Breakfast Can Improve How Well Your Kids Eat Dinner

One of the downsides of the nutrition mindset is that it encourages parents to examine the immediate meal.

Actually, sometimes the nutrition mindset focuses parents' attention on the immediate mouthful! But the habits approach encourages you to step back and look at patterns.

Breakfast can change HOW your kids eat.

Here's a favorite post that explains...

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Yes, breakfast is important nutritionally, but it is also the biggest missed opportunity for teaching your kids to eat right.

You’ve heard the nutrition news a zillion times before: kids need to eat breakfast.  It makes them healthier and better students at school.  (Though I’m not sure kids need the chocolate chip pancakes at IHOP which come in at over 600 calories, or the flapjacks at your local diner which are probably just as fantastic.)

But you probably haven't thought about breakfast from the habits perspective.

Used correctly, breakfast can teach kids to eat new foods.   Used incorrectly... well, you probably know what happens.

Here are three ways to get the most out of breakfast:

1) Use breakfast to get kids used to the idea that they eat different foods on different days and they’ll be more open to new foods.

Most parents settle on the same 1 or 2 things to feed kids in the morning.  It’s a busy time, and we want our kids to eat breakfast (after all, we know how important this meal is).

But feeding kids the same stuff all the time gets them used to eating the same stuff all the time.  No wonder they balk when different stuff comes around - even if different comes later in the day.

Read Make "New” Work For You.

Tip 1: Rotate the breakfast foods you serve.  You don’t need to introduce foods your kids have never eaten.  Simply establish the procedure of not serving the same food two days in a row.  If you must serve cereal every day, at least switch up the brands and the flavors.

2) Use breakfast to expand the taste, texture, appearance, aroma and temperature of foods your kids will eat and they’ll be more open to new foods.

Most parents think they are providing a variety of foods, but they’re not. Breakfast foods tend to all have basically the same taste, texture, aroma, appearance and temperature. 

Toast, cereal, bagels, muffins, French toast, pancakes … they’re all relatively bland, bready products.  Some offer a little more sweet, or a little more crunch, but the variation is minimal.  That’s because the main ingredient is the same: refined flour.

Read The Ingredients Game.

Tip 2: Pay attention to which tastes your kids gravitate towards and then slowly introduce them to other flavors.  Do the same thing with texture (do they only like crunchy?), appearances (are they white or beige eaters?), aromas and temperatures.

Read The Variety Masquerade.

3) Use breakfast to reduce your kids’ dependence on sweet and fat-laden foods and they’ll be more open to new foods.

A lot of what we feed our kids in the morning fosters eating habits that run counter to the healthy stuff we’re always begging them to eat.

Do our kids really need to develop a lifelong taste preference for butter, cream cheese, and sugar?  Not if you want them to eat broccoli.

Tip 3: Teach your children that …

• Butter is an ingredient in food, not a topping on food.  Yes, it’s yummy but it’s also 100% fat, and nothing else. Get your kids in the habit of eating toast topped with peanut butter, cottage cheese, hummus, guacomole... anything but butter. 

• Cream cheese is a treat, not a staple. According to the USDA cream cheese doesn’t fulfill your kid’s daily dairy requirement because it doesn’t have enough calcium.  Instead, it’s a fat delivery system - thinkcream cheese - that packs in 100 calories per ounce. Most people slather on at least 2 ounces. Read about USDA Milk Group.

• “Children’s cereals” – which have up to 85% more sugar than those marketed to adults -- are treat snacks, not breakfast foods.  Maybe this is one reason most kids have such a sweet tooth! Read A Spoonful of Sugar? 

• Syrup.  Is there really any point?  Think Coke without the bubbles.  Ounce for ounce Aunt Jemima’s syrup has 5 times as much sugar as Coke.  (Coke has 3.3g sugar per ounce; the syrup has 16g per ounce. A point of reference: those little packets of syrup served at fast food joints are approximately 2 ounces.) Teach your kids to enjoy pancakes with jelly, fresh fruit or -- here's a radical idea -- plain naked (then they'll know what pancakes really taste like).

When it comes to teaching kids to eat new foods every meal counts, especially breakfast.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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Source: Zinczenko, D. and M. Goulding, 2008. Eat This Not That for Kids. New York, NY: Rodale. p. 74; product labels.

When Food is More Than Food

Emotional eating can begin by age 2.

Yet...

• The discussion about obesity centers around what people eat, not why they eat. And,
• The discussion about when to teach eating habits centers around school-aged children.

