Providing Enough Nutrition for your Toddler

Providing Enough Nutrition for your Toddler

October 12th, 2010 by admin  |  No Comments

When your toddler graduates from breast milk or formula to cow’s milk, she is no longer getting all the nutrition she needs in liquid form. Cow’s milk can’t replace all of the nutrients that were being provided by the breast milk or formula, so you will need to make certain that your toddler gets everything she needs from her food.

The key to good nutrition for your toddler is to make sure she eats a balanced toddler diet that offers a variety of foods. Different foods provide different nutrients, so the more variety in her diet, the better and more complete her nutrition will be.

Expanding Food Horizons

In the early stages of toddlerhood, before your little one decides to start getting picky about food, you should start offering as many different foods as you can, to introduce many new flavors. Spend some time in the produce department or at a local farmer’s market. Ask questions about fruits and vegetables you don’t recognize. They might turn out to be something you toddler loves, and could replace the nutrition missing from foods she refuses to eat.

Your toddler won’t eat everything you put in front of her, but the more different foods you offer, the more likely she will be to find something she likes. Every child, and even every adult, has some foods they simply don’t like and never will. Rather than forcing your child to eat something she really dislikes, try to find other foods that offer similar nutritional value to make up the difference.

Feed a Balanced Toddler Diet

The best way to make sure your toddler is getting all the nutrients she needs in her diet is to serve the right number of servings from each of the food groups. Aim for 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables, 2 servings of protein, 4 servings of dairy, and 3-4 servings of grains every day.

Spread all of these servings out over 3 meals and 2 snacks during the day, so that your toddler is only faced with a few foods at a time. The snacks are especially important as snack time is often when less than nutritious foods tend to hit the table. Make sure that every meal and every snack offers servings of nutritious foods, and skip empty calories that might fill your toddler up and cause him to skip out on healthier foods.

Using Supplements

If your toddler is getting the right number of servings from each food group every day, and eating a variety of different foods on a regular basis, it’s likely he is getting the right nutrition. Still, many pediatricians recommend a multivitamin supplement that can help to fill in any nutritional gaps in your child’s diet. Supplements are meant only to back up the foods your toddler eats, and shouldn’t be relied upon to provide all or most of the needed nutrients. Don’t skip servings of vegetables on the belief that the supplement will make up the difference.

Because toddlers are notoriously picky eaters, supplements are generally a good idea for those times when you just can’t get him to eat right. Think of them as a backup line of defense to keep your toddler healthy – but only a backup. No matter how difficult it might be, you should keep trying to get all the needed foods into your toddler’s diet every day.

Healthy Diets Start Young

Healthy Diets Start Young

February 22nd, 2010 by admin  |  No Comments

If you want your child to grow up with optimum health and be eating a healthy diet as an adult, you must start early – even before he is born. Children are amazing to watch – they are tiny mirrors of their parents in many regards and often food is reflected through your children. If you are a healthy eater and your household contains healthy food items and mealtimes, it is likely your child will grow up in that environment and mimic it in his own home. On the contrary, if you feed your child fruits and vegetables while gorging on fast food yourself, you can count on him doing as you do – not as you say.

The Healthy Home

Rather than focusing on your child’s diet, focus on the diet of the home. In an ideal situation, your baby will make the transition to baby foods and then straight onto the foods you prepare for your family. If these are French fries and chicken nuggets, you’ll struggle substantially to meet the healthy diet goals you’d like to reach. Correct failings in your own diet first and your child will naturally benefit.

Infancy

During infancy, your child has limited options as to what foods to eat. Breast milk from a mother eating a healthy, balanced diet is best, but if that is not the right choice for a baby, a milk-based formula contains all necessary nutrients and supplements a baby needs for optimum growth. Other options such as soy-based formula and elemental formula might be the right option for children raised as vegetarians or with digestive and allergy troubles.

Solids

When your baby moves to solids, you have the first opportunity to truly affect his tastes and food choices later in life. Introduce solids slowly and then, as they are introduced, feed your baby a variety of foods from all food groups. As he is able to handle textures, move quickly to the table-food variety of fruits, vegetables and starches. Lentils and legumes are easily mashed and eventually make terrific finger foods.

Be sure your child is getting the right amount of formula up to his first birthday or beyond if warranted and full-fat milk is suitable for the dairy in his diet following formula. By one your child should be drinking plenty of milk, eating protein foods, consuming other sources of calcium, eating at least two or three servings of fruits and vegetables a day and eating plenty of whole grain carbohydrates. As your child will be eating table food at this point, it means you also should be eating this balanced diet on a daily basis.

Snacks and Sweets

The most trouble to a healthy diet comes not at mealtime, but at snack time. You’d have a hard time putting cookies beside broccoli on the dinner plate, but somehow it’s easy to hand a child a cookie for a snack. The cookie can reduce his appetite for healthy foods at mealtime and, with the limited appetites of young children, can reduce your opportunity for healthier options.

Children need snacks throughout the day, but they should be the same quality of food that you’d put on their plate at mealtime. Whole grain crackers, cookies made with oatmeal and raisins, and fruit or vegetable slices are all good choices – they will help you reach the nutritional requirements for your child each day instead of working against you.