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Feeding a Healthy Family

At no other point in life are healthy attitudes about eating more easily instilled, beneficial, and long lasting than in childhood. To learn how parents can help their children and themselves to make better food choices, we sat down with Registered Dietician Christina Meyer-Jax. As media spokesperson for the Minnesota Dietetic Association and member of the culinary faculty at Art Institutes International in Minneapolis, Meyer-Jax is a vivacious and articulate teacher, impressively informed by her work in area hospitals, universities, health clubs, and grocery chains; yet she credits her two toddlers with motivating her and her husband to improve the way their family eats. What follows are Christina’s top ten recommendations for feeding a healthy family.

1. It’s all in the modeling. “From day one,” Meyer-Jax says, “your kids are imitating everything you do. If you are eating junk all the time, that’s what they think food is.”

2. Treat All Foods As Equal. Telling kids they have to eat their vegetables before they get more pasta or that they have to finish the main course to get dessert sends the message that some foods are to be endured while enjoyable foods must be earned. Instead, try putting all the food out on the table at the same time, and allowing the family to eat a little of everything in whatever order they please.

3. Watch your mouth. Learn from food service experts. “The minute you call something ‘healthy chicken enchiladas’ you don’t sell them,” comments Meyer-Jax, who notes that creating a hierarchy of “good” and “bad” foods is similarly unhelpful. Above all, avoid any language that suggests that food is a reward. If it’s Halloween and your child is going overboard on the candy corn, you might have to refer to it as “the last thing,” a much less loaded phrase than calling it a treat.

4. Stock up on “Value Added Foods.” Preference for sweet foods is instinctual. Breast milk is sweet, while a gag response to bitter or sour flavors protects children from eating spoiled, toxic, or otherwise dangerous foods. In other words, reconcile yourself to the fact that most kids love sweets, but think of ways you can incorporate nutritious elements. Instead of giving your toddler a chocolate chip cookie, you might bake a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies. Or you could top vanilla pudding—made with milk—with slices of fresh fruit.

5. Relate the benefits of positive food choices to things your kids care about. Set kids up to make choices in their own best interests by talking to them early on about how their bodies use the food they eat. “Milk gives you strong bones” or “Orange juice can help get you over your sniffles faster” are some obvious examples, as are any connections you can make between food and your child’s eagerness to jump higher, learn faster, grow stronger, or play longer.

6. Try not to make bad nutritional choices even possible. “Parents who complain that all their kids eat are chips,” says Meyer-Jax, “need to remember who is doing the shopping.” Keep your kitchen well stocked with string cheese, peanut butter, fresh fruit, and other healthy snacks instead.

7. Make Food Fun. A wide variety of foods can appeal to kids when you involve them in aspects of its assembly and presentation. Let them “draw” faces or pictures by arranging the toppings on pizzas or pancakes. Play with seasonal colors and shapes. Scale foods to little hands with “baby” corn, miniature carrots, and tiny sandwiches. Capitalize on a fascination with dipping by building meals around cheese fondue or Middle Eastern hummus. Meyer-Jax isn’t above being sneaky, either, by “hiding” certain foods in novel contexts; beef tamales are her daughter’s current favorite meal, even though the child doesn’t otherwise like meat.

8. Involve Kids in Meal Planning. “If your goal is to feed a healthy family, you can’t get away from the planning aspect,” Meyer-Jax asserts. “But you can get a lot more buy in and ownership of choices by letting your kids help design the menu, within a few basic parameters.” Shopping also gets easier when you have a week’s meals mapped out.

9. Put a high value on family time. By eating together regularly and using mealtimes as an opportunity to share the highlights of the day, families reinforce positive associations with food and eating. Kids who eat with their families also typically make healthier food choices than those left to their own devices.

10. Accept and accommodate individual preferences. Having children has forced Meyer-Jax to take a closer look at her own likes and dislikes. For instance, since she doesn’t enjoy milk, she and her husband have agreed that he will model milk drinking while she models water instead. And even though their children are still very young, they can already see the ways that their preferences come down to simple genetics; while one child shares her love of spicy foods, the other likes subtle flavors, like her husband. Before you brand your child a “fussy” eater, remember that young children still have most of their taste buds and are much more sensitive to the strong flavors of foods like grapefruit, cabbage, or spinach. About 25% of the population, classified as “supertasters” because of the high number of taste buds they have as compared to “normal” or “non-tasters,” retain this sensitivity into adulthood. By all means encourage your child to try new things and ask him to describe the positive or negative flavors he encounters, but don’t criticize his innate preferences.

Countless adults know from experience how hard it is to tone up, lose or maintain body weight, or meet other fitness goals without confronting their own negative attitudes about eating. Set your kids up for success by teaching them to prefer the foods that you can all feel good about.