It’s National Nutrition Month® and a great reminder to all of us about the importance of eating healthy.

The American Dietetic Association promotes March as National Nutrition Month®.  This organization reminds us every year that nutrition is a very important part of our well-being.  In fact, a key component, especially for our children.  Each year, the ADA challenges us to find ways to improve our nutrition.  This year, they are asking us to build “Nutrition from the Ground Up”.

I was thinking about that, what does that really mean?

I think that building nutrition from the ground up means that nutrition really starts at home.  Food associations, preferences and habits are really formed at a young age at home.  Kids are learning every day from their parents about nutrition and how important it really is (or not).  And we, parents, are solidifying our family’s habits every day by the foods we choose to buy, the meals we decide to cook, the way we eat our meals etc.

I believe that if we are going to improve our nutrition and overall well-being, then we need to start with our foundation (the ground floor!)  - our home.

But sometimes it can be challenging to come up with a plan of action to change your family’s eating habits.  We know that with everyone’s busy schedule, who has time?    I think that nutrition habits at home don’t have to be drastic.  In fact, sometimes it is the little changes that can really help you and your family “build nutrition from the ground up!”

We want to help you.  We have a very simple “3 steps to a healthier family” to help you begin.  Three doesn’t sound too overwhelming and our suggestions our very doable.

1. Decide as a family that nutrition is important.  National Nutrition Month gives you a great reason to talk as a family about nutrition and how nutrition impacts a body’s health.
2. Evaluate your current eating habits.  Think about the kinds of foods you eat, meal time for the family, snacks, fast foods, cooking and eating out routines
3. Pick just one or two changes your family will make together to improve your nutrition

Building nutrition from the ground up starts with acknowledgment that it is important.

And remember, it is important to change habits gradually and to keep positive.  Oh, and keep it fun!

Resources:

Learn more about National Nutrition Month and healthy eating- Many topics of interest to parents from the American Dietetic Association

Helping Kids Develop a Taste for Healthy Foods-  American Dietetic Association

“Improving your family’s nutrition one step at a time“- ‘Nourish Healthy Kids – March Edition’

Setting Family Goals and Fun Tracking sheets for the family- Printable healthy eating and physical activity trackers

Note to bloggers:  National Nutrition Month® is asking bloggers to share their ideas and thoughts this month on “What it means to you to build nutrition from the ground up”.  Read more information about how to participate in this campaign.

Michelle Obama has really helped promote a new trend and a very healthy one,  fresh farm foods.

I know many schools are trying to incorporate fresh grown fruits and vegetables into their cafeteria program and their nutrition education programs.  I ran across this fairly new organization and wanted to share it with you.

Farm to School brings healthy food from local farms to school children nationwide. The program teaches students about the path from farm to fork, and instills healthy eating habits that can last a lifetime. At the same time, use of local produce in school meals and educational activities provides a new direct market for farmers in the area and mitigates environmental impacts of transporting food long distances.

They have created a network to help parents and teachers find this type of program into their local schools.   Meeting local farmers and learning about how foods are grown are all part of helping kids love nutrition!

Find a Farm to School Program by clicking on your state.

Related Resources- from our website Nourish Interactive:

Fruits and vegetables worksheets

Food pyramid food groups – fun coloring and learning sheets

Can you tell if your child is overweight?

According to a new study, you may be underestimating your child’s weight. A large proportion of the parents of overweight children—and especially mothers, who are surveyed more often—do not perceive their children as overweight. In some studies, the percentage of parents who don’t realize (or won’t admit) that their child is overweight has been reported to be as high as 80% to 90%.

One thought was that we have a greater percentage of overweight and obese children.  So overweight kids don’t stand out as much as they used to twenty years ago.

Regardless, of the reasons, it is important to first start with a pediatric check up and see where your child is on the growth chart.  You can also use our BMI calculator designed for kids but remember this is just one measurement and has to be combined with other factors.  If your child is indeed overweight, then working with a dietitian is recommended. The basics will still apply:

Don’t single out your child, work as a family to eat healthier

Set one or two goals for changing eating habits and track them.

Be patient, positive and encouraging.

General guidelines of areas to work towards:

• Find activities that your child and family can do together and work towards being active for at least one hour every day.
• Increase fruits and vegetables.
• Decrease sugary and fatty foods that don’t offer nutrition,  just calories.
• Get plenty of sleep.
• Limit TV time and screen time to 2 hours or less a day
• Eat breakfast every morning

Resources from Nourish Interactive:

Printable Nutrition Tips and Tools for Parents

Healthy Parenting Nutrition Articles- ‘Nourish Healthy Kids’ newsletter articles and tips

Free Nutrition Education Games for Kids!- Fun interactive games and tools

Healthy Nutrition Tips Calendar -Printable PDF

Printable Healthy Nutrition Tips Calendar

I came across this video about kids being active.  I love the music.  Made me get up from my computer and break out some moves.

