Episode 21: Small tweaks to healthier kids

Episode 21: Small tweaks to healthier kids

As parents, we can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the prospect of improving our children's eating habits amidst the chaos of daily life. I’m here to give you some simple tips - from swapping out refined sugars to sneaking in extra servings of veggies, we'll explore practical steps to transform your child's diet one bite at a time.

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Links
https://nourishwithkarina.com/feedingbabies
https://nourishwithkarina.com/3-week-feeding-kids-reset

Highlights:

Introduction (00:00)
Improving Nutrition in Kids (00:31.182)
Boosting Child Nutrition through Goal-Setting (02:55.566)
Substituting LCM Bars for Healthier Foods (05:16.142)
Increase Whole Grain Consumption in Children (07:32.366)
Substituting Sugar for Fruit in Kids' Diets (09:53.614)
Adding Nutrients to Food (12:06.19)
Healthy Eating Habits for Children (14:30.574)
Nutritional Tackles for Children (16:43.086)

Show notes

READ TRANSCRIPT

Show Notes

Here are five key points we'll be covering:

The Magic of Small Changes: Discover how even the tiniest adjustments, like adding two extra bites of vegetables per day, can yield remarkable long-term results. I break down the math behind it, showing you just how impactful these small tweaks can be.

Navigating Nutrient-Rich Alternatives: Learn how to substitute processed snacks with healthier options without sacrificing taste. From whole-grain bread to homemade muesli bars, we'll explore nutritious alternatives your kids will love.

The Stealthy Veggie Approach: Learn how to increase your child’s daily veggie intake without resistance. Whether it's pureed veggies in pasta sauces or grated fruits in baked goods, I’ll uncover clever ways to boost your child's veggie intake effortlessly.

Smart Swaps for Sweet Treats: Explore creative ways to reduce sugar content in your child's favourite desserts and snacks.

Embracing the Journey: Finally, I discuss the importance of patience and persistence in cultivating healthy eating habits. I'll share practical tips to celebrate small victories, empowering you to stay motivated on this journey.

So if you're ready to start making small tweaks to your child’s day, join me in this episode! Remember, every tiny step counts towards a brighter, healthier future for your little ones.

Learn more about my membership program, head over to: https://nourishwithkarina.com/membership

Introduction (00:00.11)
You're listening to the Easy Feed Podcast, episode number 21, small tweaks to dramatically improve your child's nutrition. Hi there, I'm Karina Savage and with over 20 years experience feeding children, including my own, I've learned all the secrets that busy mums need to get their children eating better and actually enjoying healthy foods. So a huge welcome to the Easy Feed Podcast.

Improving Nutrition in Kids (00:31.182)
I hope you are really, really well. I am so happy to be here. I've got my cup of coffee. I'm ready to have a good chat. Today we are talking about how we can make small tweaks to our daily habits and beating our kids to dramatically improve their nutrition over time. Small tweaks over the weeks and months, years will pay off. Absolutely. Most of the time, and this is just generalizing in life, I don't think

that we sometimes tend to avoid things or we don't start something because it seems too overwhelming. And feeding kids, I can imagine, would be in that category for some people. It just seems so hard. Life's so crazy busy. They're refusing to eat the good stuff. It just becomes so overwhelming. And you're like, my gosh, where do I even start to try to get you to eat better food so that you're healthier? Because you see them.

You see them eating the white stuff. You feel guilty about that, but you can't get any traction to get them move onto anything that's more colourful. So it can feel really overwhelming. But we do have to remember that from small things, big things grow. I just had to make sure I got that right. So I had that little pause there, but we have to start somewhere and build momentum, right? Starting small is super smart. You know why? Because...

Small steps, one foot in front of the other, will lead to bigger things. We've heard it. We've heard it all before. But the reason why those sayings like small steps, one foot in front of the other, have hung around as long as they have is because they work. It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle, right? When you open that box and you tip all the pieces on the table, hoping that none of them get lost right from the get -go, because that, how devastating is that when you get to the end of the puzzle and...

