Better nutrition starts not with cutting out the bad, but with adding in the good. Fill your children’s meals with healthful, high-quality food and you’ll eventually squeeze out the bad stuff.
I’m not going to pretend that getting a child to eat what’s good for him isn’t sometimes a struggle. “A lot of parents tell me, ‘My kids don’t like healthy foods,’” says David Katz, MD, an associate clinical professor of epidemiology and public health at Yale Medical School. “‘Finicky’ is not an excuse. You never hear a parent say, ‘My child doesn’t like to look both ways before he crosses the street.’ They tell him to do it. More kids today will die of complications from bad foods they eat than they will from tobacco, drugs, and alcohol.”
So how do you teach the basics of nutrition to a 7-year-old? Even we grownups have trouble understanding which vitamins and minerals we need more of and which complicated chemical ingredients we need to avoid.
Well, here’s a simple trick: Just teach your kids to eat as many different colors as they can. And no, I’m not talking about mixing the red, green, and purple Skittles. I’m talking about adding as much of a mix of fruits and vegetables as possible. That’s because the colors represented in foods are indicators of nutritional value—and different colors mean different vitamins and minerals.
Not everything on this list is going to appeal to your child’s appetite. But there’s enough variation here that he or she can squeeze one food from each category into a day’s worth of eating. For a fun project, make a multicolor checklist, and have your kid check off each color as he or she eats it throughout the day.
Or do what our parents did and sell them on the kid-friendly benefits trapped inside of spinach, carrots, and the like. Each group of produce offers seriously cool “superpowers” that appeal to kids’ deepest desires to dominate math quizzes and monkey bars alike. Feel free to sell these as hard as you want. Hey, even if it didn’t end up making you as strong as Popeye, you still ate your spinach, right?