Emotional Hunger: Prevent and Stop Emotional Eating

Posted on July 7, 2015 by SoarAway

Emotional Hunger: Prevent and Stop Emotional Eating

Earlier this week, I posted about emotional hunger. Emotional hunger is when we feel hungry because of our emotions, not because we physically need to eat. This behavior shows up even in very young toddlers. What can we as parents do to prevent it from developing, intervene when it strikes, and prevent it from happening once it has developed? Below are some of my top ways to deal with emotional hunger in kids.

How Parents Can Stop Emotional Eating from Developing

As parents, we cannot control our kids. They are independent human beings with their own minds, wills, and desires. However, we do have an enormous amount of influence on them, much of which they (and us) are not even aware of. Kids’ relationships with food are often strongly influenced by our behaviors as parents.

One thing that has been observed repeatedly in many studies is that parents who use food to soothe their young children when they are experiencing negative emotions will raise children who experience significantly more emotional eating.* Let me put this another way: If you use food to soothe your unhappy child, you are teaching your child to eat when they are unhappy.

As a parent, I know how distressing it is to see your child unhappy. Not only do you not like seeing your precious baby upset, but it can also be embarrassing, frustrating, or annoying to you as a parent. Trust me, even my little angels have thrown tantrums in the grocery store or dissolved into tears because they want something (usually a trip on an airplane, helicopter, boat, or train) that I just cannot possibly provide them with.

I have seen on so many occasions that parents will break down under such circumstances and distract their child with food. Heck, even I have done it on occasion (but with dried fruit, not chocolate, as the proffered treat). I think all parents do this every once in a while. But when this method of dealing with unhappy children becomes the norm rather than a once off rarity, you are teaching your child to soothe with food. You are educating your child that if they are unhappy, eating will make them feel better. And as a result, they are more likely to become obese.

How to Deal With Emotional Hunger

Helping your child recognize emotional hunger is only half of the battle. Once they understand that their hunger is emotionally motivated rather than physically driven, what should they do? The first thing you must make clear to kids is that the food is not going to solve their problems. Ultimately, it is not going to improve their emotional situation.

Tell them to wait

That said, do not forbid kids to eat when their emotions are in turmoil. Children, like adults, always want what they cannot have. You certainly cannot expect a child to have more self-control than an adult, and few adults can withstand emotional cravings. Instead, suggest to your child that if they are in an unhappy mood and that is making them want to eat, that they defer it for five minutes. Children are often mercurial and in five minutes their emotional state could change completely. Alternatively, they may find another, more constructive, way of self-soothing, or they might simply forget that they wanted to eat. Because emotional hunger is not physical, it is not enduring in the same way physical hunger is.

Give kids a toolkit

Another way to break the emotional eating habit is to give kids a set of tools to work with. Kids have to learn how to self-soothe and need to be taught how to appropriately handle emotions. Some emotions are uncomfortable and we do not like them. Sadness, anxiety, or loneliness are not good feelings, but they are instructive. They help teach us what we need and also help us learn to avoid potentially dangerous or counterproductive situations. Explaining to kids the positive side of bad emotions can be a good way to start. Then they can view uncomfortable emotions as their friends rather than enemies to be avoided or ignored at all costs.

Sadness: Help children come up with a list of activities that make them happy. This could be anything from kicking a ball to finger painting to reading a book. Certain activities like physical activity or singing actually release endorphins that make kids physically feel happy – and they’re healthy, too.

Loneliness: Most children experience loneliness at some point. Maybe they’re alone in their room while mom takes a nap, or perhaps they just don’t have any friends who can come over to play. Kids can also feel lonely in a crowd, especially if they are in a group of which they are not a part (such as a new school), or if they are missing a specific person (like a special friend or grandparent). Suggest that kids who are lonely call a good friend or trusted adult, play with a pet, or connect with someone they care about by looking at photos or writing a letter/drawing a picture to send that person.

Anxiety: Even kids have things they worry about. Whether it is schoolwork they don’t feel good at or a friend they’ve bickered with, kids have their own “kid-sized” set of concerns. Never ever downplay your child’s cares!!! Each of us has our own set of problems that are important to us, regardless of anything else that may be going on in the world. Do not invalidate your child’s worries. It is amazing how soothing it can be for a worried child when a parent validates their concerns. Ask what is bothering your child, listen to your their answer, and repeat it back, along with words of understanding. (E.g., “I hear that you are nervous because you have a big math test tomorrow. I know how that feels – it can be pretty scary.”) Sometimes kids are anxious without knowing why or you are not around to talk it through with them. In those cases, encourage your kids to burn off nervous energy by doing something physical, such as dancing to a favorite song or running a few laps around the playground or schoolyard.

Tiredness: Feeling tired, exhausted, or run down can be the result of too little sleep, broken sleep, or too much activity or stimulation. Like adults, when kids get tired they can also become cranky and might be tempted to reach for their favorite junk foods. Tired kids should be encouraged to rest as much as the situation allows. If they are home and it’s not too early they can simply go to bed a bit earlier than usual. If it is too early for them to go to sleep, they can lie in the bed or on the couch and “veg out” by reading a book or watching a show (reading a book is better, though, as screens stimulate the brain and can make it harder to get a good night’s sleep). To calm cravings for food, give kids a warm drink, such as a warm cup of milk (we prefer homemade rice milk). If you want to avoid extra calories, offer kids a warm cup of herbal infusion (some herbs and flowers can even be calming and aid in peaceful sleep – I use linden flower, which has a soft and neutral flavor). Don’t want to give kids drinks before bed? Use water in a different way: Give your kids a soothing bubble bath.

Boredom: Kids can get bored no matter how many toys you buy them. To avoid boredom, try rotating toys. We keep each set of similar toys in a box and no more than one or two boxes are out at any time. If our kids get bored, they don’t turn to food – instead, they trade in an existing box for a new box full of toys they haven’t recently played with. Try also making a list with your kids of projects, games, or activities they’d like to try some time when they are bored. There are an endless amount of kids activity and craft idea books out there to help you come up with ideas. Photocopy or scrapbook pages with activity or craft ideas into a “boredom book” your child can pull out when they get bored, rather than reaching for snacks.

Hopefully with a toolkit like this in hand, you will find it easier to determine both what your child’s emotional hunger triggers are and what you can do to fix them – without food.

Preventing and Countering Emotional Hunger

One of the best ways to deal with emotional hunger is to prevent it from arising. As discussed above, as parents we can do certain things that discourage emotional eating habits from developing, but what do we do if our kids already show signs of emotional eating? And what do we do if they develop the habit regardless of the way we raised them? Everyone knows that no matter how good a parent you are, you can do everything right and still your child might do something different! So how can we help our kids to counter emotional hunger in the first place?

The key to stopping emotional hunger from arising in our kids is to set them up for success. There are four aspects of your child’s daily routine that can go a long way to preventing emotional hunger from developing:

Sleep. Ensure your child gets enough sleep every night. Tiredness and lack of sufficient sleep make it difficult for kids to process their emotions. I know what it is like to have bedtime struggles, so the only advice I have is to set up a bedtime routine that gets your kids to sleep with enough hours left before school for them to get the rest they need.
Exercise. Too many kids today spend a lot of their day either cooped up at school desks or in front of screens – or both. Physical activity and movement are scientifically proven to boost mood, so making physical activities and sports a regular part of your child’s routine will also help improve their overall mood.
Connection. Kids need to connect with others. Social interaction not only teaches good social skills but it also improves kids’ “emotional quotient” by teaching them how to handle their own (and others’) moods. Close bonds and positive relationships also give a boost to kids’ sense of wellbeing and self esteem.
Relaxation. These days there is an enormous amount of pressure to fill kids’ every waking moment with activities and stimulation. I know some kids who are on the go from 7 AM to 10 PM, every day. This is an overwhelming schedule even for an adult! Parents do this thinking they are doing the right thing for their kids, by entertaining them without pause. But all that stimulation can produce stress and kids need a time out sometimes to cool down and relax. Institute some sort of quiet time in your child’s day. It may be a nap or it could simply be a peaceful half hour in their day. Older children can read a book or listen to a book on tape. If you have the time, reading a book to the family is a great quiet-time bonding opportunity all can enjoy.

