How do your kids score on healthy eating?
Finally - a fun tool that will have your kids wanting to eat their vegetables!
It may sound too good to be true, but the new, Healthy Eating Scorecard from Birds Eye actually helps parents encourage their children to eat more vegetables every day ? it might even have your kids looking forward to eating them!
Leading nutritionist, food commentator and Mum, Catherine Saxelby, is a huge supporter of the Scorecard.
?The Healthy Eating Scorecard provides a fun vehicle for children to actively get involved with meal planning, preparations and ultimately, a healthy lifestyle.
?As every parent knows, getting your children to eat healthy meals is not as easy as it sounds, which is the exact reason why the Healthy Eating Scorecard was developed.
?From birth, kids have an innate preference for sweetness so they?ll often be happy eating fruit but refuse to eat vegetables. Most vegetables don?t have the same level of sweetness that fruit does, although carrots, peas, beetroot, sweet potato and pumpkin are higher in sugars and are more readily accepted by children.
?Vegetables such as cabbage, brussel sprouts, cauliflower and capsicum have bitter flavour profiles that many children find disagreeable. Research shows that kids are born with four times more taste buds than adults 1 which accounts for their rejecting strong flavours and being fussy. However, this often changes as they grow older so it?s wise to keep offering them ?little tastes?.
?The Healthy Eating Scorecard is helping these little tastes become a regular occurrence. It?s really so easy to use: simply download the Scorecard, put it on the fridge and each time a serve of vegetables is eaten, the kids put a sticker or tick on the scorecard. At the end of the week, they count the stickers with you to see if they have become veggie-chomping champs!? explained Catherine.
In another recent survey of 500 children aged between two and 14 years 2, the underrated brussel sprout was voted the worst vegetable, with many kids claiming they won?t eat vegetables in general unless they taste like chocolate ? or are rewarded!
Whilst vegetables can?t magically be made to taste like chocolate, the Healthy Eating Scorecard is a sure-fire way to keep track of how many vegetables are being eaten, with the added incentive of being rewarded for doing so over the longer term. The simple yet effective design also helps parents overcome ?fussy eater?s syndrome? by using positive reinforcement techniques to encourage children to eat five serves of vegetables every day.
The Birds Eye Healthy Eating Scorecard can be downloaded free from www.birdseye.com.au. The site also has over 50 kid-friendly recipes, tips and hints which aim to help your children eat more vegetables; in some recipes the kids will never even know they?re actually eating them!