That last puzzle piece is missing. You're like, my gosh, that is soul destroying. Or maybe not soul destroying, but frustrating. And so you open that puzzle box. You can't go and put all the puzzle pieces, you know, in place within the first minute. You have to start with one puzzle piece at a time. And once you've achieved that, you do the next one and then you connect the next one and you connect the next one and you build momentum. And over time you get to build your puzzle.

Boosting Child Nutrition through Goal-Setting (02:55.566)
Feeding kids is no different. You got to start somewhere. Pick one thing to work on, achieve that, feel the success and the sense of accomplishment with that, and then move on to the next thing and then the next thing. What this also does is build your confidence. Because as I said, once you feel that sense of accomplishment for finishing and achieving that first goal of getting a child to, I don't know, eat another bit of fruit or have two bites of vegetables or have

grainy bread instead of white, whatever that little goal is, and sometimes it can be like a big goal, but whatever that one goal is, once you've achieved that, you are more likely to jump into that next challenge of beating kids with much more gusto and motivation. So finish and achieve that first goal first before you move on to the next. And I think that that's a really good approach for us to take with most things in life.

Because again, it can just become too overwhelming if we focus on too many things and then you feel like it's all too hard and then nothing changes. So for example, if you can simply get your child to eat two extra bites of vegetables every day. And I know that to some that might be like, you know, climbing Mount Everest, but to others it's like, maybe we could. Well, for example, if you can get your child to eat two extra bites of vegetables per day. So literally that's one bite of snow pea and one bite of cherry tomato or

like in little ones I'd cut them up, or one bite of broccoli. That's 14 extra bites of vegetables per week, which is 730 extra bites of vegetables per year, give or take. Some days it might not be two bites and some days it might be more than two bites. But that's a lot of extra vegetables, 730 extra bites of vegetables per year. Now I'm not saying that you get these extra bites of vegetables into your children through pressuring them.

If you've listened to any of my previous episodes, you'll have heard me talk about how bad pressure is for getting kids to try new foods. But my point is a small change can really go a long way. It's like depositing money in a bank. If you deposit little bits every week, every month, every year, it all adds up. Okay. So I've given you the example of a little tweak being two bites of vegetables per day, but it may be...

Substituting LCM Bars for Healthier Foods (05:16.142)
substituting out an LCM bar, which is just loaded with refined processed sugar and processed puffed rice and sugar, mainly sugar. So you might substitute out an LCM bar for a healthier muesli bar or for hummus and crackers. Or you may sub out barbecue shapes for lightly salted popcorn. All these little tweaks add up.

Because if you substitute out one thing for another consistently, it absolutely will make a difference. Not only to improve their nutrition, but to reduce their sugar or the intake of other poorer ingredients that are often found in those more junky snacky type foods. So when you start to feel like it's all too hard, and trust me, it happens to all of us regularly, remember that

Big things start from little things, so one step at a time. So how do we make tweaks to everyday foods, ingredients and recipes to make them healthier? Firstly, if we start off with trying to increase fibre and whole grains, you could try to substitute white bread for wholemeal or wholemeal bread for multigrain. And I have a good blog on this and my website, nourishwithKarina .com, if you head to the learn section, you'll find my blog and I've got a really good...

blog on all the different types of bread and which is better and why. But basically at the end of the day, whole grain is going to be the best option for anybody, your child or yourself. Because when you have the whole part of the grain, you get the outside fibre rich component of the bran part. You get the middle bit and then you get the inside bit where all the healthy fats are. So you get the, and the middle bit's full of the carbohydrates. So you get

The whole part of the grain, which is super nutritious and I go into all the detail about, you know, the outer bran, the middle endosperm and the inside germ in my blog. And I also actually have a little TV segment also that I spoke about on Sunrise about bread. And so feel free to check that out too on my website. So bread, if you can move them to the grainy slash wholemeal end of the spectrum of the bread.

