vegetables
One of the repetitive comments I get from parents who bring their children in for their well-child checks is, “I have been telling my son to eat his fruits and vegetables for years, and there is nothing we have been able to get him to do it.” As a parent, I let my patients know that I understand what a challenge it is to motivate children to eat nutritiously. Before I began investing my time and energy in child obesity intervention, the typical lunch and dinner at my house would generally include a fruit or vegetable, and I would always make sure it was a fruit or vegetable that each of my kids liked.
Son Fails Nutrition Quiz
Despite my valiant attempts to offer my kids the produce I knew they enjoyed, it was shocking to me, after the meal was over, how many grapes, cucumbers, strawberries, carrots, and apples I would find myself throwing in the garbage at the end of each meal. One day I was looking at information online, and I found a nutrition quiz you could do on your child. This was around the time I was becoming interested in child obesity, so I thought it would be a great place to start. I am a health-conscious mom, and I have healthy-weight kids, so I was pretty sure my children would do great. I started with answering questions about my first-born son, and guess what he got at the end of the quiz? A big fat “F”! I was aghast!
Concerns for Future
Part of why my son failed the nutrition intake quiz was because when I really had to quantify his number of fruits and vegetables he got each day, he fell far short of the recommended five per day (because fruit snacks did not count). What taking this quiz told me as a parent was that if he had an “F” in nutrition at age nine, even though he is a healthy weight now, he may not maintain that healthy weight into his teenage years. I also became concerned about what his blood sugar, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure may be like as a grown man. I never met my husband’s father, but I know that he was around 350 pounds when he passed away at the age of 45 of a heart problem. So after my son failed this nutrition quiz online, I felt a sudden urgency to do something drastically different in my household!
Lessons From How Adults Eat
Have you ever been to a party at dinnertime when you are starving, and because there happens to be a veggie tray laid out as an appetizer, you find yourself nibbling on the veggies? How about times that you have been to a restaurant and you ate the garden salad first that came with your meal, and by the time your main entrée came along you were too full to eat it? If you recall being in these situations, there are a few lessons we can learn about the healthy way to eat: Eat the high-density, low-calorie foods first when you are most hungry; and eat the high-calorie, low-density foods after you have already filled up on the most healthy part of the meal. The human body perceives fullness more by the volume of food we eat—which requires stretching of the stomach—than by the number of calories that we eat. If I wanted my children to eat the produce I provided at dinner, I needed to present their food to them differently, and now I do!
A New Strategy Proves Successful
When I get home with the kids after work, they are all “starving.” The first thing I now do is set the table, and lay out the fruits and vegetables on my kids’ plates. They know that they are allowed to grab whatever is on their plate while they are waiting for me to prepare dinner. During this time frame, they are so hungry they will eat a carrot or two; gobble down the grapes on their plate; and if there are bowls of them sitting on the table, sometimes grab for seconds before the main dish even makes it on the table. By the time my husband gets home from work, it is time for the family to sit down to the table and pray, and three things have already occurred:
- My children have eaten their fruits and veggies without being nagged.
- Their stomachs have been filled with high-density, low-calorie foods that are the most healthy part of the meal, so they are less likely to eat as much of the main dish, which tends to be the less healthy part of the meal.
- There has been a bit of a delay between the times they started eating to when the main dish was served, which ultimately tends to result in less calories being eaten.
By creating this “two-course” meal in our house, with the produce out and on their plates first and eaten when they are the most hungry, it has had a great impact on increasing the quantity of produce in their bellies, not in my trash can!