Conclusion

Emotional hunger can plague anyone, from very young toddlers through to the elderly. Eating just because we want to assuage our emotions can lead to overeating, unhealthy eating, and weight gain. Unfortunately, kids can establish these habits and patterns very young. Using the tips and advice in this post can help you learn what to do: A) as a parent, in order to prevent habits from developing; B) to help your child avoid eating for emotional reasons; and C) to prevent emotional hunger from arising by changing your child’s daily routines. With these tips in hand, we can start to say goodbye to emotional hunger!

*Farrow C, Haycraft E, Blissett J. Teaching our children when to eat: how parental feeding practices inform the development of emotional eating—a longitudinal experimental design Am J Clin Nutr May 2015 vol. 101 no. 5 908-913

Emotional Hunger: What Is It?

Posted on July 4, 2015 by SoarAway

Emotional Hunger: What Is It?

Earlier this week, I posted about using mindfulness as a tool to teach kids how to take control of their eating habits. One of the most critical things kids (and all of us) can learn from being more mindful when we eat is to be aware of our hunger. Some hunger comes because our bodies need fuel, but not all of it. Some hunger is instead emotional hunger.

What is Emotional Hunger?

Emotional hunger is the hunger we feel when we are experiencing a certain mood or situation. The emotional triggers are different for each person. I know a lot of people who eat nonstop when they are stressed. I, on the other hand, cannot even think about food when I’m stressed. But stress and anxiety are not the only triggers that make people suddenly want to eat. Some people eat when they’re happy or when they’re sad. Some people eat when they’re in a relaxed mood, others when they are under pressure.

Often we eat simply because we are reminded of a food. No matter what our mood is, we start to salivate when we walk past a chocolate or pizza shop. Just smelling food can make our bodies respond as if we are about to eat. Not only smells, but memories or reminders can also spur us to eat. Thinking fondly of a family member who has just called can bring to mind memories about shared meals. Remembering with pride a certain achievement can also recall the foods we used to celebrate it.

Being in a situation similar to one we’ve experienced many times can also trigger us to want certain foods. I know a lot of people who insist on having chicken soup the moment they come down with a cold, whether they are hungry or not. When my stomach is upset, I reach for dry crackers and ginger ale, even if I really don’t want to consume anything.

All of these moods and memories that spark our interest in eating are forms of emotional hunger. We are hungry not because we need to eat but because something else internal to our mind has made us think we need to eat. Emotional hunger is hunger driven by our emotions and our psychological needs rather than our physical needs.

Kids Also Experience Emotional Hunger

As adults, we may be tempted to think of emotional hunger as an adult experience. Kids, who surely have less emotional baggage to carry around, should not be so susceptible, right? Right? Wrong. In fact, there is an entire emotional eating scale adapted specifically for children and adolescents!*

Emotional Hunger Begins Young

It makes perfect sense that even very young children should associate food with soothing emotions. Beginning at birth, babies are offered food as a soothing mechanism and feeding times are often an opportunity for intense parent-baby bonding. Food is immediately associated with being a way to improve mood and overall feeling. Having had two babies of my own, I can freely admit to many times having offered the breast to my babies to stop them from crying and to soothe their distress – even when I knew they weren’t hungry.

Actively eating as a result of emotional hunger can be observed in children as young as 2 years old.** It has also been extensively tested in preschool children*** as well as in adolescents.**** There is no doubt that children use food to stimulate or still their emotional states just as adults do.

The Dangers of Emotional Eating and Emotional Hunger

The main danger of emotional eating and emotional hunger in children is that it is clearly associated with obesity. Emotional eating leads to a greater body mass index (BMI) and a less healthy diet, which results in less healthy kids.*** If we want to inspire healthy kids, we need to deal with emotional hunger in a constructive way.

How to Identify Emotional Hunger

If your child(ren) is/are already displaying emotional eating habits, it is time to teach them how to identify emotional hunger and to separate it from physical hunger. Mindfulness techniques can really help. Mindfulness encourages children to assess their emotional state prior to eating. However, there are some key identifiers that make it easier for a child to answer whether they are experiencing emotional or physical hunger. Use these lists as your guide, from Doris Wild Helmering and Dianne Hales Think Thin, Be Thin (New York: Broadway Books, 2004): 77 and Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (Australia: Hay House, 2010): 153.

Physical Hunger

Builds gradually
Strikes below the neck (e.g., growling stomach)
Occurs several hours after a meal
Goes away when full
Eating leads to feeling of satisfaction

Emotional Hunger

Develops suddenly
Above the neck (e.g., a “taste” for ice cream)
Unrelated to time
Persists despite fullness
Eating leads to guilt and shame

Conclusion

*Tanofsky-Kraff, M., Theim, K. R., Yanovski, S. Z., Bassett, A. M., Burns, N. P., Ranzenhofer, L. M., Glasofer, D. R. and Yanovski, J. A. (2007), Validation of the emotional eating scale adapted for use in children and adolescents (EES-C). Int. J. Eat. Disord., 40: 232–240. doi: 10.1002/eat.20362

**Farrow C, Blissett J, Stability and continuity of parentally reported feeding practices and child eating behaviours from 2-5 years of age. Appetite 2012;58:151–6.

***Blissett J, Haycraft E, Farrow C. Inducing preschool children’s emotional eating: relations with parental feeding practices. Am J Clin Nutr 2010;92:359–65.

****Braet C, Van Strien T. Assessment of emotional, externally induced and restrained eating behaviour in nine to twelve-year-old obese and non-obese children. Behav Res Ther 1997;35:863–73.

Diabetes: How Kids Can Eat Healthy

Posted on April 14, 2015 by SoarAway

Diabetes: How Kids Can Eat Healthy

My brother has diabetes. He developed it when he was just 7 years old, so it dominated his childhood and my teenage years. It had major impacts on our family. For families with a diabetic child, it can cause major changes in the family diet. Here are some ways to eat healthy with diabetes:

Types of Diabetes

There are two types of diabetes. Type 1 diabetes (which used to be known as juvenile onset diabetes) is when the pancreas simply stops producing insulin. There is no cure for Type 1 diabetes and diabetics with this form of the disease have to take insulin injections for the rest of their lives (or until a cure is found). Diet and insulin injections are the best way to manage Type 1 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes used to be known as adult onset diabetes because it is strongly associated with obesity and used to occur predominantly in older adults. Not so today. With so many children today overweight and so many children consuming high sugar foods and refined carbohydrates that spike blood sugars, Type 2 diabetes is now increasingly common among children and can no longer be called “adult onset diabetes.” With Type 2 diabetes, the pancreas still produces insulin but the body doesn’t regulate it well. Type 2 diabetes is not as stark as Type 1 diabetes. Indeed, it is more of a continuum. Some people have Type 2 diabetes so mildly that it can be managed entirely by dietary modifications. People who have a more severe form can take medication and people who have a very severe form need insulin injections like Type 1 diabetics do.

No matter how severe the diabetes or what Type, diet is a crucial part of any management program. Of course you should consult you’re doctor before embarking on a particular dietary program, as I am not a doctor, nor have I even played one on TV (although I was once on an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which is fitting because I am actually a lawyer haha!). My advice regarding diet for diabetics is meant to be practical and helpful, not the be all and end all of diabetes dietary requirements!!

Impact of diet on diabetes

Diet can have an enormous impact on diabetes. Insulin is a hormone our bodies produce that regulates blood sugar levels. Blood sugar levels that are too high or too low can cause serious illness, coma, and even death, so managing diabetes effectively is really important. Unfortunately, much of the food kids eat today is processed and full of sugar (it is hidden in all sorts of things you wouldn’t expect). Kids also eat a lot of refined carbohydrates, such as white rice, white flour, and white potatoes – I like to say, “White flour, white potatoes, and white rice: If it’s white, it isn’t nice!” Carbohydrates are converted into sugars by the body so it can use them as fuel, but refined carbohydrates are converted into sugars very quickly and simply, so they flood the system. Think about it: eat one serving of white bread and compare how long you feel full to when you eat one serving of whole grain steel cut oatmeal.

In fact, in cases of Type 2 diabetes diet can even reverse diabetes entirely, just as diet can reverse obesity. This has been tested in animals and also shown in scientific peer-reviewed studies to work in humans (especially effective if exercise is included). This works because a healthy diet reduces obesity and heart disease risk factors – even in children.

