What Should You Feed Your Kids?

Nutrition is a cornerstone of health and developing healthy eating habits is a key step in ensuring proper nutrient intake, reducing risk of several chronic diseases, and feeling your best. One of the best ways to develop such healthy habits is to start young. Children who eat healthy are more likely to grow up to be adults who eat healthy and parents and other caregivers play a large role in establishing heathy eating behaviors.¹ Additionally, children with healthier dietary intake also have less risk of obesity and heart disease as adults.^2,3 But how do we help kids learn how to make healthy choices and what should we be offering them as options?

Starting the day with a meal that includes protein and ensuring that kids are getting enough protein throughout the day helps regulate blood sugar and mood, cognitive function, and attention, as

well as reduce anxiety. Getting kids to eat fruits and vegetables can be difficult for some but one way to do so getting creative by including them as an element of other foods they like, such as spaghetti sauce, smoothies, burgers, muffins, pasta, and rice. 

A diverse diet helps ensure that your child has access to a wider supply of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. This makes nutritional insufficiencies or deficiencies less likely, promotes good health, and helps protect against chronic disease. One way of helping children with dietary variety is teaching them to “eat the rainbow” by including foods of many colors in what they consume.  A varied diet also helps protect against the development of food sensitivities, as does rotating foods, or ensuring that kids are not eating the same foods repeatedly over time. Like adults, children may tend to crave foods to which they are the most sensitive.

Another tip for developing healthy eating habits is to allow children to have input on what and how much they eat, as well as involving them in the preparation of meals and snacks. Giving them insight into how food is made and allowing them some control over the food they consume may help them develop a healthier long-term relationship with food.

Finally, while it is unrealistic to expect that your child will eat only fresh, whole, organic foods all of the time, and never eat anything else, you can plan ahead to minimize the potential for them to eat highly processed, unhealthy food. Indeed, minimizing processed foods is a central goal when trying to decide what to feed kids.

Learn more about how the functional medicine uses healthy eating and lifestyle-based strategies to support health in children and adults by contacting a functional medicine practitioner near you.