, he/she does not forget this instinct.

There may be days when a child doesn’t feel like eating much and other days eat more than normal. I tell all my clients please do not force-feed your child; it does not help as the meal times remain no longer happy times for the child. Let the child decide how much he wants to eat. It helps them in understanding the relation between food & hunger & refraining from overeating in later years.

2. Most of Children need to try new food up to 10-15 times before they develop taste for it.

This does not mean you need to force feed your child a particular food 10-15 times to develop liking for it. Give the child the food in different forms may as a vegetable, a soup or part of sandwich for 2-3 weeks for him/her to become familiar with the food.

3. Make each Calorie your Child consumes count.

Try and give your children nourishment packed foods such as nuts, eggs, dates or healthy finger foods, which he/she can grab & eat quickly. At young age the child’s focus is more on playing than eating so try and give them food they can eat quickly.

4. Offer Food to your child at the same time every day so that they develop a regular eating habit.

This is important to get the child to have regular meal pattern. Keep the kitchen closed at other hours so that he/she understands that they will get food only at the times it is offered.

5. Recruit Nutrition Hand.

Take your little ones along with you to pick up vegetables and fruits and allow them to choose. Also involve them in the cooking process such as rinsing the veggies or stirring the batter. This will give them a sense of ownership and will ensure that they will try these veggies since they chose it.

6. Limit liquid foods such as juices & milk before meal.

This will ensure that the children are hungry enough to eat the main meal served to them whole heartedly.

7. Avoid distractions such as TV & IPADs while eating meal.

There is increasing trend among parents wherein child’s favourite show or movie is switched at the mealtime with the belief that he/she will eat complete meal without any fuss. Focusing on the food while eating plays an important role in understanding the relation between food & hunger.

Instead of distracting the child by external means such as TV, try and make the food more interesting by talking about different shapes and colours such as apple moons, broccoli trees, banana wheels, cucu Os, carrot swords etc. The mealtime should be an interesting time for the child rather than a chore.

What are common beliefs that parents carry about healthy food & healthy eating?

Juices are healthy.

Sugar content is very high in a juice. When we give a fruit to a child, a child can’t eat more than one fruit for example he won’t have more than one orange at a time. However when it comes to juices, we need to squeeze at least 4-5 fruits to get a glass of juice so the sugar content in juice is higher and seeing the rise in obesity in kids we should try and avoid juices.

Juices are not a good choice on a daily basis. Freshly pressed juice can be given to your child once in a while but avoid package juices unless it’s during a travel when it’s not possible to carry fresh fruit juice. But we should by and large stick to whole fruit, because during the process of juicing there is a nutrient loss, as the fibre is strained and vitamins get destroyed. We should concentrate more on developing the habit of eating a fruit.

Breakfast Cereals & Brown Breads are healthy.

Cereals aren’t healthy, I suggest parents to read the nutrient label printed on the package rather than buying it based on the bold marketing buzz words like ‘Protein Rich’ or ‘Calcium Rich’, they should actually see what is there on the nutrition label on the back of the package. That is where the reality lies. For example, A very popular kids cereal brand has mentioned all the carbohydrates, proteins and fat details when the cereal is consumed with milk. However if you remove the milk then there is only Sugar in that product. So that’s how company trick us to assume it’s a healthy cereal.

Same applies to brown bread, which many mothers assume is whole wheat bread – but in reality if you check the label the first ingredient will be wheat flour which is nothing but maida. Mothers should always check if Whole Wheat flour is mentioned as the first ingredient followed by other ingredients. As per the processed food standards the Ingredients are printed based on their quantity, so if whole wheat flour is the first ingredient that means the percentage of this flour is maximum %, and if maida or Wheat Flour or Refined Wheat Flour is mentioned first that means then Maida is present in highest proportion if that’s the case then the bread can’t be healthy.

Kids can eat anything.

Homemade Ghee/Butter is healthy, cheese is good source of protein & calcium. However this does not mean you can feed your child with the same in any quantity. If the child is on a higher side of the scale then feeding the child with more fat will result in obesity but if a kid is underweight or in the normal weight category then you can top their food with homemade ghee, butter or cheese in controlled portions. It all depends upon the weight parameter of the kid.

Do you see health issues in kids, which were earlier found mostly in adults?

There is an increase in hyperactivity in young children and increased occurrence of PCOD in teenage girls. Also, obesity is now quite common in kids, which earlier, was rare. I believe that increased consumption of packaged foods have a big role to play in this. Packaged food usually contains artificial colors, flavours, preservatives and chemicals. Parents are not aware of the connection between these health issues and increased consumption of packaged food.

Parents are mostly concerned about their kids not eating enough if they are underweight and if overweight then they are lost as to what is causing the weight gain. They don’t know the how to control the overeating. Parents need to realise that they are responsible for wrong eating habits of their children.

Easy availability, variety & strong marketing of packaged food as the best product for your child, has increased the consumption of packaged foods.

If you go through food consumed by large number of urban families, mornings start with cereals & bread, short break box is packaged food, either a cake or biscuits and the evening snack is biscuits with milk. Chocolates and aerated drinks are always there at home. If we control our purchase of packaged food then consumption can be reduced.

A Recipe from Nutritionist Uma Narula you can try with your kids.