Increase Whole Grain Consumption in Children (07:32.366)
spectrum, it would be beneficial to their health because as soon as you increase the wholemeal whole grain component, you bring fibre and a lot of other nutrition, nutrients to your child's life. So simply swapping from white to wholemeal or wholemeal to grainy is going to value add to your child's day. You can also look at changing the pasta. Now look.

having an Italian background, I do just stick to traditional pasta, but you absolutely can go for a high fibre pasta, a wholemeal pasta, or even legume pasta that's based on say lentils, for example. So you can absolutely increase the fibre and the whole grain component of pasta by choosing one of those other options. Other ways to increase whole grains, a simple tweak might be that you swap basic crackers for crackers with grains in them, or you swap

basic crackers for popcorn, which is a whole grain product and popcorn also contains iron. So don't think popcorn's not a good option. As long as it's only lightly salted, that could be a really good option or better still you make it a home and then you can really control how much salt goes on or no salt at all. So popcorn is another whole grain option. If we move on to fruit, I always go on about leaving the skin on where possible because leaving the skin on brings valuable fibre and nutrients that sit just under the skin of the

fruit, so for example, an apple. But if that's not an option, then perhaps grating it, so if they don't want to eat the whole fruit with the skin on, perhaps grating it with the skin on can be really nutritious or using fruit instead of sugar. So using fruit to sweeten things because fruit is very nutritious. And as I said, where possible leave the skin on, but definitely using fruit instead of sugar will value add to your child's day. So we'll bring.

Yes, natural carbohydrates and sweetness, but it will bring fiber and it will bring vitamins and phytochemicals. And phytochemicals are naturally found in plants. They are the plant's natural immune system, you can say. Like it's the plant's own defense system to, I guess, fight off against diseases of plants. And so plants have phytochemicals in them to protect themselves a bit like we have an immune system.

Substituting Sugar for Fruit in Kids' Diets (09:53.614)
But when we eat the plants, we get the phytochemicals and we benefit from those as well. So trying to sub out sugar for fruit will increase the phytochemicals, it will increase the fibre, it will increase the vitamins. So for example, in a cake, if you subbed out some of the sugar for mashed bananas or pureed apple or grated apple or sultanas, you're going to make simple tweaks, but

over the weeks and the months and years, they'll dramatically improve your child's nutrition. And if you can do two of these tweaks, then you're going to double the benefits. So all of these little things, I think we need to recognise as achievements on that path, on that journey of feeding kids, because it is a long road and it's a difficult journey. And I tell you, I got to...

Four o 'clock last night, what's for dinner? Five o 'clock last night, what's for dinner? Six o 'clock last night, what's for dinner? I just had such a busy afternoon and I couldn't get my head around dinner and it was so frustrating. And in the end, I finally got something on the table. Too late, but you know, I get the real life struggle of being a family day in, day out, break us lunch, dinner, snacks. So, you know, it's hard, but if we can celebrate...

when we do achieve little small wins and recognise that that is going to make a big difference in the long run. It makes us feel better as parents and it makes us feel like we're not failing, we're actually achieving something. So let's move on to vegetables. Vegetables, I always say we need to include them in pieces so that the children get used to being exposed to vegetables and seeing vegetables and touching them, tasting them, sniffing them, licking them, chewing them, spitting them out, whatever they want to do with those vegetables.

They need to see them in whole form as well as they can be snuck into, you know, bolognaises and muffins and cakes as pureed veg. So you can puree a whole lot of veggies up and sneak it into a bolognese sauce. You can, if your kids are like real super sleuths, you can just use a butternut pumpkin or roasted jar roasted capsicum that hides into, or sneaks into a bolognese sauce or red sauce is a little bit easier.

Adding Nutrients to Food (12:06.19)
There's nothing green in there. You can use pureed butternut pumpkin or pureed jar -roasted capsicum and mix it with tomato paste as part of a pizza base. That's a really good way of getting it in. And I would always put in, sprinkle on some dried oregano onto the pizzas too before the cheese goes on. So it's kind of hidden in a way. In terms of white, you can hide cauliflower rice that you puree up or just steamed cauliflower that you puree up. You can mix that into cheese sauces.