Don't you think that's an example of too little, too late?

As I finish up my book (due out in January!!), here's an old post on how good parents sometimes teach bad habits.

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If you are good you can have a cookie!

Who hasn’t resorted to a little behavioral bribe?  Food—or more specifically the lovely cookie—has the power to produce miraculous results: kids who wait patiently through phone calls, lines at the bank and even grocery shopping trips that take forever.

“You can have an ice cream if you play quietly by yourself for another 15 minutes.”

Don’t do it.  It might just affect your children’s lifelong eating habits.

A 2003 Yale University study found that adults who remember their parents using food to control their behavior have higher rates of binge eating.  They are also more likely to be excessively concerned about their weight, suffer from weight fluctuations, and other problems such as chronic dieting.  Yikes.

Food works to reinforce behavior in the short term, but it also communicates mixed messages to children about the role that food should play in their lives.

So much parental energy goes into encouraging healthy eating, but then we reward our kids for behaving well by giving them…brownies!

These peas are good for you.  These cookies are just plain good.

It makes sense that when parents reward children with dessert, these same children grow into adults who reward themselves with dessert.  But it’s not just dessert consumption that is affected.  A 2001 study found people whose families used food as a reward for success and good behavior were more likely to be bulimic than people whose families did not use these tactics.

1) The key to teaching kids to eat right is to keep your eyes on the long term prize.

Nutrition puts enormous pressure on parents to get the right foods into kids.  And that pressure makes parents do crazy things.  If you’ve ever found yourself wrestling under the table to get one more slurp of applesauce into your little superstar then you know what I mean.

One study of college students founds that 72% of the students who had been forced to eat food as a child said they still wouldn’t eat that food today. 

And a substantial body of research shows that pressuring kids to eat more makes them eat less.  Give up your membership in the Clean Your Plate Club.  Instead, pay attention to the long-term lessons your kids are learning.

2) Carefully use rewards to encourage healthy eating, but avoid using food to encourage behaving.

In an earlier post I talked about the power of rewards so I wouldn’t blame you if right about now you were thinking that I am the contradiction queen. I don't think I am.

Giving stars as a reward for eating behavior—trying new foods, for instance, or eating vegetables before the rest of the meal—is completely different than using food as a reward for desirable behavior. Read Star Power.

I'm not going to dispute that rewarding your kids with foods they really like will get their attention, but pulling out the big guns (and let’s be honest, nobody bribes good behavior with broccoli) overpowers kids.  Really big rewards produce really big results because of the amount of pressure they apply. What's a poor kid to do?

But while using food coercively works, it won't position your kids to develop a positive relationship with food. Research confirms this.

 3) Look for non-food rewards that work.

Here are a few ideas to get you started.  Allow your kids to:

• Plan a special outing.
• Pick games for family game night.
• Choose a movie for the family to watch.
• Select a sport for everyone to play together.
• Stay up a few minutes past bedtime.
• Allow a sleepover.
• Have a few friends over for a special “party.”
• Choose a small toy from a special toychest.
• Play an extra computer game.

I’ve often said that you shouldn’t sacrifice your kids’ long term eating habits for the sake of the immediate meal.

Here I’m saying, don’t sacrifice your kids’ long term eating habits to stave off the immediate meltdown.   Instead, arm yourself with an arsenal of non-food rewards and set your kids up for a life time of healthy eating.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

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Sources:

Batsell, R. W., Jr., A. S. Brown, M. Ansfield, E., and G. Y. Paschall. 2002. “"You Will Eat All of That!": a Retrospective Analysis of Forced Consumption Episodes.” Appetite 38: 211-19.

Puhl, R. M. and M. B. Schwartz. 2003. “If You Are Good You Can Have a Cookie: How Memories of Childhood Food Rules Link to Adult Eating Behaviors.” Eating Behaviors 4: 283-93.

PediaSure SideKicks: The Sure Way to Ruin Your Kids' Eating Habits

PediaSure would like you to think that SideKicks will help you balance out your picky eater’s uneven diet.

What SideKicks will really help you do is train your kids' tiny tastebuds away from healthy foods and towards junk. In other words, they'll help ruin your kids' eating habits.

The SideKicks website says:

Each shake is a source of 7g protein, 3g fiber, and 25 essential vitamins and minerals for kids who are growing fine but missing nutrients.

PediaSure SideKicks is a fancy form of sugar water.

  

OK. It is a fancy form of sugar water with added protein. And added vitamins.

Big deal. Kids don't eat nutrients; they eat flavors. And flavors shape habits.

