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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Encouraging Healthy Eating In Children

By James Zane Johnson

Healthy eating is something that is talked about widely today. However, despite the general recognition of the importance of a healthy diet, many people still do not appreciate what is involved to ensure that they and their families constantly enjoy healthy eating.

Embracing a healthy lifestyle is best done from early childhood. The habits a child adopts with regard to their eating can often stay with them for life. Training your child to eat healthily can begin as early as the breast feeding stage. Many foods consumed by the mother pass into the mother's breast milk. It has been shown for example, that children whose mothers eat a lot of spicy foods more readily accept spicy foods as they get older than children whose mothers did not.

In a similar way, babies are more likely to accept foods that are highly sugary or very salty, if that were what the mother took a lot of while breast feeding. A mother can do a lot to affect her child's eventual taste preferences by controlling what she herself consumes while she is breast feeding her baby.

It is once a child moves to solid food while still and infant and then all the way through to adolescence that is critical for forming lifelong healthy eating habits. The way to encourage your child toward a healthy lifestyle is to practice healthy living yourself. A child that lives in a family whose diet consists of mainly fruit, vegetables, salads, whole grains and fresh fish is most likely to continue this eating style 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 stand firm and not be swayed by advertising. By continuing to follow a diet that is devoid of commercialized products their children will not develop the wrong eating habits. Parents who eat healthy food themselves find that their children are inclined to want to eat what they are eating.

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. - 17273

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