You can use, you can use cannellini beans that you puree up into mashed potato. You could also add cauliflower to mashed potato. So cauliflower and cannellini beans are good white foods to puree up and add into white things like cheese sauce or mashed potato. Nuts. So nuts are a super nutritious option to add into food. So you can sprinkle nuts into breakfast cereal and on breakfast cereal, you can also add chia and ground flaxseed.

Or you can add some seeds as well, like sunflower seeds. You can also use almond meal to sprinkle into a cereal to sort of blend it in. Cashews are great in a stir fry. Peanuts are great in a pad thai. You can also use almond meal to mix into a butter chicken sauce to add value add to that sauce. Almond meal is also great to add into cakes. Moving on to cakes and baking and biscuits, cookies and muffins, they can all be value added to or nutrient boosted.

through the ingredient tweaks that we make. So for example, I always try to use wholemeal flour instead of white flour. I always try and add an extra egg if the recipe will allow because eggs are so nutritious, including the yolk as well. I always try and add a couple of tablespoons of ground flaxseed or chia or hemp. Again, depends on the recipe, but trying to sneak those in just value adds to that recipe. To sweeten that, yes, you can use honey. I think honey is the best.

option from a sugar perspective. Otherwise, raw sugar is totally fine. Not the brown sugar, we can use brown sugar as well, but trying to limit the sugar where possible. I think for a recipe that calls for two cups of flour or equivalent, so like a row of 12 muffins or a cake, I would try to limit to about half a cup of sugar. If you've got little ones, I would use less. Once your kids, you know, reach eight, nine, 10 years of age, they want something that tastes a little bit...

Healthy Eating Habits for Children (14:30.574)
more like a supermarket muffin. So I feel that you've got to add a little bit of sweetness into it. Otherwise they're just not going to want to eat it. So around half a cup of sugar or honey or sweetness is what I would aim for. But if you can use less or substitute the sugar for pureed or mashed banana or apple puree, then

Again, you're going to be value adding, you're going to be removing the sugar and you're going to be value adding valuable nutrients from that fruit. You can also sneak in shredded carrots or zucchini for added moisture and nutrients without altering the taste much. And I've got a great carrot muffin recipe. It's one of my member only recipes, but that's a great recipe that uses grated carrot. I've also got one that uses carrot, apple and orange. And that's another good one. And I literally grate the apple with the skin.

So you're adding a lot of valuable nutrients there. So have a think about your child's day and perhaps pick one meal that you want to focus on value adding nutrients to. It could be breakfast, whether you sneak in some nuts or seeds or whether you swap the spread that you're using. So instead of butter, you use peanut butter or avocado, or maybe it's a snack that you're trying to value add or swap out to improve the nutrition. Maybe it's sneaking a few extra vegetables in the lunch.

perhaps adding a little bit of hummus. Or at dinner time, it might be sneaking in some extra veg and also putting at least two to three little bits of vegetables on their plate to have a good go at with no pressure. Remember that establishing healthy eating habits with children is a journey, not a destination. So we've got to buckle up and be in it for the long haul, but remember this is normal. It's completely normal for children to...

you know, like some foods and not like others and not like vegetables too much. So remember you are not failing if you are feeling like a failure because certainly I felt like that too. But you are doing well. You are doing the best you can and just keep going, mama. Like seriously, you are kicking goals every day, just getting food on the table, even if it's literally a plate of plain white pasta. At least the kids are getting fed. So if we can...

Nutritional Tackles for Children (16:43.086)
value add to their day. Remember, it's not just at meals, it's snack times too. Snack times can significantly increase a child nutrient intake across the day. And remember, as I said, it's a nutritionally balanced week that I talk about, not a nutritionally balanced day, but those little tweaks every day, every week, every month, over the year will all add up. So I hope that's given you some motivation to keep going, find one little tweak that you can make to your child's day today.

and go for it, give it a go, try it over the next week or the next month. And when you achieve that, give yourself a pat on the back and then focus on the next goal. Remember small steps and you will gain great momentum and you will get there. So thank you so much for being here today. It really means a lot to me. If you are really enjoying my podcast, can you please leave me a review and a rating so that we can get this podcast out to more parents. I wish you a beautiful week and chat soon. Bye for now.