Diets for Diabetic Kids

The Internet is full of different diets to help reduce or reverse diabetes. As an adult, you can afford to buy into the starvation diet, but even if it is endorsed by a reputable university’s biomedical department, a starvation diet can be dangerous for children, whose bodies are still developing. Do not starve your children!

However, the concept still works for kids. Other studies (see above) show that reducing calorie intake can slow, stop, or even reverse diabetes development. This is because reducing caloric intake has a twofold benefit for diabetics. Firstly, if done in a healthy and balanced way, it normalizes blood sugar, avoiding blood sugar spikes and making blood sugar regulation easier on the body. Secondly, it reduces weight and reducing obesity reduces the incidence of diabetes.

Another demonstrated dietary fact is that diabetics should reduce fat intake. In more than one of the studies I cited above, fat and especially fatty liver played a stark role in the development and reversal of diabetes. This is why the healthy vegan diet kids in the recent heart disease study was so effective in reducing heart disease risk factors in children: It was very low fat.

That said, there are three commonly endorsed diets for diabetics, all of which can be healthfully used by children:

The Plate Method

The Plate Method is the diet for diabetics that is currently recommended. It calls for 50% of the plate to be covered with non-starchy vegetables, 25% with starchy vegetables, and 25% with protein, as well as a serving of fruit and a serving of milk on the side for each lunch and dinner meal. Of course, the efficacy of any diet like this relies on making good food choices. Non-starchy vegetables such as asparagus or broccoli should be cooked in a healthy way, like steaming, roasting, or stir fry, not doused in sauces and oils. Not all starchy foods are created equal. Whole grains like brown or wild rice and quinoa are preferable to refined grains like white rice or white bread. Starchy vegetables like zucchini, peas, and parsnips are more nutritious than white potatoes (and also have more flavor, reducing the need for additives like butter and oil). Non-fat protein choices like tofu or seitan will always be better than an animal product even if it is low in fat, due to the way in which the body metabolizes animal fats, and also due to the benefit of fat reduction in diabetic diets. For children, consider serving the fruit during snack times rather than during meal times, thus eliminating the need for kids to have yet more calories in their diets during the day. For the milk, I recommend making your own brown rice milk or buying oat or almond milk. If done properly, this kind of diet is incredibly healthy.

A sample lunch would be:

1 cup brown rice milk
Sandwich of whole grain bread, lots of hummus (for protein), and roasted spring vegetables or salad vegetables
Side of raw non-starchy vegetables (such as cucumbers, mushrooms, and capsicum) with some more hummus to dip them in.
1/2 cup strawberries for morning snack
1 small banana for afternoon snack

A sample dinner would be:

1 cup brown rice milk
Stir fry of non-starchy vegetables like asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, and spinach with tofu over brown and wild rice mix

Diabetic Exchange Diets

There was a time when this method was very popular, but compared to the Plate Method, it seems like a bit of a pain to me. Foods are divided into six categories: starch, meat (there are no vegan meat substitutes), non-starchy vegetables, fruit, milk, and fats. Together with a dietician each individual will be given a number of servings to have from each category each day. This method is easier in a way because it is easier to measure out servings, but it also basically forces adherents to eat a lot of animal protein. This eliminates the potential benefits of following diets now shown to be effective for weight loss.

Carbohydrate Counting

This method counts each major carbohydrate source as one serving (15 g) of carbohydrate. The list of carbohydrate sources includes starches, fruits, milk, and sweets. Of course this does not necessarily lend itself to be the most healthy diet, although it does allow a lot more leniency for kids who won’t take well to being told they cannot have dessert. That’s because if, say, a cookie counts as one carbohydrate, kids can choose to fill up their carbohydrate quota with unhealthy sources of carbs. This type of diet requires a lot of parent monitoring because its permissiveness creates a sort of temptation for kids. It also does not limit sources of other things affecting kids’ diet and weight. For instance, fat and meat intake are not measured, so a child could eat lots of steak and then carbohydrate count for dessert, which would not be a healthy diet at all. Of course, a parent who is conscious of their child’s choices and is committed to making good food choices and to dedicating extra time to their child’s diet can make it work. But carbohydrate counting is definitely the most time consuming of the three methods.

Tips and Advice

Feed the whole family the same meals as the diabetic child is eating. Diabetic children should be eating very healthfully, which will be good for the whole family. Also, if a child is overweight, it is likely that other family members are also not at their ideal weights and can benefit from a healthy weight loss diet.
Don’t starve your kids, but do do portion control. Don’t allow kids to eat as much as they want. Overeating is often a contributor to obesity, which can lead to the onset of diabetes.
Reduce the amount of packaged and processed foods in your child’s diet. Even so-called diabetic foods are not necessarily healthy. Feeding your diabetic child sweets made with artificial sweeteners can cause other health problems.
Read nutrition labels. You may be surprised to see how many carbohydrates are in your favorite foods and snacks. Be aware that the serving size on a package may not match the serving size of one serving if you are doing an exchange diet.
Reduce the amount of fat – fat consumption increases risk of heart disease and diabetics are much more at risk of developing heart disease.
Spread meals out during the day. For instance, breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner. This will help keep your child from feeling too hungry and will also help the body metabolize sugars and nutrients more evenly.
Get your child active! Diet can go a long way to reducing obesity and diabetes management, but exercise and burning up of some of that energy is also really important. This is a good time to get your child involved in an activity that gets them moving, whether that is an organized team sport or just neighborhood games. My gym even offers classes for kids! You can also make exercise a family activity – going for walks, family bike rides, or hikes in local nature areas are great ways to bond as a family while increasing the health of everyone in the family!

I hope these tips make it easier to find a healthy diet for your diabetic or pre-diabetic child! Together, we can manage diabetes and maybe even reverse it!

For More Information:

American Diabetes Association: www.diabetes.org

Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: www.eatright.org

National Diabetes Education Program: http://ndep.nih.gov

Supporting Kids’ Food Choices

Posted on April 13, 2015 by SoarAway

Supporting Kids’ Food Choices

Our children don’t always want to eat the same way we do. Of course, many kids today are interested in filling up with junk food, but a lot of kids also go through a vegetarian phase. Parenting forums are filled with moms lamenting that their children are refusing to eat meat, and panicking over how to sneak meat into their diets or otherwise ensure they get enough protein. As parents, the best thing we can do for our kids is to find ways to be supportive of their food choices.

When kids decide to follow a different path from their parents – whether it is dietary, religious, or political – it is hard as parents not to feel that we have in some way failed them. It feels like a judgment to have your child refuse the food you always fed them. Almost as if they are saying you are not a good enough parent and you raised them the wrong way. Our task as parents is to raise ourselves above this natural inclination and to ask ourselves what is best for our child.

Research has long shown the health benefits of a balanced vegetarian or vegan diet. A new study also shows major cardiovascular benefits for kids on a vegan diet, which is important because heart disease begins in childhood. Many people are trying hard to get their kids to eat a more heart healthy diet. Yet, if it is our children who make the decision to eat a vegetarian or vegan diet, we resist it. Oh, the ironies of life!

Unfortunately, I know too many kids who become vegetarian and end up eating more junk food and processed, pre-packaged foods. Today, vegetarian processed foods are widely available, which makes it easy for kids to access them. Additionally, there is a natural human inclination that when we give one thing up, we should get more of another thing we like to replace it. Kids who give up their steaks and fried chicken legs might feel justified in downing some extra potato chips. But when this happens on a regular basis, it adds up to some pretty unhealthy eating.

As parents, we need to be supportive of kids’ dietary changes, even if we disapprove. The problem is that if we are not, then our kids will not be able to make the healthiest choices within their range of options. Vegetarian and vegan kids whose parents are unwilling to cook separate food for them end up replacing meat with canned or instant foods, or junk foods, which are high in sodium and sugar.

On a personal level, I have known in my lifetime far too many kids who gained weight and became much less healthy on a vegetarian diet. When I spoke to them about it, I found they were carbohydrate loading. Pasta and bread were their main foods. Junk foods and other high-calorie convenience foods were also way up there in their list of things to eat. Remember, potato chips and deep fried french fries are vegan and pizza and lasagna are vegetarian. While these foods can be delicious treats, they should be “once in a while” foods, not everyday foods. When I saw vegetarian kids gaining weight, I found they were eating these foods frequently, and were eating far too many calories (especially from fats and carbohydrates) overall.

