How to make healthy food tasty for children?

For many parents, daily meals are a small drama. The child prefers to eat exclusively from fries, frozen pizza and sweets. Now the child needs a lot of nutrients to grow - a strategy has to be found, with which the child finds healthy food delicious and eats with pleasure.

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The foundation for a person's sense of taste is laid in early childhood. What he gets to eat in his first year will shape his preferences for the rest of his life. How big the impact can be, we experience today: until twenty years ago, substitute milk was still mixed with vanillin. Researchers have found that people fed as a child with vanillin-rich foods still prefer foods that contain vanillin. Former nursing children tasted better without vanilla supplementation. Although this is an extreme example, in principle it applies to all other foods, especially sugar or junk food, which have been added to flavor enhancers. In some children, the parents have done everything but "right" and yet they hate everything that could even be approximately healthy.

Healthy food - and no one has noticed

One way to subjugate children's healthy food is to hide it in accepted foods. The cauliflower is packed in the lasagna and the carrots in the spaghetti Bolognese. Pizza contains a portion of spinach or tomato and the applesauce to the pancake is self-cooked and sugar-free. For dessert, homemade ice cream with fruit is available, for breakfast there is the cereal with yoghurt and finely cut fruit.

With recipes that hide healthy foods, you can make your child eat the necessary amount of nutrients and vitamins without protest. This spares one or the other drama at the dinner table and a bad-tempered hungry child.

Make it a eyecandy - food beautifully prepared

Visually inclined children can often be seduced by well-prepared plates for healthy food. The fish sticks are decorated with tomato slices, star-shaped sliced ​​cucumber slices and apple wedges. Often, children then eat the healthy portions of the dish, just because it looks so delicious. If your child can then make the plate himself, it will eat his own work even better.

Even raw food or fruit platter, which are prepared as finger food or with skewers, usually arrive well. Easy to access and enjoy reminiscent of the beloved snacking and seduces the children for a healthy enjoyment.

Homemade it tastes twice as good

When shopping, let the child choose what he likes and taste and motivate him to help with the cooking afterwards. The help must of course be adapted to the development of the child, even to avoid accidents. The bigger the child, the more responsible tasks it can fulfill, but even the little ones can put the sliced ​​carrots in the saucepan or help wash the lettuce. If a child feels that they have cooked it, the courts will like to eat it in order to honor their own work.

The bigger the child becomes, the harder it is to enforce a healthy diet. Appeal to the understanding of the child and calmly compromise, even if they carry a touch of blackmail: dessert is after five bites carrots, ice cream is possible, if before an apple or a banana is consumed.

As so often, however, parents are the best role model. Incidentally, if you've always had a healthy diet and your child has had a healthy diet in the past, then you can count on your child's refusal to be merely a phase that will pass by in no small amount of time.