Encourage Healthy Eating In Your Child
We read a lot about healthy eating in the media. There are many TV shows and radio broadcasts devoted to the topic also. Despite the great awareness raising about the importance of a healthy diet, many people are yet to comprehend exactly what is involved to really benefit from healthy eating.
Mothers can start to introduce their children to healthy eating right from early infancy. Breast feeding has been shown to have an impact on a child’s later taste preferences. For example, experiments have demonstrated that babies were more likely to accept spicy food after weaning if their mothers had been eating spicy food during breast feeding. The flavours and aromas of spicy food passes into breast milk and the child grows accustomed to it from then on.
Similarly, a baby can develop a taste for very salty and sugary foods if that is what the mother consumed a lot of while breast feeding. If you do not want your baby to eat too much sugar and salt when they grow older, you can do a lot to affect their choices right from this early stage of development.
After your child has moved from breast milk to solid food they continue to form lifelong eating habits. Children will learn to eat healthily if that is what they see you eating on a regular basis. Your own diet should mainly consist of fruit, salad and leafy green vegetables. It should also be rich in fresh fish and whole grains. Early introduction to these things will help your child continue with a healthy eating lifestyle right through to 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.
If you want to experience the full benefits of healthy eating then you must be prepared to make a nutritious diet an integral part of your daily lifestyle. Don’t expect miracle results from an occasional salad. If your diet consists of some raw food every single day year in year out then you will really be giving your body some of what it needs to function at optimum performance.