As parents, it is our job to combat this behavior: Not by denying our kids the freedom to make some dietary decisions. Not by forcing our kids to eat foods they don’t want to. But by helping them make healthy food choices within reasonable parameters.

Here are some quick tips for busy parents whose kids want to eat a vegetarian or vegan diet:

Find healthy alternatives to bread, pasta, potatoes, and rice. Quinoa is my favorite, but oats (especially steel-cut) are fantastic for breakfast (even pancakes!) and potatoes can be replaced with more nutritious root vegetables, like sweet potatoes or turnips.
Make sure all grains are whole grains. Whole wheat bread, whole wheat pasta, and brown rice are all much more nutritious than white, refined carbohydrates.
Make beans! Beans are a great source of protein, fiber, and lots of other vitamins and minerals. Don’t buy the canned kind – buy dry beans. They won’t have any added sodium and they are much cheaper. Soak them overnight, then boil them. Do a big batch and keep them in the fridge. Beans are incredibly versatile and can fill in as a meat substitute for many kinds of meals. There are lots of kinds of sauce you can put on them, you can add them to eggs or other cooked dishes, and you can also puree them to make a spread for bread or a dip for vegetables. As a bonus, there are many different kinds of beans, each with a slightly different flavor and texture, so you can offer your child some variety.
Make smoothies. It’s easy to toss some fruit in a blender for a quick meal or snack. For a vegetarian meal on the go, add some milk (or rice milk) and some nut butter for added bulk and protein. For a snack, make it lighter, by adding only fruit and some ice.
Provide healthy snacks. Healthy crackers or muffins are easy to grab on the go. Even sweets like cookies and cakes can be healthy treats if they’re made right. Providing the kinds of snacks you want your kids to have available makes it less likely they’ll grab a bag of chips when they’re out. Package snacks in small, disposable snack size bags (I use biodegradable ones, which are now very good quality) and you make it even easier for kids to grab and go. (I prefer to use reusable containers, but for many kids on the go this will be a deterrent, as they will now have another item they need to remember to bring home, even after they’ve finished their snacks.)
Use juice pulp. Making fruit or vegetable juice is a great, healthy addition to any diet, but don’t throw away that pulp. Many vegan and vegetarian kids are eating pasta and bread until they are full, whereas heavier proteins can make you feel fuller. Help kids feel fuller, faster, by giving them some extra fiber in their diets. Add fruit juice pulp to muffins and oatmeal. Use vegetable juice pulp to make pasta sauce, burgers, and crackers.
If you can’t beat them, join them. Try making all-vegetarian meals a few times a week. You might find you enjoy them, too. By including kids in family meals, they are more likely to eat a healthy diet.

I hope these tips help ease the adjustment when you have a child who decides not to eat meat anymore!

If you have other tips, please share them below!

Trick Your Kids Into Eating Healthy At Home

Posted on April 9, 2015 by SoarAway

Trick Your Kids Into Eating Healthy At Home

Yesterday, we considered some clever psychological ways to trick our kids (and possibly ourselves) into eating healthier when out of the house. But a lot of the food our kids eat is in fact eaten at home. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to trick our kids into eating less and eating healthier at home, beginning with the way we do our grocery shopping, and continuing on to the way we serve (and even market) our homemade meals. Bon apetite!

In the Store

Going food shopping? We all know it’s a bad idea to go to the grocery store when we’re hungry – it encourages impulse buying, especially of convenience food items. Shopping hungry doesn’t necessarily make us buy more, it makes us buy worse… and that unhealthy food will feed our families for the next week.

Another grocery shopping trick to still those cravings is to chew gum, especially mint flavor. Chewing gum tricks your body into thinking its eating and, as your stomach expectantly waits for its (nonexistent) food delivery, you will be able to do your grocery shopping uninhibited. People who chew gum while shopping buy 7% less junk food.

Begin your shopping trip in the produce section. Spend some time there. Browse the vegetables and, if your kids are with you, talk to them about them. Spend at least 10 minutes there – shoppers who spend this long in the produce section tend to buy more produce than shoppers who rush through… and fresh produce is the healthiest thing you can buy in the entire grocery store, really!

Don’t be afraid to “cheat.” Who cares what people thing when they see you buying bagged salad?! They may think you’re lazy, but do it anyway. We’re all busy mums and bagged, pre-washed salads make it so much easier to serve salad for dinner. Today, you can buy bags of just greens, but more and more grocery stores are offering complete pre-mixed options that come with other veggies already mixed in, or in separate packets in the bag. Heck, I’ve even been know to cheat by buying the bagged Asian salad mix – and dumping it into the pan for a quick stir-fry. If bagged salad means you’re more likely to serve salad for dinner, do it!!!!! As parents, we tend to feel like better parents if we’re serving our kids fresh vegetables, so why not skip some steps and take credit for being a good parent? Serve them bagged salad or steamed frozen veggies and feel proud while you do it!

Smart shoppers looking to save money will often buy the economy size, so save yourself some money and buy all means get the healthy option in the biggest size available! But don’t leave it that way when you get home – subdivide them immediately. Today you can buy special reusable cereal containers that even come in half sizes. I have a whole pantry full of them and I use them for everything, from muesli to rice. Seeing the smaller container when serving will encourage kids to take less.

At Home

Get organized! People eat less when their kitchens are clean and organized, possibly because it sucks to make food when you know you’ll be messing up a clean, shiny countertop. The same principle applies to other places where you tend to sit and eat, like at your desk at work. People surrounded by clutter eat 44% more snacks. And no matter how organized or nice it looks to leave certain food items sitting on the counter, put them away – studies show that people who leave containers of cereal (even super healthy cereal) sitting on the counters weigh on average 21 pounds (10 kg) more than people who hide their cereal in the pantry.

What kinds of dishes and utensils are you using? Next time you’re looking to upgrade, don’t go with the fancy plates that match the food you’re serving, unless perhaps you’re serving kale on a dark green plate. People consume 18% more food when they are eating off a plate that matches, so try to choose contrasting colors. And of course there is the age-old trick of using a smaller plate. Most people have heard about this one already – it’s logically satisfying, since you can’t eat as much if you can’t fit as much on your plate. Use a smaller plate, eat 22% less.

As for your cutlery? Go with a bigger fork. It may be tempting to serve kids with small salad forks rather than the big adult forks, but it’s time to give your kids a promotion to adult status, at least in this regard. One study found that people who used larger forks ate on average 3.5 ounces less per meal than people who used smaller forks. That’s because our brains take visual cues to determine how much we have eaten – our stomachs are just too slow to respond. Seeing bigger bites tricks our brains into thinking we’ve consumed more, while seeing smaller bites makes us think we’ve consumed less.

Don’t stop there – think about what kind of glasses you are using to serve drinks. Experiments have mainly focused on alcoholic beverages like wine, but it stands to reason that a kid’s equivalent of wine would probably be some sort of juice, soda, or other soft drink. Soft drinks are a huge portion of calorie consumption by today’s children, so why not trick your kids into drinking less? People drink 92% of what they pour for themselves, so the amount put in the glass really matters. Pouring into tall, thin glasses, rather than short, fat ones, encourages people to pour in less, and thus consume less. Of course, if all your glasses are short fat ones, you can just avoid the whole issue by serving only water at meals, which is what I do.

Keep healthy food around and visible, especially during mealtimes. Placing a bowl of apples in front of the shelf of potato chips may seem like a hopeless and obvious attempt to get your kids to snack on the right foods, but it actually works. Kids who are presented with healthy food staring at them when they make food choices are more likely to eat healthier overall during that meal. Whether it’s guilt, shame, or subconscious influence, I don’t know, but it does work. Of course, you could just remove the potato chips and replace them with apples completely… but how many of us have that much willpower?

How do you serve meals to your family? I’ve never been a fan of “plating” each dish – in my experience, this leads to a lot of food waste and grumbling because not everybody wants precisely one serving of every thing. Growing up, dishes were all placed on the table and each member of the family took as much of each as they wanted. Lately, I’ve been lazy and I often serve meals directly from the stovetop in a “get it yourself” kind of manner. Which of these three methods is best? Well, studies show that serving yourself from the stovetop rather than family-style at the table results in eating 19% less, so if you are aiming to reduce the amount your kids are eating, go ahead – tell them to get it themselves!

