Family Health Foods Explained

Choosing family health foods for your kids can be a minefield. Pasta with cheese, yoghurt, chicken, sandwiches, fish (usually of the fingers variety), chips & peas – these are nutritious family health foods right? Full of energy, calcium, protein & vitamins? Well they can be. But then again… Pasta can be lots of things, as can chicken, or a cheese sandwich. And not all of them are good You’ll find more meal ideas for Fussy Eaters & Picky Eating Toddlers here!

Take pasta. If we’re talking wholewheat, buckwheat or spelt pasta, with a freshly made, tomato based, organic (preferably) sauce full of chopped fresh vegetables, & some good protein in the form of pulses, a little tuna or oily fish like sardines, or some grated organic, tasty (so you need less of it) cheese… then yes, that’s *clean food* & a great meal for growing kids.

Slow burning carbohydrates for energy, protein, vitamins & minerals, antioxidants & calcium, omegas (if you went for the oily fish) – all good. If however by ‘pasta’ you mean white pasta with piles of ready-grated cheese of the sweaty, so mild it tastes of nothing rubbery variety, then that’s not so great. High GI, processed carbs for a blood sugar spike with a pile of additive-filled saturated fats on top. Not nutritious foods for kids at all.

Try fish & chips. We had these the other night. Fresh white, sustainable fish cut into strips, dunked in egg & fresh breadcrumbs, potatoes scrubbed & cut into chunky chips, then roasted in the oven, served with some fresh green veg like broccoli florets or peas, or some salad. This is clean food. OR… ‘fish & chips’ could just as easily describe a plate of trans-fats, salt, sugar & colourings, plus a host of other preservatives & un-pronounceable additives of dubious ‘fish’ or otherwise origin.

Chicken – water-filled, hormone-injected & GM-fed? In a tub covered in some dodgy bloke with a beard’s secret recipe & bizarrely labelled ‘chicken popcorn’ (what IS that by the way? Cos it sure ain’t chicken. Or family health food). Or organic (or at least free range) real chicken cooked with vegetables, rice, potatoes, cous cous, whatever, so long as you can still identify how every ingredient started life & it hasn’t been pumped full of, well, stuff. Clean food simply means it;s not been messed with.

Now before I get lynched by the ‘I can’t afford organic chicken & fresh fish, I’ve got a family to feed & I’m a working mum’ brigade, hear me out. Because so am I. But if the food your family are eating is full of c**p, has had all the nutritional value sucked out of it, & is filled with water to make it look bigger than it is – is that really saving you anything?

Try having meat or fish one day less a week, make it clean food (the good stuff) fill out the meal with more fresh vegetables & get some real nutritional benefit from the food you’re eating!

Good protein doesn’t have to come from meat or dairy- you can make fabulous filling & child-friendly meals using chickpeas, lentils, kidney beans, cannellini beans… (incidentally if those suggestions leave you bemused & staring vacantly at an out-of-date packet of pearl barley, I’ll happily provide some extremely simple recipe suggestions in a future post!)

Yoghurt. When yoghurt is referred to by nutritionists as a great food, they mean natural (unsweetened), fresh, probiotic yoghurt – cow, goat or sheep… (all these really should be organic). They don’t mean a pot of over-processed, very sweet gooey stuff with a few tiny pieces of ‘real (well it was once) fruit’ in it.

Cereal… I read in a yoga book once about ‘cereal’ being a key food, but somehow I don’t think it was referring to coco pops… Nuff said.

Read the labels on your food! Ingredients are listed in order of how much of that is in there. If sugar (remember sugar can also be glucose, glucose syrup, fructose, honey, high fructose corn syrup, & many more!) is one of the first listed – that means it’s one of the main ingredients. Even if it has got ‘low fat’ or ‘real fruit’ or pictures of the Tweenies on it.

Try to feed your kids (& yourself!) nutritious family health foods which don’t HAVE labels! Real food has a pronounceable names & bears some physical resemblance to a natural source.

What have I missed? What other foods have you come across that have a number of guises… not all of them friendly?!