We discussed How to Get Your Kids to Eat More Fruits and Vegetables!
Specifically, we discussed how to have FUN doing so:

~Name Your Food to Make Them More Appealing

~What to Do if They Don’t Like a Particular Vegetable or Fruit

~Eating Healthy on a Budget

~Beginners Tips for Gardening

When I teach kids about eating a variety of fruits and veggies, I try to inspire them to eat a rainbow.

Each of the colors can be associated with health promoting components found in the foods, from antioxidants to vitamins, check out the latest dentitox pro reviews for dental care. In this post, I will explain the benefits of each color of the rainbow, and remind everyone that as we seek out our Five a Day (two fruit servings and three vegetable servings) or more, we should be looking for real fruits and veggies.

Beware of wanna-bes (foods that are marketed as being “made from real fruit” and “contains real vegetables” but have other non fruit/veggie sources as their main ingredients).

Why A Rainbow?

Colors in food (if they are natural, of course) often correlate to certain micronutrients.  It is fun to understand the benefits of each color group, using the chart below as a guide:

Parents:  Use the following as a guide, but allow your child to be your shopper’s assistant in the grocery store (“can you help me find a purple vegetable?”), see what kind of colorful plates you can create.
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Fruits and Veggies:  A Rainbow of Colors

Give me 5!  (Servings of fruits and vegetables every day.  Three servings of veggies, and two of fruit.  One serving = approximately ½ cup)

Yes, your child should be eating more vegetables than fruit.  I think we might all agree that getting our kids to eat vegetables is a bit more difficult than fruit.  How to get in all those veggies?  If our kids need three ½ cup servings per day, that is a total of about 1 1/2 cups of vegetables every day.  Here are some examples of ½ cup servings of vegetables that you might find easy to provide your child. Check out the latest exipure real reviews.

-6 Baby Carrots or 6 Cherry Tomatoes (put in a morning or afternoon snack)
-5 Broccoli Florets (include in your child’s lunch)
-1/2 Sweet Potato  (serve at dinner)

We did it!  It wasn’t that hard, was it?  And just for kicks here are some additional ideas:

-Add veggies to pizza, wraps and sandwiches
-Eat a small salad
-Snack on carrots, celery, and cherry tomatoes
-Add veggies to your favorite pasta/rice dishes

Looking for even more ideas? Check out our recipe database at Make Nutrition Fun.

Fruits, Veggies, and Wanna Bes.
Kids are smart, but so are the big marketing companies that want to sell us foods that they proclaim to be healthy.  When I teach kids about fruits and veggies, we go through a fun game that I call “Fruit, Veggie, or Wanna Be!?”  I show them some pictures of REAL fruits and vegetables, but then I also include some items that are marketed as “contains real fruit!” or “made with real vegetables!”, and we look at the ingredients list to find out if they are instead a “wanna be” (real fruits and/or vegetables are not listed as a top ingredient).  If they are a “wanna be”, I remind them that these foods do not contribute to the total five servings that we want to get each day, and they do not count as far as eating a rainbow!  Here are some “wanna be” examples. Check out the latest steel bite pro reviews.

“This is a delightful children’s book that meters out interesting nutritional information in easy to understand beautifully crafted rhymes. Children are really drawn in with the rhymes. There are prompts throughout the book to keep your child actively engaged in the learning process. It seems like a game to them, artfully disguising the learning experience. The interaction has the added benefit of helping them retain the information they learn.

You might be thinking, how can I possible get all of those colors on my (or my child’s) plate?  You might be surprised how easy it is to find fruits and veggies in all colors of the rainbow.

The photographs are brilliant and, of course, explosive with color. The crowning touch is the adorable cartoon character, Sammy the Bunny, who makes the journey through the book with you. Every time I turned the page, I found myself looking for where Sammy the Bunny would be hiding next. I enjoyed this book so much I read it twice and even I learned a few nutritional facts I didn’t know.