A few days ago we started a topic of those in summary plan, in which in a few words we try to explain as much as possible, in a concrete way, in order to consolidate the most important things to take into account when giving of eating our children.
As we said in that post, the most important thing is that they can make a balanced diet, without forgetting foods that parents dislike (not fair to them), eating a little of everything (or a little of many things), eating the amount they need and having a positive attitude towards food and the time to sit at the table to eat.
As we talked about all this in the previous post, today we will be a little more concrete with the issue of balanced diet, explaining what is this diet and what are the most important points.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day
A phrase that I always say to children in schools (sometimes I go as a nurse to give talks to children aged 6-7 years) is that “it is recommended have breakfast like the kings, eat like the princes and dine like the poor”, And I tell you because most children do it exactly the other way around, inverted: they eat well, eat well and eat little, badly and quickly (and when they grow a little longer, they don't even have breakfast).
When I ask them what they have for breakfast they tell me, mostly, a glass of milk. Some add cookies, or cereals, but many stay there, in the glass of milk. After several hours without eating anything because they have been sleeping, the ideal is that they give fuel to the body, basically because they have spent many hours and because they will need it for the rest of the day. If you are not hungry in the morning you will have to see how much you have dined (if you have a lot of dinner, it is likely that in the morning you will be unaware)
So at least they should get to school having had a glass of milk with something, which can be toasted with jam, with cheese, with some sausage or with tuna, can be cereals, bread, a snack, some fruit.
Then, in the middle of the morning, when they go out to the patio in the school, they should take a detail: half a sandwich, a fruit, a couple of cookies, something like that, so that the glucose does not go down much and they are not in the middle of the morning crawling through the halls . Eating this detail, this snack, you can also take advantage of the patio time for that, to make patio and also come home with some hunger.
It can't be that children go to school without eating just anything, at the time of the patio do not play because they are hungry and then come home an hour later to eat and are not hungry because they have recently swollen food at school. Has no sense.
The snack in a balanced diet
To snack, then a little more of the same. After eating and returning to school, on leaving they are hungry again and need to eat a little. If they don't they will arrive at dinner so hungry that they will eat too much, they will eat badly (when glucose is lacking the body takes us to the closet of insane things, because they are precisely those that have more glucose), they will gain more weight (the calories of the dinner do not burn sleeping) and the next day they will not be too hungry at wake up, thus closing the circle of an unbalanced diet in terms of quantities and schedules.
Lunch and dinner
For lunch and dinner, the only thing we have to do is to offer varied food and with varied food I mean raw vegetables and cooked vegetables, if it can be every day, natural fruit and not juice, because they take more fiber, milk and derivatives, being recommended about 500 ml per day (there are children who fall short and others who pass three villages, because between yogurts, cheese and milk they take more than a liter).
Legumes are also highly recommended, which are the big forgotten ones of current diets and that provide proteins that can become of high biological value if they are mixed with some cereal (bread, rice, ...), with the advantage of not having the meat fat (that is, more legumes and less meat).
Obviously, carbohydrates are necessary, which should make up approximately 55% of the diet, which are pasta, rice, bread, cereals and flour, among others.
It is also recommended that they eat varied meat (chicken, turkey, rabbit, pork, lamb, veal, ...), once a day about four or five days a week, leaving the sausage as an option to make snacks (for example) from time to time in when.
The fish can not miss either, whether white (monkfish, hake, sole, ...), or blue (salmon, tuna, sardines, ...), eating it on days when they do not eat meat (the typical meat to eat and fish for dinner usually leads to excess protein in the diet).
And finally, it remains to comment on the egg, the food with the proteins that best suit the needs of humans, that children should drink two or three times a week, either in the form of an omelet or hard-boiled egg (fried occasionally, well, too) and that have little to do with the eggs they know best (the Kinder).
Final recommendations for healthy infant feeding
Some final tips to finish rounding the topic could be the following:
- Avoid or control the consumption of candies or sweets between meals: always taking into account that it is better not to buy than to limit or prohibit if you already have them at home (“forbid it and I will want it more strongly”)
- Always offer those foods that you have not just accepted: it is a mistake not to offer what you do not want, because for a taste to be accepted it is necessary to try it several times. He puts a little dish with it (knowing that they probably won't try it) and if nobody gets too stressed and they see that we usually eat it, it's possible that one day they decide to try it.
- Put vegetable garnish to accompany the second dishes: a good way to eat vegetables, and even raw vegetables, is accompany the side dishes with garnish.
- Avoid excessive consumption of animal fat and salt: also avoiding eating many precooked foods, which usually carry more of both things than if we did at home.
- The balance of the diet is achieved with all the meals of the day: if you eat pasta, then we will eat vegetables, if you eat fruit in the morning, then in the afternoon a yogurt for a snack, for example.
- The best drink is the water.
- That the children eat in a varied way and that they eat it at ease It is one of the greatest contributions that parents can make for the health of our children.
Photos | Smooshmasterflex, Subewl on Flickr On Babies and more | Special Infant Feeding