Name the food you serve. Yes, I know, most foods already have names, but are they names that mean something to kids? “Green Bean Almondine” may sound elegant to adults (and it has a nice rhyme factor) but it is meaningless to a five-year-old. To encourage kids to choose to eat the healthier foods you are offering, rename them with names that are cool for kids. “X-Ray Vision Carrots,” “Popeye’s Super Strong Spinach” and “Silly String String Beans” will sound fun to kids and studies show they’ll eat more of them.

Finally, if you’re not above misleading (or blatantly lying) to your kids, try telling them their meal is less healthy than it actually is. People who think they are eating fattening, filling, and high calorie foods fill up faster and feel more satisfied, leading them to eat less than if they think they’re eating the diet version. By all means, serve your kids the healthy stuff… just don’t let them know.

Conclusion

If you employ these tips and tricks you will find your kids are eating far less. Maybe not the more than 60% less that each of the “at home” tricks listed above add up to, but then again… maybe! I think it all depends on your starting point. But if your child has a weight problem or you think he/she is eating too much, these tricks are a completely painless way to persuade them to eat less, without ever needing to tell them you want them to eat less. So go ahead, serve that rice on a red plate and that pasta with tomato sauce on a white plate – a small one – from the stovetop. And make sure there’s a big bowl of salad on the table while your kids are eating. Then, just have patience and wait for the results.

Go ahead, shamelessly trick your kids into eating healthier.

Go ahead, shamelessly trick your kids into eating healthier.

*Many of these statistics have come from the research of Brian Wansink, who is a food psychologist and the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. You can read more about tips and tricks for psychological food mind games in his new book, Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life.

5 More Ways to Get Kids to Eat Healthy

Posted on March 18, 2015 by SoarAway

5 More Ways to Get Kids to Eat Healthy

There are lots of creative ways to get kids to eat healthy. Some of those ways to get kids to eat a healthy diet apply to all ages of kids, while some techniques work best with older kids and teenagers or with young children and toddlers. The techniques explored have included talking to kids about how diet affects health, exposing kids to new foods, getting them involved in gardening, cooking, and shopping, and offering healthy foods repeatedly. Now here are four more techniques you can try to get your kids to eat a healthy diet.

Set a Routine

Kids inherently prefer routine. While they may seem to want lots of freedom and spontaneity, kids actually need some structure in their lives. This can take lots of forms, but the most common one is to set some sort of schedule. Kids sleep better if they go to bed and wake up at around the same time, and eating is no different. Kids are more likely to eat healthy if they eat meals at designated times of the day. Otherwise, they have a tendency to snack or to eat what is most conveniently at hand. Eating on a schedule trains them, both physically and mentally, to expect nourishing food at predictable times.

Let Them Get Hungry

Kids are more likely to eat healthy food if they are hungry when it is put in front of them. As the saying goes, “Hunger is the best seasoning!” Kids do not need a snack every time they get hungry. Set firm mealtimes (e.g., breakfast at 7 AM, snack 10 AM, lunch 12 PM, snack 3 PM, dinner 6 PM) and stick to them. If your child comes to you complaining they are hungry and dinner is going to be soon, there is no harm in telling them they have to wait. They will not starve in the space of a few minutes or even an hour. Giving them a snack to quiet them will only serve to spoil their appetite for a healthy meal later.

Let it Be Their Decision

Prepare healthy meals at home, but let your kids serve themselves. At first, you may feel dismayed when they take the least healthy of the options. Perhaps they will load up on mashed potatoes but leave the peas and corn behind. Or maybe they will eat only the soup and not take any salad. Don’t force them to take these foods. Yes, they may be the healthiest options and of course you really want your kids to eat them, but you also have to ask yourself what is the most effective way to get them to eat these foods in the long term? It is more important to establish a lifelong healthy habit than to win the Phyrric victory of forcing them to eat healthy in the short term but making them resentful for life. Keep serving healthy foods every day and let your kids see you eating these foods yourself. Eventually they will decide to try them and will make them a part of their own meals, on their own. When kids decide of their own volition to eat healthy, this sets them up for a lifetime of healthy eating.

Another option is to place a variety of healthy foods separately on the table and letting your kids choose which ones they want. For instance, a platter of cut vegetables from which they can choose which ones they want to eat. Or perhaps a salad bar, where they can add as much of each salad component as they want. Then you do not need to force them to take healthy food, as all the options are nutritious, but kids still get the sense that they are in charge and able to make their own decisions. Encourage them by telling them how proud and impressed you are with their choices. This will increase feelings of positive association and self empowerment when it comes to good food choices, making it more likely they will choose healthy foods again in the future.

Don’t Just Tell Them: Show Them!

Make kids’ understanding of healthy food more visual. It’s good to talk to kids about the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods, but find ways to make your message more visual. Kids often understand and remember a visual message better than a spoken one. Explain to kids how many teaspoons of sugar are in one bottle of soda, then have them put that number of teaspoons into an empty soda bottle so they can see just how much sugar is in each sweet beverage. You can do this with healthy nutrients, too. For instance, see if you can get a bunch of empty boxes for cheeseburgers from a local fast food restaurant like McDonald’s, then compare how many cheeseburgers you’d need to eat to get the same amount of vitamin C as in one cup of strawberries (150g) (the answer is approximately 75), or the same amount of vitamin A as in one cup of carrots (the answer is approximately 68). It may seem extreme, but a visual comparison of this nature can be massively compelling. They will not soon forget which type of food gives them the best nutrition.

Educate kids about other aspects of food as well by showing them. Demonstrate portion sizes, for instance, in comparison to what is normally served at restaurants. Next time you go out and order a meal, ask the server for some extra plates and divide the meal into healthy serving sizes. For instance, a 9-ounce steak is actually three servings! You can also show kids how small a serving of healthy veggies is. For instance, cut a carrot into 1 cup’s worth of sticks (100-120 grams) and place it in the center of a big plate. Kids will be surprised to see that one serving of veggies is not that much – it is more like a snack! Then the idea of eating several servings of vegetables per day will not seem so daunting or unappetizing.

Let Them Be the Food Critic

I love watching cooking shows. It’s really the only kind of television you’ll catch me occasionally watching. I love food, nutrition, tastes, and flavors. Let kids emulate the judges on these shows by being little food critics. Give them a selection of foods and let them try them. This is a good option for some snack time fun. Prepare a few different kinds of healthy foods and have your child answer questions about the foods and describe them just like on cooking shows. For instance, do a raw vegetable taste test and give kids red capsicum/bell pepper, green capsicum/bell pepper, cucumber, carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, and broccoli. Have them describe which are hard and which are soft, which are most juicy, which are the most crunchy, and which ones are sweet or savory. This makes trying healthy foods fun and frees them up to safely form and express their opinions. It also gives you more ideas what kind of healthy snacks they might enjoy in the future.

Conclusion

It is a challenge to get kids to eat healthy food, but there are new ideas and techniques being thought up every day. Try a variety of techniques until you find some that work for you. Get them involved and make it fun. Make healthy food synonymous with good feelings and good experiences, instead of letting mealtime become a daily battleground. Let’s inspire healthy kids!

How to Reduce the Amount of Salt in Kids’ Diets (Part 2)

Posted on March 17, 2015 by SoarAway

How to Reduce the Amount of Salt in Kids’ Diets (Part 2)

Too much salt is dangerous for kids’ health. Kids today eat far more salt than is healthy for them. Yesterday we looked at some ways to avoid eating too much salt and to reduce the amount of salt in your kids’ diets. Today we will look at a few more really important strategies to keep your kids from eating too much salt.

Read Nutritional Labels

Learn how to read nutritional labels and teach your kids, too. Look for the line that says “sodium” and choose the lowest sodium option. Look for foods with no added salt or low sodium labels. Try to select foods with less than 120mg of sodium per 100g of food. You will be surprised at how quickly the amount of sodium in what you eat adds up over the course of a day! The Heart Foundation recommends that 4-8 year olds consume only 300-600mg of sodium per day. Once you start reading nutrition labels, you will be surprised how quickly your child hits that upper limit!

