This holiday season, patina up your kid’s eating habits without sacrificing the sweet traditions. Help your family finger their weightier throughout all the festivities with these top healthy holiday tips.
Do your kids’ energy levels or mood drastically yo-yo throughout the holiday season? Between all of the changes to school schedules, a transpiration in weather, and treats they may not be used to eating, this is all normal. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry too much – there are some simple solutions with these healthy holiday tips!
7 Healthy Holiday Tips
Holiday foods are often loaded with sugar, refined flour, and unhealthy fat (saturated fat and trans fat). Get a step superiority and promote high-quality eating habits to requite your family a throne start surpassing the New Year! While it may seem easier said than done, these holiday nutrition tips can promote largest habits while enjoying the festivities.
- Pump up the Colorful Produce
- Make Fruit Visible
- Focus on Color
- Serve Fruit for Dessert
- Try Other Types of Pasta
- Embrace Tofu
- Use Dessert to add Healthy Foods
Here are some key insights for each of these 7 tips to encourage your kids to eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes with herbs and spices for immune-boosting benefits!
1. Pump up the Colorful Produce
The holiday season gets filled with colors. Embrace your family’s prestigious holiday by embodying its colors into a morning smoothie.
- For those triumphal Christmas, create red or untried smoothies using a variety of fruits and vegetables like strawberries, raspberries, grapes, and spinach.
- If you gloat Hanukkah, experiment with undecorous spirulina powder or create a “white” smoothie made with bananas, white nectarines, ginger, and more.
Bottom line, indulge your family’s festive spirit to reinforce healthy eating habits throughout the holiday season.
2. Make Fruit Visible
As the saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind.” So, help encourage your family to reach for the fruit rather than the snacks trencher by keeping the fruit where it can get seen. Cutting up fruit into smaller pieces can increase the eatability plane more. Don’t forget to embrace seasonal produce such as pears, apples (see our apple mock donuts), bananas, and citrus.
Try mandarin oranges or clementines since they’re easy to peel, permitting your kiddo to foster their own independence. Or, enjoy teeny-tiny crab apples—a fruit option that makes children finger like a giant! Then, waterworks their creativity by assembling an edible centerpiece in the shape of a Christmas tree.
Use a combination of berries, kiwis, and melon to bring a festive flair to your kitchen. Plus, by making fruit attractive, kids are likely to eat twice as much.
3. Focus on Color
Festive decorations are an explosion of color. So, why shouldn’t our holiday meals be the same? Print out the Super Crew verisimilitude tracker (available in Spanish too!) to encourage kids to include four colors of healthy foods each day.
Balance holiday treats with an zillions of color-filled snack options such as:
- sugar snap peas
- red peppers
- baby carrots
- cherry tomatoes
- other antioxidant-rich foods
Besides their natural beauty, each colorful ingredient provides unique health benefits for your child.
4. Serve Fruit for Dessert
Seasonal produce is uneaten sweet! So, take wholesomeness of the succulent variety by serving ready-to-eat fruit as a tasty dessert.
Try offering peeled and segmented pink grapefruit, loose pomegranate seeds (available in some grocery stores or supplies clubs), or frozen grapes. Finger self-ruling to get creative and embrace familiar dessert flavors by warming up frozen cherries or fresh apples, topped with cinnamon or nutmeg.
To request to the chocolate lovers, create a must-have dessert of strawberries drizzled with visionless chocolate. It’s a sweet dish packed with antioxidants to help your kids finger their best. For increasingly healthy holiday tips for children, trammels out these dessert ideas.
5. Try Other Types of Pasta
Welcome an im-pasta-r. Revolutionize pasta night with a colorful rendition of your family’s favorite dish. Experiment with woebegone bean, chickpea, edamame, or lentil pasta to plant-power your way to largest health.
It’s moreover easy to create antioxidant-rich dishes with spiralized “spaghetti” made from carrots, zucchini, squash, or beets. Or, simply pop a spaghetti squash in the oven and let your family members do the work. Your kids will love to help scrape out the ‘noodles’ from the squash skin. Then, top the squash with tomato sauce, turkey meatballs, or whatever colorful pasta toppings that your household enjoys. Talk well-nigh an easy way to include yet flipside succulent veggie serving in the day.
But, if your kids don’t like tomato sauce, try serving the spaghetti squash with olive oil, Parmesan, or nutritional yeast, herbs, and spices. For the al-dente lovers, take out the squash a little early and embrace a crunchier “noodle” texture.
6. Embrace Tofu
Terrified by Tofu? While tofu may squint like a brick, it’s time to unravel lanugo those anti-tofu walls. Tofu is a zippo canvas for savor that is rich in protein and calcium (when fortified), making it the perfect volitional to meat. It can get transformed in a variety of ways and may help wastefulness glut calories during the holidays. Here are a few ways to enjoy it:
- Crisp it in the oven and pair it with your favorite holiday side dishes
- Incorporate it slantingly meat or dairy products as a plant-forward tideway to mealtime
- Add it to stir fries or soups
- Use it in puddings
- Add to ricotta for lasagna
- Blend into smoothies for a creamier texture that packs a protein-filled punch
Check out these tasty baked tofu nuggets to melt with your kids.
7. Use Dessert to Add Healthy Foods
Dessert is a unconfined way to incorporate legumes or vegetables into a meal. For instance, use woebegone beans in place of a portion of the flour in your pixie mixture. It adds a uplift of fiber, antioxidants, and prebiotics while maintaining it’s ooey-gooey, chocolatey taste.
Then, experiment with transforming chickpeas into a tasty edible cookie dough by putting it into the supplies processor with vanilla extract, nut butter, and visionless chocolate chips. Or, take wholesomeness of a ripe avocado by using it as a butter substitute in your favorite recipe. It adds creaminess while providing a healthier fat source than butter.
But, be sure to alimony your baked goods or no-baked dessert bites in the fridge to worth for all the perishable ingredients.
Pro holiday health tip: Try them all and see if your kiddo can guess the secret ingredient in these succulent treats.
For increasingly kid-friendly healthy holiday tips and activities, trammels out the Super Crew’s nutritious activities!
The post 7 Healthy Holiday Tips for Kids appeared first on SuperKids Nutrition.