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Tips for Encouraging Children Toward Healthy Eating
Filed under best weight loss programJul 31We hear a lot today about healthy eating but how many people really understand what is involved to be truly healthy from a balanced diet? Healthy eating has to be a complete lifestyle decision before it can have an impact on our general well being.
Introduction to a healthy lifestyle should be made right from the beginning of a person’s life. Many people do not appreciate for example the role of breast feeding in tuning a child’s taste buds for life. Studies have shown that babies whose mothers ate a lot of spicy food while breast feeding were more ready to accept spicy foods after weaning than other children. The flavours of the spicy food passed into the mother’s milk and the babies had already grown accustomed to the taste.
Likewise, if a mother consumes a diet that is high in salt or refined sugars her breast fed child will lean toward preference for salty or sugary foods also. You can start to gear your child toward healthy eating from this early stage of development by ensuring that you eat sensibly while breast feeding.
Breast feeding is important but it is once a child embarks on a diet of solid food that lifelong habits begin to form. Children can be trained to practice healthy living if they live in a family that practices a healthy lifestyle. From the beginning it is important to introduce your child to a diet that has a high content of fresh fruit and salads. Also if you have a diet that is rich in whole grains and oily fish, your child is likely to continue eating these things into adulthood.
If a child lives in a family where the diet mainly consists of processed foods high in saturated fats, refined sugars, salts, refined carbohydrates such as white bread and pasta and too much red meats such as steaks and burgers, that child is liable to form lifelong eating habits that are far less than optimum.
Unfortunately, many parents end up exchanging their own relatively healthy diets for a diet that is seriously lacking nutritionally. This is because they have bought into ideas promoted by advertising companies about what their children will enjoy eating. For example, commercials convince parents that their children will love packet frozen goods with attractive packaging. These foods such as frozen pizzas and fries end up forming the mainstay of the entire family’s diet because grocery shopping has become child centred.
Parents should maintain a healthy diet that does not consist of commercialized products and take a stance to resist the onslaught from advertising companies. If the parents eat only healthy food they will find that their children will learn from them and are more likely to be influenced by parental eating habits than what they see on TV. It is a mistake to adopt a diet suited to your child’s tastes. It is better to let your child grow to accept eating what they see you eating and not vice versa.
Healthy eating is not something that can be done once in a while if it is going to have a lasting impact on your life. There is very little point having a salad once a week if the rest of the week is a diet of soda and junk food. People need to be consistent with their healthy eating. Every single meal of every single day should be healthy. This should not be seen as drudgery. On the contrary, healthy eating is very enjoyable and satisfying indeed.
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Tags: diet, eating, healthy
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