Make Avoiding Salt a Game

Make avoiding high sodium foods a fun game for kids. It is a great tool for teaching math skills, too. Have kids help you plan meals with less salt, and get them to help you when you are grocery shopping. Have them add up the amount of salt in each ingredient for each meal of the day. Then talk about the amount of salt they will be eating each day and how to lower it. Make a competition to see which child can come up with the lowest sodium meal plan for a week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, or dinners, with the prize being that those will be the meals served that week.

Avoid High Sodium Processed & Restaurant Foods

Did you know that 43% of the salt kids eat comes from just 10 types of food? That’s right! Pizza, bread/rolls, cold cuts/cured meats, savory snacks, sandwiches, cheese, chicken patties/nuggets, mixed pasta dishes, mixed Mexican dishes, and soups account for 43% of the sodium kids consume. Some of these foods most of us recognize as salty food items: salty ham cold cuts, pizza, cheese, and potato chips are all foods we recognize as super salty. Some foods, we might not think of as high in salt until we really give it some thought, like pasta dishes, Mexican food, and soup.

But at least one of these items comes as a surprise to most people: bread. Bread is often very high in both sugar and salt. Bread is very easy to make at home. If you are wary of making your own bread, investing in a bread machine will really pay off in the long run. A loaf of bread that costs several dollars in the store costs just cents at home, and you can control what goes into it – no preservatives, low salt, low sugar, and whole wheat flour, plus the option to add seeds or dried fruit!

Some processed foods contain salt when they do not even need to. One of the most common culprits is peanut butter. Peanut butter marketed to kids in brightly colored containers is often full of salt, sugar, and oil. None of these things is necessary to make peanut butter taste good! Get a high quality organic pure peanut or almond butter. Some stores now even offer to let you make the peanut butter yourself on the spot using a special machine. If so, let your child participate, perhaps choosing which nut butter they want (if multiple options are available) and letting them pull the lever or press the start/stop button.

Another processed food high in sodium is the sandwich meat we often give our kids for lunch. Cold cuts and preserved meats are generally very high in salt content. If you do want your child eating a meat sandwich, make some extra meat with dinner and use that instead. For instance, make a sandwich with sliced turkey or chicken breast that has been cooked in a healthy way, rather than using salty sliced deli meats.

Be aware of other processed foods that often contain a lot of salt as a preservative. Canned food is often high in salt and/or sugar. Consider replacing canned vegetables with frozen vegetables, which should not have any additives. Avoid other canned convenience foods like soups or beans, which use salt to preserve them, and if you do buy canned vegetables or bean, rinse them off with fresh water before cooking or serving. Food in jars often faces the same problem, as salt and sugar are used to preserve foods at room temperature.

Also avoid eating high sodium foods in restaurants and fast food joints. If you request it, these establishments should be able to give you the nutritional information for their products before you order. Then choose one of the lower sodium options. You can also ask that no salt be added to your food during cooking. And definitely do not add extra salt to your dish even if there is a salt shaker on the table! If you think this may be a temptation for your child, ask the waiter to remove it.

Conclusion

Simply by switching to lower sodium options and not adding salt to home cooking, you can dramatically reduce your child’s salt intake. Making this switch does not have to be that difficult. Just cook as you always have, but take the salt shaker off the table and stop adding salt to your food. At first the foods may seem a bit bland, but as your taste buds adapt you will really enjoy the flavors of the foods themselves. It only takes a few weeks for your taste buds to adapt! For processed foods, check labels to choose lower sodium options, or scan them with a smartphone app like FoodSwitch that list healthier alternatives.

How to Reduce the Amount of Salt in Kids’ Diets (Part 1)

Posted on March 16, 2015 by SoarAway

How to Reduce the Amount of Salt in Kids’ Diets (Part 1)

Over the last couple of days I have been looking at the dangers to kids’ health when they eat too much salt. Recommendations for how much salt to consume are actually listing the maximum amount of salt one can safely eat daily, not how much one should eat. And although they can’t seem to agree on the ideal amount of salt kids should consume, scientists and experts all agree that the maximum amount is way too high. So, how can we reduce the amount of salt in our kids’ diet?

Take Salt Off the Table

The first step to reducing salt intake is to reduce the amount of salt kids are eating at home. Many families place salt and pepper on the dinner table and each family member can season their food accordingly. Studies show that kids who add salt at the table have higher systolic blood pressure than those who don’t.* Remove salt from the table and kids won’t add it at the table. This reduces their risk of having high blood pressure. One in every six children has high blood pressure! This increases their risk of suffering heart attack or stroke later in life threefold. Taking salt off the table is a crucial first step to reducing this risk.

Taking salt off the table also teaches children not to add salt to prepared foods even when they are in a situation where it is available. Kids who make it a habit to add salt to food might even develop the habit of adding it without tasting the food previously. Restaurant foods and prepared foods, with their high amounts of sodium, then get extra salt on top of them, making them even less healthy. Kids who add salt to their food at the table also begin to slide down the slippery slope of adding more and more as they become accustomed to the flavor and their taste buds are corrupted. However, kids who do not see a saltshaker on the table at home do not become accustomed to adding salt to their food, nor do they get used to the flavor of salt and need it on everything.

Eat Fresh Foods

Replace processed snack foods with healthy, fresh alternatives. Raw fruits and vegetables are great snacks for kids: portable, and delicious. Instead of sending potato chips as a midmorning snack, send an apple or banana. Make up a fresh fruit salad or blend fruits together to make a smoothie. Using raw fresh fruits is a great way to get your child eating healthier and will also avoid excess salt. Replace salty snacks with unsalted raw or toasted nuts (although this may not work for school, it will work at home!) You may also consider dehydrated or freeze dried fruits and vegetables, as well. Dehydrated fruit like raisins or apricots are commonly available. Freeze dried vegetables like peas or green beans are becoming more widely available, as are freeze dried fruits like strawberry, banana, and mango. Kids will enjoy freeze dried vegetables and fruits as a snack alternative because they are so crunchy and fun to eat. They give the same feeling of eating a crunchy potato chip, but without the oil and salt!

Cook More at Home

Prepared foods are much higher in sodium than foods prepared at home. Processed, packaged foods use salt both for flavor and as a preservative. Restaurants apply salt liberally to enhance the flavor of their foods. Foods cooked at home tend to be much lower in sodium because home chefs add less salt than the commercial versions. For instance, last night I made a vegan bolognese sauce to put over pasta. I did not add any salt to it at all and it tasted great! In processed jars of pasta sauce one serving of sauce might have 300 mg of sodium all the way up to 1,000 mg! 1,000 mg of sodium in one cup of pasta with sauce is a crazy amount – it would mean a home chef adding nearly 1 tablespoon of salt per 1 cup of pasta with sauce. I hope no home cooks do that!

Food cooked at home not only has more salt, but it tends to be healthier overall. Kids who eat home-cooked meals eat more fruits and vegetables, as well as less salt, sugar, and fat. Home-cooked family meals also promote togetherness and good relationships. So cooking at home can really pay off!

Even super sweet rice krispie treats contain a large amount of salt. Percent daily values are based on the maximum amount an adult should consume. Children should consume half of that amount as an absolute maximum, and even then the ideal is to consume about one fifth of that. 50mg sodium may be closer to 10% of what a child should be consuming daily in a healthy diet!

Don’t Add Salt to Cooking

Most people add salt to food as they are cooking almost without thinking about it. But salt is not necessary for food to taste good. When you cook at home, you have the power to control flavors. Most foods can use substitutes for salt. Scrambled eggs, for instance, often include salt. But perhaps instead of adding salt, you can add different flavors. Season eggs with lemon and parsley, cumin, coriander, or ground pepper. Seasoning common foods with fresh herbs and ground spices gives those foods a new, exotic, exciting flavor, and makes them seem more fancy. Kids and adults alike will not miss the salt in a well-seasoned dish.

Absolutely do not add salt to food for your baby or infant! Babies’ immature kidneys cannot handle the additional sodium. Always be careful to feed babies homemade food or food specially formulated for infants. Even if the ingredients list looks the same as it does for adult foods, adult food salt contents are higher. Excess salt intake in babies can even be fatal.