With the weather still being pretty cold, here is a fun aerobics video for kids, you can even do the DVD with them. Make being physically active a fun part of your day together.

This is a fun way to encourage kids to be physically active for 60 ‘Move It Minutes’ a Day. You can get a taste of the DVD from this youtube video.  Show it to the kids and see if they start to move.  Finding different ways to get your kids having fun while they are active is the key to helping them build this as a life long habit!

Fit Factor for Kids Website and DVD

Resources from Nourish Interactive- The fun way to learn about nutrition:

Move It Minutes- Printable Daily Physical Activity Tracking Sheet

Get Kids Moving Tips- Healthy Family Article

Family Fitness Tips, Being Active and Fit

More Resources:

Let’s Move - New initiative for improving kids health, nutrition and increasing daily physical activity.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released a report in January showing just how much time kids were spending on entertainment media, like tv, video, computer, ipod etc in a typical day.  The study was conducted with kids from 8 to 18 years old.

You may surprised to read these results:

There is a lot of correlations and stats about what was found.  But let me just make it simple.

Kids are spending way too much time in front of the screen.  Cell phones and ipods are adding to that.  What was interesting was according to this study, only 3 out of 10 young people said they had rules about how much time they could spend in front of the screen.

Some other interesting finds:

• big increase in mobile media usage – cell phones and ipod
• 64%of young people said the TV is usually on during dinner time
• 45% said the TV was on most of the day

Read the full report from Kaiser

Related resources: Reducing tv – screen time articles- printable goal trackers

How to limit your child’s TV habits in a positive way- ‘Managing TV Time’ -Nourish Healthy Kids Article

Ideas for ’screen free’ alternative activities- ‘TV and screen free’ list of ideas- fun activities for kids.( printable pdf)

Limiting TV time-  printable time tracker for kids -Printable daily/weekly limiting screen time goal sheets for kids

Set a Limit TV time (or whatever media device) Kids GOAL sheet- Printable agreement sheet

Michelle Obama speaks out on the new initiative “Let’s Move”

Let’s Move will give parents the support they need, provide healthier food in schools, help our kids to be more physically active, and make healthy, affordable food available in every part of our country.

We support Michelle Obama and our President 100%.

Healthy Choice Resources

Fun Healthy Goals and Tracking sheets

Nutrition Games and Tools for Kids

Nutrition Tools for Parents

Nutrition Tools for Teachers

A very exciting and ambitious goal was set by President Obama this week.

President Obama has announced that a task force on Childhood Obesity has been created.

Spurred by the sad fact that:

• kids are predicted to have a shorter life span than their parents
• childhood obesity and the related diseases has tripled among children
• current strategies are not working

President Obama has made this one of his key missions:

TO FIGHT CHILDHOOD OBESITY

He is:

• redoubling the efforts to solve the problem
• he wants the problem solved within a generation!
• he wants a comprehensive plan delivered in 90 days!!

Wow, that is quite a hefty goal and schedule.  I applaud the fact that he is taking such a strong stand to address this serious issue head on.

I still don’t think most people/parents realize what this will mean to our children’s lives, health care system and economy if we don’t figure out how to stop this trend.

But under this new leadership, I am hopeful. I am excited and energized!  We can make a difference if we all make this a priority.

There has been a lot of debate about the the different kinds of sugar put in many popular foods consumed by children.  In particular, there was been a lot of concern about high-fructose corn syrup.   I think it is important to look at the ingredients on food labels but if you don’t know what you are looking at, it can be a bit confusing.

So here is the 101 on sugar and the food labels:

Glucose:  This is the basic molecule of sugar.  The converts the foods we eat, breaks it down to glucose, so that it can be used by the body for energy.

Fructose: This is another basic molecule of sugar but it comes from fruits naturally.  Fruits are high in fructose but when eaten whole you get lots of other vitamins, fiber and nutrients.   But when you drink fruit juice, you are getting a lot of the vitamins but the fructose (sugar)  is concentrated in the juice.  This is why it is recommended that a child only get one serving of their fruit requirement from juice.  It is much better to get the rest of their fruit from whole fruits.  Another way to look at it, you would have to eat several pieces of fruit to get the same amount of sugar as one glass of juice.

Sucrose:  This is the plain white sugar that comes from sugarcanes or beet roots.  This is usually a combination of glucose and fructose sugar.

Lactose:  This is the sugar found naturally in milk.  Some people who can’t tolerate milk are allergic or have an intolerance to the lactose.  There are now lactose-free milk with the same amount of calcium as regular milk.

