Preventing Childhood Obesity: Encourage Healthy Eating Habits

Feeding children in a healthy way helps them develop good habits that will reduce the risk of obesity. Learn about your role in feeding the children in your care and how to do this job well.

Being obese or overweight has a serious impact on a child's development. Obesity can harm all areas of children's development, especially social/emotional and physical development. Obesity also carries with it serious long-term health problems, including greater risk of diabetes and heart disease. Our professional responsibility is to help children develop to their full potential. Because of the serious lifelong effects of obesity we must do what we can to help children avoid this increasingly common problem.

A variety of changes in American life is causing more and more people to gain too much weight.These changes have to do with our habits about food, our food portion sizes, our food choices, and how we exercise. Both adults and children have been affected by these changes.

What is a caregiver to do? You have a great deal of influence on the health habits of the children in your care. The choices you make about how you feed the children influence their food choices, their portion sizes, and even their attitudes towards food.

Children can be picky eaters and will often choose junk food over more nutritious options. While this can be frustrating, it's worth the time and effort to promote healthy food choices. Healthy eating benefits children physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively.

As a caregiver, your responsibility is to

1. Offer balanced meals and snacks
   
   
2. Choose the timing of when food is offered

• Support children in listening to their appetites
• Continue to offer healthy choices (even when children reject them)
• Share nutrition information with parents
• Be a good role model
• Encourage the children to be active every day

Prepare balanced meals and healthy snacks for the children in your care, using a wide variety of foods. The food guide pyramid especially for children can help you make good choices from a variety of food groups.

Nutritionists recommend that children eat fruit rather than drink fruit juices because of the high sugar content in juice. Whole fruit contains fiber and other nutrients that are lost in juice processing. For drinks, stick with water and milk for your children.

Look for whole-grain, high-fiber crackers and breads. Read the label. Look for whole grain as the number one ingredient. Check the amount of sugar–the less the better. If you serve cereal, pick one with less than nine grams of sugar per serving. People think of granola as a healthy choice, but it usually has lots of added sugar.

Canned fruit is a good choice if you serve the type that is canned in its own juice, rather than in heavy syrup. Watch when you are purchasing "light" products: many have artificial sweeteners. Research has found that artificial sweeteners set up your body to crave sweets more.

In this country, we have developed an unrealistic idea of appropriate portion size. For children under the age of five, an appropriate portion size is a tablespoon per year of age. So a portion of peas for a one-year-old is one tablespoon. Start with a small plate and offer small portions of each food on your menu. This gives you a chance to save the leftovers and can help children get used to a new food without so much waste.

When a child has a favorite food at your meal, offer it in a reasonable portion size and make sure you offer other foods as well. Sometimes we accidentally encourage children to eat only a limited number of foods by offering their favorites in large portion sizes, which reduces their appetite for other foods.

You decide when to serve food. It is best if food is served at regular times. This can be a challenge, but try to keep your meal times as regular as possible.

Because young children have little tummies, they can't just eat three meals a day. They need snacks to get all the calories and nutrients they need in one day. Offer nutritious snacks at a regular time so the children do not get too hungry.

It helps to have some easy meals and snacks in mind for times when you are tired or busy, but beware of processed snack foods such as chips. These foods tend to be costly, high in fat, salt, or sugar, and low in fiber. If you pay attention to which fruits and vegetables are in season you can serve fresh snacks for the same cost or even less than prepared snacks. Apples, bananas and carrots are also moderately priced year-round.

A child's job is to eat what her body needs. A good eater listens to his body about what foods he needs to eat. We need to let children listen to their body signals about how much to eat and trust that a truly hungry child will eat.

When children learn to listen to their bodies, they make good food choices and they tend to eat the amount of food that they really need. This is very important for lifelong healthy eating and weight control.

If you serve a new food and some of the children don't want it, offer it another time. Rather than insisting that a child try it, just place a small portion on her plate. This way you can make sure that the children become familiar with the sight and smell of the new food. It can take more than ten presentations before a young child will begin to accept a new food.

In this process, young children are known for spitting food out. This is normal and part of the process of growing familiar with a food with unfamiliar texture or taste. Teach the children how to do this politely and discretely into their napkin.

At times food may be wasted, but you can cut down on the waste by offering small portion sizes, freezing leftovers and offering them at a later time, or using them in the preparation of other foods. It can take a lot of time to help the children accept a wide variety of foods. Be patient. It is worth the effort to teach the children to be healthy and flexible eaters.

If in your program all food is supplied by parents, then you do have less control over food choices, but you still have a responsibility to help parents make wise choices. If a parent is assigned bring in the snack for all the kids each day, you can strongly encourage healthy choices. Make a list of healthy snack suggestions and distribute it to the parents.

Sit down with the children, eat slowly, and make pleasant conversation while you are eating. Model using a napkin, and be a good example of polite behavior while eating. Say "please" and ?thank you," and the children will pick up your example. Many children today are not experiencing family meal times, so you are an important role model. The children will absorb a great deal from you.

Toddlers need thirty minutes of active time and preschoolers need sixty minutes. Give the children opportunities to be active. Just taking them outside is not enough. Spend time throwing a ball or playing a running game. The best thing you can do is to be active yourself. The children will pick up your example, and you'll all benefit from the exercise!

Many states have child care food programs that reimburse you for food that you purchase and prepare according to their nutrition and food safety guidelines. Click on link to view the USDA child care food program at http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/care/CACFP/cacfphome.htm. While it takes effort to learn the system and to keep careful records, it is valuable for both you and the children. You can save money while offering the best possible nutrition to the children in your care.

If you have a fridge, you can store leftover food in the crisper and use it the next day. A freezer is also useful for keeping snacks like frozen fruits, vegetables, and bread. When you're low on fresh food, bring out frozen food and thaw it in the microwave.

If you can't store food, give it to the families as a healthy snack at the end of the day. Then the kids can eat a little on their way home when everyone is tired and hungry.

Let the children help you prepare food. It will take a little longer, but as well as saving you some work, it's a great activity. The children learn important skills, and they are much more likely to eat foods that they've helped prepare. The feeling of accomplishment is wonderful (and worth a few spills)!

Children can help set the table. Even toddlers can tear lettuce for a salad. The children can wash fruit, knead dough, stir and mix ingredients, and cut soft things with a plastic knife. Older preschoolers can grate cheese and peel hard boiled eggs. School-age kids can learn to crack eggs and follow the directions in a simple recipe.

One idea that involves kids in preparing food, as well as encourages them to listen to their appetites, is to introduce a self-serve snack. Write a picture recipe that the children can follow--for example, a picture of one cracker and one piece of cheese. Children are allowed to go and make themselves a snack during free play if they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't have to stop what they are doing. The children will become more sensitive to when they are really hungry enough to stop playing.