If your dish needs some salt, add the tiniest amount possible. A small pinch will usually suffice. Use the healthiest kind of salt out there, so it will include other trace minerals rather than just the sodium and chloride that is in table salt. I use pink Himalayan salt or natural sea salt if I need to season my cooking, and if I do decide to sprinkle my own dish with a bit of salt, I use Maldon sea salt flakes. Choose the highest quality salt you can, preferably a kind with additional nutrients and minerals. It might cost more, but you’ll be using it sparingly enough it should last for a long, long time.

More great tips to come tomorrow! – Read on for How to Reduce the Amount of Salt in Kids’ Diets (Part 2)

*Gregory J, L.S., Bates CJ, Prentice A, Jackson L, Smithers G, Wenlock R, Farron M., National Diet and Nutrition Survey: young people aged 4 to 18 years. Vol. 1: Report of the diet and nutrition survey. 2000, London: The Stationery Office. 271-336.

Salt: How Much Do Kids Need?

Posted on March 15, 2015 by SoarAway

Salt: How Much Do Kids Need?

Salt is an essential mineral for good health, but most kids today eat far more than they should. Eating too much salt is unhealthy and can lead to many different health problems. Most of this comes in the form of processed or restaurant foods, which makes it difficult for people to make good judgments about what foods to avoid. It makes it challenging to determine just how much sodium is being consumed per day.

Salt is a preservative and is therefore ubiquitous in processed foods. Even “sweet” foods generally contain at least a bit of sodium and foods that are really salty contain lots. A child’s lunch sandwich will contain lots of sodium: in the bread, the mayonnaise, and the cheese (or meat). There is even sodium in some soft drinks, especially those designed for sports. They are meant to replace electrolytes, one of which is salt. But most kids today consume way too much salt and do not need additional salt in their drinks, too!

It is rare to find children (or anyone) suffering from a salt deficiency due to a lack of salt in the diet. Sometimes adults who are suffering from severe water retention or athletes who are doing intense workouts over long periods of time can end up with a sodium deficiency in their blood. But this is not due to not consuming enough salt (the notable exception being in users of the drug Ecstacy, but if this is an issue for your child then you have bigger problems than just trying to get them to eat a healthy diet!). Indeed, even people in those situations might be consuming too much salt on a regular basis. However, due to other diseases or intense physical exercise for a long period of time, their salt reserves drop down.

This large pinch of salt is 3 grams of salt. Many people will add this much salt or more to a dish they are cooking!

Fear of developing hyponatremia (salt deficiency) is not a good reason to load your kids up with salt. With the amount of dietary sodium readily available in processed foods your child will have a hard time not eating too much salt, but will not have any trouble getting enough to live a healthy life. In fact, even adults need only 500-2,400 mg or 0.5-2.4 grams daily to be healthy (please note the wide variance of 480%!). That 2,400 mg or 2.4 g daily dose is the very upper limit of the safe and healthy recommendations out there today. In fact, most organizations recommend that adults keep their sodium intake below 1,500 mg (1.5 g).

Here is a fact many people do not know: The amount of recommended salt intake and the amount of recommended sodium intake are two different things. Table salt is only about 40% sodium. Therefore, you have to be aware of what you are trying to avoid and how much. For instance, a maximum recommendation of 6 grams of salt is 2.4 grams of sodium.

Here are the recommendations for the maximum amount of salt kids should have in their diets, according to the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, Salt and Health:

Age	Maximum Salt Intake
0-6 months	<1g / day
6-12 months	1g / day
1-3 years	2g / day
4-6 years	3g / day
7-10 years	5g / day
11 years and above	6g / day

However, these recommendations are for amount of salt. This is measurable when you are doing absolutely all food preparation at home, using table salt. However, most of us do buy processed foods and the nutrition labels list only the amount of sodium, not the amount of salt. To calculate whether our kids are eating too much salt, we need to know the maximum amount of sodium foods contain. When changed to reflect sodium intake rather than salt, the maximum recommended amount of sodium looks like this:

Age	Maximum Sodium Intake
0-6 months	<0.4g / day
6-12 months	0.4g / day
1-3 years	0.8g / day
4-6 years	1.2g / day
7-10 years	2g / day
11 years and above	2.4g / day

See the difference?

These maximums are actually on the high end of the spectrum, as many organizations, such as the American Heart Association, recommend that adult intakes stay below 1.5g sodium daily, and, as I mentioned above, the minimum recommended intake is actually 0.5 g sodium daily.

That’s part of what makes it so hard to determine how much salt your kids should have – the recommendations are maximum upper limits, not ideal amounts. You don’t want to actually aim for these amounts – you want to be well below them! Yet the percent daily values listed on nutrition panels are based on the maximums, so it looks as if there is not as much sodium in the food as there really is.

Take a look at the nutrition panel above, which is for sea salt flavor kettle chips. There are 120 mg of salt in one serving, which is 25 grams. Most of us will not eat only 25 grams of chips, but suppose you did. The 120 mg of sodium is listed here as 5% of the daily recommended value, which conveys the sense that it is fine to eat 2,400 mg of sodium daily, far above the upper limit of 1,500 recommended by many organizations – and that is for adults! If a child ate even a small amount of chips, they would be getting a significant percentage of the healthy daily amount.

Babies/Newborns

Babies do not need any added salt in their diet. Babies’ kidneys are not yet fully developed and they are too immature to cope with added salt in their diets. During the important first formative months, it is especially crucial that babies be allowed to grow naturally. Babies on a breastmilk or formula diet do get just a very tiny amount of sodium in their diet. Their diet is specially formulated to provide exactly what they need and nothing more. Too much sodium can be especially harmful for very young babies.

Infants

Infants who are being introduced to solids and/or weaned off breast milk and formula should not be given any additional salt in their diet. Infant foods are specially formulated not to contain added sodium. It is just not necessary or healthy for babies. You may taste some baby food and think it tastes bland, but it does not taste bland to babies, whose taste buds have not yet become accustomed to strong flavors. Just imagine – if you drank nothing but milk, eating plain steamed peas and carrots would taste amazing, interesting, and new. Babies do not need any added salt, so do not add any to their food. As babies grow up, you may choose to give them some snacks (for instance, I gave my babies a few Bamba occasionally, which is quite salty). If you give them snacks every once in a while, they will definitely get plenty of sodium in their diet. Just be careful not to give them too many processed foods, and avoid using things like commercial sauces and spreads, as they often have a lot of added salt.

Children

Childhood is the best time to inspire healthy kids. Do this by continuing to avoid adding any salt to meals. A tiny pinch of salt in a dish can help bring out the inherent flavors in vegetables, but if you can taste the salt in a dish you cook, it is too much salt. Really, the rule of thumb is that the less salt you add to home cooking, the better – ideally adding no salt at all. Kids who do not eat salt in food at home are more likely to be getting the right amount of sodium. There is a lot of sodium in processed foods, so kids get plenty of sodium from the processed or restaurant foods purchased.

Kids who do not develop a taste for salty food when they are young are more likely to eat a healthy amount of salt as adults. A good example would be my husband and I. His mother never added salt to everything, whereas my mother added lots of salt to her food. As a child I developed a taste for salt that has never left me. After getting married, I began cooking food without adding any salt and slowly I am getting used to it, although I still sometimes find it bland. My husband, on the other hand, has the ability to detect salt even in foods to which I have not added it!

In my house, we rarely consume any processed foods. I make almost every meal from scratch. We eat a lot of salads and most meals are paired with brown rice rather than bread. Even our ice cream and yogurt are homemade! We only eat in restaurants a few times a year. Our kids get most of the sodium in their diets from crackers, which they get to eat a couple times a week, and from Vegemite, which they also get only rarely.

Teenagers

Teens, especially females, have to be very wary of salt intake. The foods that are marketed to and are popular among teenagers tend to be things like burgers, chicken nuggets, pizzas, chips, cakes, and cookies. All of these processed foods are high in sodium and teens can easily eat way too much salt. Girls reach their peak bone mass at puberty and consuming too much salt during this critical time of formation and development can result in girls’ bones not attaining a sufficient thickness. This can cause osteoporosis later in life.