Each bottle of PediaSure SideKicks has 17 grams—more than 4 teaspoons— of sugar.

• One Kellogg’s Pop-Tart Frosted Blueberry has 17g of sugar.
• Three Oreo Cookies (34g) have only 14 grams of sugar. 

In fact, sugar is the second ingredient, after water. Check out the ingredients.

If you have trouble getting your kids to eat vegetables, look at how many sweet foods you feed them. 

• Ask yourself how PediaSure SideKids will help your kids like vegetables.
• Then, read Training Tiny Taste Buds (I've reprinted it below) and see how many foods have less sugar than juice (and PediaSure).

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If you give your kids juice for the nutrients, you would be better off giving them Froot Loops.

Froot Loops has more vitamins than juice.  It also has less sugar – 12g per serving instead of 20-23g in the typical 6.75-ounce juice box. 

Of course, giving your kids Froot Loops every day would teach them the wrong habits, and it would get their taste buds used to too much sugar, but that’s the point.

Most 100% apple, grape, punch and other “kid-friendly” blends have around 3g of sugar per ounce.  For a point of reference, Coke has 3.3g of sugar per ounce.

True, Juicy Juice is made from juice concentrate – a natural sugar -- but your kids’ taste buds can’t tell the difference. 

• According to the USDA, juice concentrate is a euphemism for added sugar. In other words, sugar is sugar.

• 100% juice may give your children 100% of their Vitamin C needs, but that’s only because the Vitamin C has been added.  In other words, it’s fortified sugar.

To drive the point home, here are 10 other delicacies that have less sugar than juice.

Some of these treats have vitamins, and others have less desirable tidbits such as fat and calories, but here is how the sugar stacks up.

Compared to the 20-23g of sugar in the typical Juicy Juice box…

1) Juice Drinks: Capri Sun Original fruit drinks have only 16g of sugar per 6.75-ounce pouch. Even 8 ounces of Sunny D has only 20g.

2) Sweetened Cereals:  A bowl of Fruity Pebbles has 11g of sugar.  Even Count Chocula has only 12g per bowl.

3) Fruit Leather:  One pouch of Stretch Island Fruit Leather, Autumn Apple flavor, has 9g of sugar.

4) Fruit Flavored Candy:  One pouch of Kellogg’s Barbie Fruit Flavored Snack has 13g of sugar.

5) Popsicles: One Dreyer’s Fruit Bar Grape has 20g of sugar.

6) Pop-Tarts:  One Kellogg’s Pop-Tart Frosted Blueberry has 17g of sugar.

7) Cereal Bars: Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Mixed Berry Bar has 12g of sugar.

8) Donuts:  One Dunkin’ Donuts Strawberry Frosted Donut has 14g of sugar.

9) Flavored Water: One pouch of Capri Sun Roarin’ Waters has only 7g of sugar.(Isn't that a lot for water?) 

Guess what?  Even some chocolate beats juice in the sugar department.

10) Chocolate: 8 Caramel-Filled Hershey’s Kisses have 21g of sugar. One Reese’s Peanut Butter Big Cup has19g of sugar.

Kids come out of the shoot ready for sweet, but you don’t need to encourage it. 

If your kids have a limited palate, especially when it comes to veggies, I recommend you look to juice as a hidden culprit.

In fact, juice is one of the easiest places to clean up your kids' eating act.

Read Juice: Apple, Grape, Punch; Coke Beats Juice.

Juices aren’t all created equal - orange juice has something to offer - but the juices and juice drinks that most kids consume are some combination of apple, pear and/or grape juice.

Even Capri Sun Juice Drink Sunrise Orange Wake Up.

Ingredients: Water, Sugar, Apple and Orange Juice Concentrates, Calcium Lactate, Citric Acid, Water Extracted Orange Juice Concentrate, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Natural Flavor.

Most parents keep their eye on their children's sugar consumption, but look in the wrong places. 

Even though my family loves juice, I have to say: if you wouldn’t serve your kids Froot Loops on a daily basis, remember that juice is worse.  Not only does it generally replace water, but it gives your kids the wrong idea about what is healthy. 

Most of all, juice trains (and trains again) your kids' taste buds to enjoy the flavor they already love – sweet.

So teach your kids to use juice like the candy it is (sparingly and as a treat) and you'll be teaching them the habits they need for a lifetime of healthy eating. In the short run, weaning your kids off sugar might just help them open up to broccoli too.  Read Ways to Wean Your Juice-Fiend.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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All websites accessed 5/28/2010