Babies, Parenting, Child Health, Infant Nutrition

Child Nutrition – 8 Building Blocks to a Healthy Diet

23.01.2010 | 9:34:18 am | Posted by colleenh

By Colleen Hurley, RD, Certified Kid’s Nutrition Specialist

Mum Mum’s recently reported on understanding a whole food based diet. Developing healthy eating habits is not as difficult as one might think, and starting children are born with a clean slate and pick up their eating habits by mirror others. Even if you understand the lingo, but are still having a difficult time grasping how to implement a healthy diet into your family’s meals here are 8 building blocks to a healthy diet:

Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes are the foundation of a healthy diet. Low in fat, rich in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients; these foods provide what your body needs and should represent the bulk of your diet.
The second principal is to eat those foods in a wide variety, as different foods provide different nutrients. Create a rainbow on your plate of colorful produce daily and mix up the types of grains and legumes for maximum benefit.
The rest of the foods should come from low-fat dairy, lean meat, fish, and poultry. Vegetarians and vegans can still get adequate protein without animal foods as long as the previous rules are applied.
Make sure to include dark leafy green, yellow, and orange vegetables and fruits daily as they not only contain disease-fighting antioxidants and natural immune boosters, but are also important nutrients for growing kids like vitamins A and C, as well as calcium.
Choose high fiber foods: this one is easy if you follow the previous steps! Fiber is abundant in whole grains, legumes, fruits, and veggies and is basically an added bonus for the good food choices.
Go for the healthy fats and limit the unhealthy: opt for fish, nuts, and nut butters as well as olive and canola oils over hydrogenated oils, butter, margarine, or trans fats.
Get enough calcium: calcium is critical to maintain healthy bones and teeth and kids need lots of calcium to support their growing bones. Low fat dairy is an option, but if there is a dairy allergy in the house, emphasize non-dairy calcium sources like leafy greens, almonds, soy nuts, beans, or fortified orange juice.
Have sugary foods, processed grains, and high sodium snacks in moderation: this is the last step because these types of food can be eaten only when the proper foundation of a healthy diet is laid. Just like you can’t put a roof on a house until it is built from the ground up, refined or processed snack foods fit best on top of the healthy diet building blocks.

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The Baby Mum-Mum blog discusses everything to do with babies and parenting with a focus on child health and child development. Baby Mum-Mum is a healthy, easy to digest baby rice snack that is enjoyed by babies and mothers around the world for its portability, gluten free ingredients and great taste.

Announcement:

On February 22, the FDA issued letters relating to labelling to 22 food companies, including several baby food manufacturers. We were advised by the FDA that we are not permitted to print the statements "Low in Fat" or "No added fat or oils" on our Baby Mum-Mum packaging.

Although these statements are true and each serving of Baby Mum-Mum does not contain any fat, the FDA has brought to our attention that these claims are technically not allowed on our packaging solely because the product is intended for consumption by infants and children under 4 years of age.

In the future, these claims will be removed from our packaging.

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