Conclusion

The amount of salt kids need is very different from the amount recommended as a percentage daily value. Percentage daily values are based on a very high adult amount, which is double the safe maximum for children. The guidelines, even those listed above for children, are based on maximum safe amounts, which are four to five times higher than the amount that is actually healthy. Experts all agree that too much salt is harmful and dangerous to health – they all consistently recommend reducing salt intake as much as possible to obtain optimum health. The best thing you can do for your kids is to reduce their salt intake as much as possible!

How to Get Your Kids to Eat a Heart Healthy Diet

Posted on February 27, 2015 by SoarAway

How to Get Your Kids to Eat a Heart Healthy Diet

Recently, we’ve been looking at heart disease in children, which is becoming more and more prevalent as obesity rises. A new study showed how eating a low fat vegan diet reduces many more heart disease risk factors in children than the predominant American Heart Association (AHA) recommendations did. But the chief complaint from those on the vegan diet in the study was that finding no added fat vegan options was difficult and expensive. So, if you have that added hurdle, it makes it even harder to get your kids to eat a heart healthy diet. Here are some ideas for ways to get your kids to eat a heart healthy diet.

Getting kids to eat healthy can be challenging under the best of circumstances. Even famous celebrity chefs can find it difficult to get their kids to eat their gourmet healthy meals. With teenagers, I have always stressed communication as the key to inspiring healthy kids, while with younger children I focus mostly on getting them involved. These strategies hold true for a heart-healthy diet just as much as for an overall healthy diet.

Start Young

The younger you start your kids eating a healthy diet, the better. Taste buds can get corrupted very easily and once they switch off to trying new foods or to eating healthy things, you will have a very hard time getting them back. Even as a health-conscious adult, I have a hard time giving up the unhealthy flavors of my youth. We never drank a lot of sugary drinks, so I don’t have a problem giving those up, but when it comes to dairy or the occasional cookie, I have a hard time saying no. Once these tastes integrate themselves into your kids’ minds, you will find it difficult to eradicate them. When kids are young is the best time to make healthy eating part of their lives and habits, forever.

Lead by Example

Kids often model their own behavior on what their parents do. For better or worse, conscious or unconscious, this is pretty standard among children. Parents are their primary role model. So change your diet, too. Show your kids you enjoy eating spinach and cauliflower and they’ll be more interested in trying it. Friends are amazed that my toddlers will sit and eat spinach (even raw!) but to me, it is no surprise – they see my husband and I eating it all the time. Kale, beets, brown rice, and whole grain bread are all part of the diet they regularly see us eating, so they eat these foods, too.

More Family Time

Did you know that kids will eat more fruits and vegetables if you eat meals together as a family? Once again, kids have more opportunities to see parents modeling good eating habits. There is also the “peer pressure” effect, applied in a positive way. When kids see the rest of the family eating a meal, they are more likely to, as well. Eating meals together as a family has a lot of relationship benefits, too. In fact, family dinner is one common recommendation family therapists make. When I was a kid, family dinner almost every night of the week was the norm, but times have changed. Today, each member of the family eats at a different time, making it easy for kids to grab for convenience foods or just the tastiest bits of whatever meal is on offer. Eating together makes it socially unacceptable for a child to just grab a bag of chips from the corner store to have for dinner – that child now has to sit at the table and eat from what is on offer.

Start Slowly

Don’t try to change your kids’ diet all at once. Switching from a meat-heavy, fatty, salty, sugary to a sugar-free, low-fat vegan diet will be a shock to your kids’ system. If their taste buds are corrupted, you need to wean them off unhealthy foods slowly and teach them gently to love healthy food. Change one snack and one type of food at a time. Swap out sugary fruit roll-ups for all-natural fruit leather one week. The next week change out buttery Ritz crackers for whole grain Mary’s Gone Crackers. Change from serving macaroni and cheese to serving macaroni and red pepper cheese dip, then swap out the macaroni for whole wheat options or for broccoli. By making changes slowly and gradually, you will not see an immediate change like you would if you changed your kids’ whole diet over suddenly, but the changes you do make are more likely to stick. And it is much more important to teach kids to have a healthy lifestyle that lasts than to have them shed pounds suddenly only to pick them up again a few months later.

Get them Gardening

Food education programs with a lot of success, like the Eden Village Camp I was involved with, teach a farm-to-table approach. Kids who grow their own vegetables are likely to love eating those vegetables. Growing vegetables is a great teaching tool for many subjects, like science, as kids learn about life cycles and the environment. But growing something also promotes a sense of pride and ownership in kids that makes them more likely to try – and keep eating – those foods they’ve grown. And growing things doesn’t require a full-scale garden or even a back yard! Kids in apartments can grow veggies in pots placed by windows and the need to water and care for plants gives kids a gentle sense of responsibility and stewardship that is great for their maturity.

Take them Shopping

Getting kids involved in the food selection experience also gives them a feeling of power and control. Kids, like adults, want to feel they have some measure of control in their lives. The younger the child, the more difficult it is to give them safe freedoms. In a world where you can get arrested for letting your kid play unattended in a park across the street, how can we give our kids the freedom to make choices and grow up? We are all required by law to be helicopter parents, like it or not. So taking your kids to the store with you and letting them help with the shopping is a great starting point. Begin by letting them pick out the fruits and veggies for the week. With very young kids, including toddlers, just bring them along to the store and let them pull a few things they want to eat off the shelves. Use it as a teaching opportunity for older kids, too. Before you go to the store, take the time to do a little bit of “homeschooling.” Sit down with them for an hour and plan out meals for the week, how much of what they need to buy, and then have them use math to figure out how much it will cost as you go through the store. The amount of time you invest in involving your kids in food shopping will be repaid in the amount of time you will not have to spend fighting to get them to eat nutritious foods later in the week.

Teach them to Cook

Cooking is one of my favorite creative endeavors. It is an opportunity to challenge oneself and is a rare opportunity to see nearly instant gratification from the fruits of your labors. Kids are more likely to eat food they themselves have prepared, and teaching kids to prepare healthy meals will benefit you as a parent down the line, even if it requires a bit of time investment now. Imagine never needing to make your kids’ lunches again, or being able to ask your kids to make dinner a few nights a week! Kids of all ages enjoy cooking. Even very young kids can learn to stir a bowl. Help them decorate healthy pizzas or casseroles with a variety of ingredients, or make dinners they can assemble themselves, such as a salad bar or taco bar. Giving them the responsibility of helping and the freedom of choosing is a great way to encourage kids to eat healthy food.

Try, Try Again

Finally, don’t give up! Getting kids to eat a healthier diet is a challenging task. Don’t expect them to jump on the bandwagon with enthusiasm right away (if they do, consider yourself fortunate!). It might take a lot of effort, and it might take some time. Just be patient and keep trying. There are a lot of different strategies you can implement and an infinite amount of yummy and healthy foods to try. If one doesn’t work for you, discard it and try a new one the next day. If you come across one that really works for you, add it to a list of special foods to make again. (Like my favorite Island Kale and Sweet Potato Soup, which everyone in my family loves and I make once or twice a month.)

I hope these tips and tricks work for you and if you have any other ideas please share them in the comments so we can all benefit. Here’s to helping inspire healthy kids and to motivating our kids to eat a heart healthy diet!

How Parents Can Stop Emotional Eating from Developing

How to Deal With Emotional Hunger

Tell them to wait

Give kids a toolkit

Preventing and Countering Emotional Hunger

Conclusion

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What is Emotional Hunger?

Kids Also Experience Emotional Hunger

Emotional Hunger Begins Young

The Dangers of Emotional Eating and Emotional Hunger

How to Identify Emotional Hunger

Physical Hunger

Emotional Hunger

Conclusion

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Types of Diabetes

Impact of diet on diabetes

Diets for Diabetic Kids

The Plate Method

Diabetic Exchange Diets

Carbohydrate Counting

Tips and Advice

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In the Store

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Set a Routine

Let Them Get Hungry

Don’t Just Tell Them: Show Them!

Let Them Be the Food Critic

Conclusion

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Read Nutritional Labels

Conclusion

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Take Salt Off the Table

Eat Fresh Foods

Cook More at Home

More great tips to come tomorrow! – Read on for How to Reduce the Amount of Salt in Kids’ Diets (Part 2)

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Babies/Newborns

Infants

Children

Teenagers

Conclusion

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