KTK-Nutrition

Everyone knows fruits and vegetables are good for your health.   But many parents don’t know about half of what a kid eats should be fruits and vegetables.   MyPlate shows a plate with half the plate being fruits and veggies.   Many parents aren’t serving kids even one fruit or vegetable at a meal, let alone 2 at each meal.   In fact, statistics show only 22% of kids ages 2-5 are getting the recommended servings of vegetables. For older kids, it’s even worse with only 16% of kids ages 6-11 and only 11% of kids ages 12 to 18 are getting the recommended vegetable servings.   Even then the vegetable is often French fries or chips.        Many nutritionists and health care professionals offer tips to parents on how to get kids to eat their veggies (and their fruit).   One bite rule – child care centers often invoke this rule.   A child has to take at least one bite before they get to veto the food.   The child may find th...

How can you get your kids to eat more vegetables and fruit?   It is easy to get kids to eat junk food but when it comes to vegetables, it can be quite a struggle. So what can a parent or child care provider do?   Apparently, the same marketing techniques fast food and junk food advertiser’s use, can be used to get kids to eat more vegetables and more fruit.    A recent study in Pediatrics, Marketing Vegetables in Elementary School Cafeterias to Increase Uptake , looked at 10 elementary schools and tried different approaches to get kids to eat more veggies. A banner with vegetable characters displayed on the salad bar TV spots of vegetable characters talking about health education Both the vegetable characters displayed on the salad bar and the TV spots of vegetable characters The researchers studied the number of elementary students taking vegetables from the salad bar over a 6 week period.   So what worked the best?   The banner pictures of veget...