Healthy Recipes For Kids Gives Them Every Chance To Live Joyful Healthy Lives!

Why Healthy Recipes for Kids?

"Why bother looking at healthy recipes for kids?" you may be asking.

Well we all worry about our children's health. With 1 out of every 3 children in the West either overweight or obese our concerns are justified. It pays for us to understand that how kids eat contributes to this obesity epidemic and that healthy eating guidelines are important keys to living a healthy lifestyle.

Breast milk contains generous amounts of protein, essential fatty acids, and carbohydrates essential for infant health. It also tastes sweet. Nature primes us in this way to enjoy sweet tasting foods.

Before the industrialized revolution our diets contained only the sweets that came from natural foods like starchy vegetables, grains, fruit and the little honey that people gathered. With industrialization the processing of food became wide spread.

Most Processed Foods Are Not Healthy Foods

Grain and cane sugar were among the least expensive products to process and market. They flooded the market and have become the mainstay of our modern diets.

Most packaged foods contain generous amounts of processed flours or processed sugar or both. Trouble is they are quite simply addictive! This makes them very tempting for children and adults alike and we end up eating them in large quantities and feeding them to our children without even realizing how much we take in.

Manufactured foods include other processed ingredients like hydrogenated oils found in most commercially manufactured cookies, crackers, cakes and other baked goods. Many manufactured foods contain preservatives, food coloring and other food additives. All these additives make these foods more appealing in some way or give them a longer shelf life.

Healthy Recipes For Kids Do Not Contain Lots Of Additives!

The long shelf life and addictive quality of processed foods benefits the manufacturers obviously. But research into the effects of processed foods and additives on our health and particularly our children's health, shows that they do not benefit us - the end consumers.

We all know sugar contributes to tooth decay. It also makes us fat - check out the pages on low fat diets and low carbohydrate diets.

It contributes to one of the most dreaded killers of our times - heart disease. Younger and younger people are suffering from heart disease these days, including young children.

See our page on heart healthy recipes for more details on how sugar contributes to the onset of heart disease.

So what can we do about all this?

What We Eat Really Does Matter!

First - we need to understand and believe that what we eat really does affect our health.

Second - we need to really want to do something about it, and who wouldn't, given half the chance, want to better their children's chances at a healthier life?

Third - we need to understand that we can do something about it.

Get Educated on What is Healthy to Eat and Please Cook Heaps of Healthy Recipes for Kids

We need to educate ourselves and become more discerning consumers.

We need to read labels carefully watching out for processed white flour, coloring and preservatives and sugar in all its guises. Please remember - healthy recipes for kids do not contain lots of preservatives or artificial coloring!

Keeping packaged foods to a minimum will help.

The best foods for health live outside the aisles of your supermarket - whole food closest to their natural state:

Fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, poultry, free range eggs, nuts and seeds, dairy, cold pressed oils, whole grains and their products.

Here Are 10 Tips for Healthy Recipes For Kids

1. Aim to serve meals that are 50% vegetables with smaller amounts of lean protein such as chicken and fish, lean meat, eggs/dairy and whole grains such as whole-wheat pasta and brown rice.

2. Serve veggies - like broccoli, snap peas, cucumbers, capsicum or carrot and celery sticks spread with peanut butter, hummus or spreadable cheeses like Ricotta, in between meals for snacks, or before dinner time, or whenever kids stalk the kitchen!

3. Plan Healthy Recipes Together - Pick a fortnight's worth of favorite quick and healthy recipes. Write each on index cards. List ingredients for the recipes on one side and instructions for preparation on the other. Use it when grocery shopping, and avoid last minute dinner hour panic and the temptation to regularly opt for take out.

4. Vary the recipes and try new ones with the kids regularly. That way, you will keep the kids interested and avoid getting into a recipe rut.

5. Shop alone while the kids are at other activities. This will prevent you giving in to pressure for sweet treats and other junk food.

6. Let kids help with meal preparation - Letting the kids cook the meals they have planned is the best way to teach them to enjoy eating a healthy variety of foods. Kids eat more variety if you let them get to know the ingredients and work with them. They'll also learn valuable life skills.

7. Become a sneaky chef - Substitute lower-fat ground beef or turkey instead of high-fat ground beef in recipes for tacos, burritos, meat loaf, burgers, chilli and other dishes.

8. Encourage kids to drink more water and fewer soft drinks by using fun water bottles, or plain soda water and adding a shot of cranberry juice or orange juice and ice cubes in summer.

9. Find tasty trade-offs - Consider low-fat vanilla yogurt with berries, whole-grain cookies. Choose individual servings of desserts such as 100-calorie frozen fudge bars if your child loves ice cream. Or just go out for an occasional ice cream cone.

10. Pack School lunches - or teach the kids to pack their own lunches using whole fresh foods. Avoiding the packaged stuff will benefit their health and your wallet.

Here are a few Healthy Recipes For Kids

Healthy Recipes For Kids Breakfast:

A Wake Up Smoothie
Wiz in a food processor or blender -

Ingredients -
1 1/4 cups orange juice
1 banana
1 1/4 cups frozen berries, such as raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and/or strawberries
1/2 cup low-fat silken tofu or low-fat plain yogurt
1 tablespoon honey or zylitol

Healthy Recipes For Kids Snack:

Homemade trail mix
This is a quick and easy snack treat you can make at home with the kids.
Just mix the ingredients altogether -

Ingredients -
1 to 2 tablespoons of dark chocolate chips. (The chips make the mix look like a treat)
2 tablespoons of dried fruit
1/2 cup of whole-grain cereal
2 tablespoons of chopped nuts or sesame seeds.

Lunch:

Pita Pizzas

Small wholemeal rounds of Pita bread make excellent quick pizza bases.

Spread with lycopene (antioxidant) rich sugar free tomato paste. Put on toppings of your children's choice, then sprinkle with grated cheese and Italian seasoning herbs, if your children like these.

Encourage them to pile up the fresh veggies like capsicum, zucchini, sliced onion or shallots, mushrooms, tomatoes, olives add cold meats, chicken, turkey, or a little ham.

Put the pizzas under the oven grill for a few minutes to melt the cheese and heat them up.

My 7 year old, likes making the vegetable slices and pieces into faces for fun.

Healthy Recipes For Kids Dinner:

Cowboy Casserole

Ingredients -
1 pound lean ground beef
1 heaped tablespoon tomato paste
½ chopped onion
1 cup cooked and drained brown rice and vegetable pasta spirals
2x 12 ounce cans of low sugar baked beans
½ tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon stock powder
½ teaspoon cumin
¼ teaspoon chilli powder
Pinch of oregano

Preheat the oven to 180C or 450F. Heat a medium sized pan, add the meat and stir till browned. Add onion and keep stirring until the onions soften.

Mix in the two cans of baked beans, spices, sauce and tomato paste and then sprinkle in the stock powder. Mix really well then add the cooked pasta.

Pour the whole mixture into an ovenproof casserole-type dish and cover with grated cheese.

Heat in the oven till the cheese is melting and turning brown.

Serve with salad and wholemeal garlic bread.

Healthy Recipes For Kids Dessert:

Mango Strawberry Snow Cones

Ingredients
2 mangoes, peeled and chopped
1 pint strawberries, hulled and sliced
1 lime juiced, plus wedges for garnish
8 cups ice
Mint leaves, for garnish

Directions
Put the mangoes and strawberries into a blender or food processor. Squeeze in the lime juice and puree.
Crush ice in a food processor or blender until it is very fine, like snow.
Pile the crushed ice into dessert dishes; pour the fruit puree over until you can't see any more white.
Garnish with lime wedges and mint; serve immediately.