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Diet Mistakes! What Parents do Wrong
Reported August 25, 2011
DETROIT, MI (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- In the last 30 years, childhood obesity
rates have tripled. Almost one in five kids between 6 and 19 are overweight!
Choosing the right foods for your kids is key to making sure they don’t
become a part of that statistic. We’ll show you the top six mealtime
mistakes all you parents might be making.
With four kids and a fulltime job, mealtime at Lori Schroll's house is kind
of crazy. Keeping her picky kids healthy and happy is her mission.
“We don’t do any white bread any more; we don’t do any white pasta. You
won’t find any pop in the house,” Lori Schroll told Ivanhoe.
But no matter how hard she tries, mistakes happen here and at dinner tables
everywhere!
“Just looking at the label, you may be thinking you’re eating a healthy
food, but you’re eating 2 or 3 servings, and the calories really add up,”
Amy Lockwood, RD, a registered dietician at the University of Michigan,
said.
When choosing bread, Lockwood says picking whole wheat isn’t enough.
“When you’re reading the label, you want to look at the fiber. You want it
to have 3 grams of fiber, and you want to have whole wheat as your first
ingredient,” Lockwood said.
Kids need two servings of fruit a day.
“You want to look for fruits canned in natural juice or water,” Lockwood
said.
Do the math: heavy syrup has 20 to 25 grams of sugar compared to 10 in
fruits canned in their natural juice.
What about Fruit Loops versus Special K cereals. Which do you think is
better? Fruit Loops has less calories and less sugar and the same amount of
fiber. A better breakfast choice is Cheerios. It has fewer calories, less
sugar and more fiber. Another health food mistake is the yogurt you choose
for your family.
“If we’re comparing two vanilla yogurts, even though they’re both low fat,
one of them has 220 calories, and 35 grams of sugar, where the other one has
110 calories and 15 grams of sugar,” Lockwood said.
If your family likes to snack before dinner, try veggies.
“One trick you can do is put out cut up veggies on the table for the kids to
snack on. If they overeat on vegetables, who really cares,” Bethany Thayer,
registered dietician at Henry Ford Health System, said.
And soon your family will be ignoring the bad foods and fighting over the
healthy ones.
Portion size is important. Think about this…the typical burger, fries and
soda that was served in the ‘70’s, now has 214 more calories. That’s enough
to add at least three pounds of weight a year to your child’s body, even if
they eat fast-food just once a week.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
American Dietetic Association
http://www.eatright.org
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