High-fructose corn syrup: This is a man made sweetener that is a combination of glucose and fructose.  The problem with this syrup is it is a very easy and cheap to make so food manufacturers can easily add this to their foods.

There are many studies that indicate the more sugar you have in your diet, the more your body will crave it.  I know, for myself, I have weaned myself off of adding sugar to my foods or coffee.  I did it gradually so it wasn’t too hard for me to get used to less and less sugar.  I have noticed that my taste buds are now much more sensitive, so a little bit of sweet goes a long way for me.

It’s better to teach your children to enjoy fruits and cereals and other foods without adding sugar.  Look for foods that say “no sugar added”.

Other resources:

Guidelines on how much fruit juice is okay for kids to drink

Learn about our free healthy food pyramid games for kids!

Learn about our healthy food pyramid games for kids

New childhood obesity study from University of Montreal indicates that how close a child lives to a convenience store promotes childhood obesity.

Well, it makes sense.  Convenience store carry food items that are processed and usually high in fat and/or sugar.  Do you go to a convenience store to buy fruit or vegetables?  Well, no, because they don’t really sell that.  So what do you get at a convenience store?  slushies, chips, candy, soda, cookies…

Another study done in urban areas found that kids who lived near convenience store purchased:

• On average, the students spent about $1 and purchased 356 calories of snack foods and drinks each visit.
• Chips, candy, sugary beverages and gum were the most frequent purchases

It is probably not a good idea for kids to go to these convenience stores to buy their snacks.   But in all honesty, even if you had a grocery store full of fruits and vegetables at the corner, would your child go there and still buy the processed high calorie food?   And of course the older a child is, the harder it is to control their “away from home” eating habits.  This is very true.

That is why it is so important to help kids develop healthy habits and a love for healthy foods while they are young and have not formed their habits yet.  That is what we are all about.  Helping parents and educators teach kids about healthy eating and activity while they are still young and just starting to form habits.

This could be a very good healthy goal for your child and family to work on.  It can be as simple as having one healthy snack a day!  Simplicity and fun are the key to helping your child be successful.  Children like to do things that are positive and they feel successful.  Don’t we all?

More resources to help kids eat healthy snacks:

Healthy Kids Snacks Agreement

Healthy Kids Snacks Fun Tracking Sheets

Take the Healthy Eating Challenge Article

Healthy Summer Snack Foods For Kids Article

In my last post I discussed some tips on how to help kids to be active as a part of a daily lifestyle.

To build on that, I wanted to talk a little more about exercise.

There are three kinds of exercise that important for your child.

1.  Aerobic exercise for the heart:

You will often hear that kids need moderate to intense exercise (aerobic activity). Activities that raise our heart rate are moderate to intense depending upon how much it raises our heart rate.  This is important for all of us because our heart is a muscle and it needs exercise too.  When we do activities that raise our heart rate, we are essentially making our heart exercise.  We also breath harder when we are doing aerobic activity and this is good for the lungs.

Here are some examples of moderate activities for kids:

• Walking briskly
• Swimming
• Bicycle riding
• Tennis (doubles)
• Hiking
• Skate boarding
• Roller blading
• Ice skating

Here are some examples of intense or vigorous activity:

• Race walking
• Playing tag
• Martial arts
• Skipping
• Swimming laps
• Tennis (singles)
• Fast paced dancing like dance revolution
• Cross country skiiing
• Jumping rope
• Field hockey
• Hiking uphill

2.  Kids also need bone strengthening activities.

These are activities where we we essentially putting weight or force on the bones.  This is important because it stimulates our bones to be grow and be strong.

Activities that produce impact on the bones (usually from the ground) include:

• Running
• Jumping Jacks
• Hopscotch
• Jumping rope
• Skipping
• Potato sack race
• Hopping on one or both feet
• Basketball
• Tennis
• Hopscotch
• Gymnastics
• Hip hop dancing

3.  Finally, kids also need muscle strengthening activities.

These are activities that make muscles small and large do more work than usual.  For adults this is usually accomplished from weight lifting or resistance exercises.

Common muscle strengthening activities for kids include:

• Push ups
• Rope climbing
• Tree climbing
• Sit ups
• Climbing trees
• Playing tug of war
• Monkey bars
• Wheel barrel races

You can see that many of the activities listed can actually fall into all three categories.  The important thing is to help kids find activities that keep them moving around and having fun.  When kids are actively playing they will naturally do activities that help the heart, muscles and bones grow healthy and strong.

Activity family agreement

Activity printable tracking sheet

Fun Activity for kids

Get the kids moving!

Limiting kids TV time