Kids in the Kitchen

Kids in the Kitchen- Part 1

Eating healthy should be a family affair.  It is much easier to establish healthy eating habits at an earlier age then later in life.  The best way to get kids to eat healthy is to make them part of the process and most importantly, make it fun! Try any of the following ideas or be creative and make your own!

Kitchen Art

Allow them to express their creativity (i.e. picking out and decorating with healthy toppings, making fun shapes, using fun cookie cutter or molds, make fruit animals with toothpicks and fruit, etc)

Mix it up

Hand the mixing bowel to your kids and they can count spatula turns, test their strength, follow cook book instructions, race the clock to see how long it takes to make the mix smooth, etc.

Kids in the Kitchen- Part 2

In the last email we discussed getting kids to eat healthy through getting them involved in the kitchen.  There are two other methods I use to get kids to have healthy habits and ironically they are completely opposite of each other.  The first method is education.  There are great tools (games, worksheets, videos, books, etc) to teach nutrition at almost any age level.  The website www.nourishinteractive.com is a great start and FREE!  When kids have positive exposure to healthy foods through games and having fun in the kitchen, they are empowered to integrate healthy foods through their own free will instead of being told what to do.  It is important to work with flavors the child likes to transition them (i.e. start out with pasta with lots of finely chopped vegetables added to the tomato sauce, versus giving a plate of steamed broccoli)

If that doesn’t work we have “Plan B”, sneak the healthy foods in without them knowing.  I highly recommend the cookbook series “The Sneaky Chef”.