Getting Your Kids to Eat More Fruits & Vegetables
For so many parents it’s a never-ending challenge: How to get kids to eat more fruits and veggies.
FOX’s Lisa Brady has some advice from a mother of triplets who became a nutritionist:
Most kids don’t eat enough fruits and veggies. It takes planning:
(Burns) “I know that as a mother when I had younger children, that was the hardest thing for me because if I didn’t plan, we weren’t going to eat healthy.”
So registered dietitian and nutritionist Julie Burns says it’s okay to start small; even a half serving a day is better than nothing. But focus on real food, not processed. Smoothies are easy:
(Burns) “Maybe start with the fruit and then eventually maybe you go to putting a small handful of kale or spinach in there. It’ll look kind of funky in terms of the color.”
Maybe call it a monster smoothie. Burns says healthy dips and sauces can make veggies a lot easier. Keep an ‘anytime drawer’ in the fridge for kids to grab carrots, yogurt or cheese and get them involved, from shopping to making their own trail mix. She’s also a fan of ‘bridge foods’:
(Burns) “So you’ve gone from french fries to sweet potato fries to roasted sweet potato to butternut squash, so now you have four there.”
She says it is never too late to start eating healthier, for kids or parents.
With FOX on Family, I’m Lisa Brady.
