Make Healthy Meals

Once you’re past the baby food stage, it can be pretty challenging to keep your toddler on a healthy diet. Toddlers love all kinds of unhealthy foods. Processed meats, candy, French fries, juice… most toddlers would cheerfully live on such a diet.

However, you don’t have to let them. There is no rule saying that you must allow your toddler to eat all those common yet unhealthy foods just because they’re easy to chew.

I’ve seen mothers of toddlers complain that all their child wants to drink is juice, juice, juice! It doesn’t sound so bad if they’re using 100% juice, except that many juices contain vitamin C and not much else nutritionally.

My own method has always been to limit juice to a maximum of one glass a day. In all honesty, though, most days they don’t get any. Juice is not required for a healthy diet. It’s better than soda, certainly, but it really doesn’t have that much going for it. Alternatively, water the juice down. Toddlers will generally drink it down anyhow.

If your kids want a fruity treat, make them a smoothie. Freeze some fruit, then pull out the blender, and mix up the fruit with some juice. You can even add a carrot or two. We often keep some smoothie in the refrigerator available for the whole family.

Keeping processed meats away can be challenging. Tots love hot dogs and chicken nuggets. While toddlers do need a certain level of fat in their diets for healthy development, there are better ways to get it. If your children are eating these, at least try to limit how often they are served. Encourage them to eat better sources of fat. Keep using whole milk for them until they are 2 years old. Whole fat yogurt is good too. I like the YoBaby brand. The fat is necessary for energy and brain development.

Many parents have trouble getting enough vegetables in their toddler. I’ve rarely had a problem.

First of all, veggies were the first baby foods I introduced, so my kids got used to something other than sweet right off the bat. And now that my kids are older, they think frozen vegetables (lightly defrosted for younger toddlers) make a great snack. They’ll beg for frozen veggies.

Many toddlers also show a fondness for raw or very lightly cooked vegetables. My son loves cucumber slices, bell pepper, broccoli, zucchini, carrots and so forth. I keep in mind how crunchy vegetables should be for his age, but he does like them not too soft.

Toddlers do need to snack a little bit, but keep it appropriate and keep it away from mealtimes. Just think about it - do you snack between meals? Most people do. It’s much harder for a toddler to go for the entire time between meals without a snack than it is for an adult. Keep healthy snacks around. Cheese, sugar snap peas, fruit and so forth are very popular in my house. Crackers are as well, and much better in most cases than potato chips.

Just as in your own diet, a healthy diet for your toddler just takes planning. You can allow more fat than is healthy for you as an adult, but try to balance that with teaching good eating habits.

Share your thoughts on this post, recipe ideas or anything else relevant.