Raising Your Children the Healthy Way

Involving your children in healthy nutrition is imperative to their future.  Paving the way from an early age is a stepping stone for their immunity and growth. Why is nutrition important? Eating a balanced diet is vital for good health and wellbeing. Food provides our bodies with the carbohydrates, protein, essential fats, vitamins and minerals for energy, to live, grow and function properly. Our body requires a wide variety of different foods to provide the right variety and amounts of nutrients for optimum health.

1. Get them involved: Your children can help with making a meal plan for the house, making a list for grocery shopping to prepping the food for you.  Have them read labels – ingredients in food labels to check the sugar and fat grams in each serving, for starters. Your children can also make no-cook recipes like smoothies, frozen popsicles, homemade ice cream etc.
2. Food source: Take your children to the open market – let them understand where the source of their food comes from.  From the eggs to the chicken, from the seed to fruits and vegetables.  Have your child start a vegetable garden, you just need seeds, a pot and some dirt.  You can start with seeds of watermelon or pawpaw.
3. Make healthy snacks available: From the grocery store to open market, the snacks you as the parent buy or make is what your children will eat.  Make healthy snacks available such as fruits in season, carrot and cucumber sticks with Nigerian peanut butter, smoothies, oat cookies, coconut cookies, coconut pancakes etc.
4. Keep the children active: We are a tech-savvy generation and it is producing lazy children.  Turn off the TV and give the iPad downtime.  We the parents need to set the example.  Spend Saturdays playing ball or going to the park with the children.  There are many sports both parent and child can benefit from – swimming, tennis, walking, skipping, dancing, playing hide and seek or tag for younger children.  Have a conversation with your child about what sport appeals to them and set it up for a Saturday/Sunday.  Make sure you allow them to pick a date and a time and put it on the calendar and stick to it.
5. Teach early: Teach your children healthy habits early.  From as early as being in the womb your child starts to develop a taste for food.  Whatever the mum consumes gets passed over to the baby.  After your child has finished breastfeeding then you can introduce them to whole natural foods – mashed carrots, peas, bananas, potato, mangoes etc.  Set their taste buds off to a good start.
6. Be a role model: Children who see their parents eating healthy and staying active will more likely follow in line.
7. Colours: Children love colours and our nutrition rule is five a day! So, make your child’s plate colourful with some carrots, sweet potato and grill chicken.

The essential nutritional steps to take are to eat foods derived from plants—vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes (beans, peas, lentils)—and limit highly processed foods.