Parentella

To celebrate Nutrition Month this March, I would like to encourage you to become a Colorful Eater.

The theme of this year’s National Nutrition Month is to Eat Right With Color, since adding more colorful fruits and veggies to our diet is so good for us. We are what we eat, and that includes French Fries. A diet that consists of too many beige-colored foods is often a diet high in fat and low in other important nutrients, like vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

Plus, it’s more fun to eat colorful food.

The point is it’s all too easy to get complacent about our food, and adding in colorful foods will help make eating healthy more fun and enticing for your family. We live a very fast-paced life, most of us, and if we are blessed with picky eaters, as I am, it can be difficult to get them to eat anything remotely healthy.

But it’s really important to try.

A few years ago I tried the “sneaky-healthy food” idea, popularized by such cookbooks as Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious.

My kids love pancakes and waffles and I wanted them to have homemade ones. For years I used a packaged mix and one day was prompted to read the label. When I saw how high the fat content was, not to mention any of several ingredients I wished my kids would not ingest, I switched to making my own from scratch. And I added in sweet potato puree.

Ever since, my kids have enjoyed their homemade breakfast just as much as before, but I felt better about it, knowing they were getting a little bit extra. Sweet potatoes contain loads of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Iron, Calcium and dietary fiber, and I find them to be delicious.

However, ever since my kids stopped being served food from a spoon, they haven’t chosen to eat a sweet potato voluntarily.

Now they eat it – and love it – without even knowing they’re doing it. It’s a vegetable I know they’ve eaten before they even leave the house. And that’s how I work in good nutrition at my house.

If you are otherwise blessed, like with children who will try new foods, first of all I will admit to being quite jealous of you – and then I will say this: get them to try healthier foods. Add a new one in each week. Visit your local farmer’s markets to get the freshest foods in season. Your kids may have a new favorite food soon, and you will certainly have healthy kids.

You can learn more about National Nutrition Month at EatRight.org.

Sarah Auerswald is the blogger behind Mar Vista Mom and a co-Founder of MomsLA.

Related posts:

1. March is National Nutrition Month
2. Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act Passed House
3. Thanksgiving Menu Must Have Recipes
4. Should We Still Have Bake Sales in Schools?
5. Lunch Box Safety Tips

Tags: breakfast, healthy food choices

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 12:01 am and is filed under Food, Sarah Auerswald. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.