Healthy Living

After you’ve tossed the last empty sun block bottle and shaken all the sand out of the beach bag your mind turns to thoughts of school, soccer practice and packing lunches.

School began last week and if your child does not eat hot lunch you began asking the nearly inevitable daily question: “What do you want for lunch?”

We all want our children to eat a nutritious lunch and nibble on carrot sticks for snack, but it’s never that simple.

As a dietitian and mother, I can be particularly obsessive on this topic.

One child loves fruit, but avoids vegetables and most forms of protein. While my older daughter will gobble down broccoli, she avoids most fruits.

Shopping for lunch and snack items has become a less than ideal chore. The following suggestions include things I have tried to expand my daughters’ palates and still provide them a balanced diet.

Have your children help plan and make meals. Take them grocery shopping, have them pick out snacks in the produce department and dairy. When your child plays a role in choosing and preparing a meal they are more inclined to actually eat it.

Keep a checklist for each child listing what they enjoy from each food group. Have them help you create the list.

Make the lunches as appealing as possible. Fun shapes with cookie cutters, meat and cheese roll ups, small thermoses for soup or left over pasta and sauce are a few ideas to keep lunch enticing.

Build in a small treat. Foods such as popcorn, a small bag of trail mix, a low fat pudding cup or jello, or chocolate chip granola bar will appeal to your child’s taste buds yet still as a qualify healthy choice.

If too many calories is a concern, avoid juice boxes, and put in a water bottle or money to buy low-fat milk at school. Whole milk is no longer offered at most schools.

A great choice for flavored water is the Capri Sun Roaring Waters. The packaging appeals to the kids – and is calorie-free.

Here is a list of meal and snack ideas I’ve accumulated over time to keep my daughters’ lunches healthy and appealing. Try to incorporate at least one item from each category when planning lunch and snacks, and mix it up -- kids get bored easily.

• Fruit: Fresh berries, sliced apples with peanut butter or caramel to dip, applesauce, pitted cherries, watermelon cubes, raisins, plums, peaches, etc…

• Vegetables: Carrot sticks, sliced peppers, raw broccoli, or even lightly salted soy beans found in the frozen food section (believe it or not my kids love these). Serve the raw veggies with a low fat dressing or better yet, take plain low fat Greek yogurt and add a dry ranch dressing mix to create a dip. You’ll gain the protein and calcium from the yogurt and your kids won’t notice the difference.

• Protein: Peanut butter, almond butter, low fat cheese sticks, Chobani kids Greek yogurt, GoGurts, trail mix with an assortment of nuts, low sodium deli meats, leftover chili or pasta and meat sauce in a thermos. Try adding shredded light cheddar to your next box of macaroni and cheese. This will boost calcium and protein and stays warm in the thermos.

• Grains: Whole grain crackers, whole wheat mini bagels with peanut butter, wraps, popcorn, goldfish, pretzels, 100% whole wheat bread or whole grain white, Barilla Plus pasta.

Rarely are we blessed with perfect eaters, myself included. But there are things we can do as parents to make school food and snacks healthier – and fun.

Wendy Kane is a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator in the Backus Hospital Diabetes Management Center. This column should not replace advice or instruction from your personal physician. If you want to comment on this column or others, visit the Healthy Living blog at www.backushospital.org/backus-blogs or e-mail Ms. Kane or any of the Healthy Living columnists at healthyliving@wwbh.org