Healthy Eating
Your family’s diet should be varied and colourful, including a mix of foods with different flavours and textures. This helps everyone to enjoy mealtimes while getting the range of nutrients our bodies need to stay healthy. Balancing energy and improving our range of vitamins and minerals is key.
The Eatwell Guide is a great tool to help guide what we eat. It shows the types and proportions of foods that make up a healthy diet. It is used in our schools to teach children about what a healthy diet is so our children will be familiar with it.
A healthy diet should include: plenty of fruit, vegetables, and starchy carbohydrates; some dairy or dairy alternatives; and good sources of protein like beans, pulses, fish, eggs, or meat. The guide isn’t about every plate being “perfect,” but about balance across the day or week.
In rural areas we can sometimes have a limited choice and prices of some fresh items are higher, canned or frozen fruit and vegetables are a suitable alternative to fresh and reduce waste.
There might be a local food market that allows you to buy loose items at a better cost or you could try growing your own! The whole family could be involved, even the most reluctant vegetable eaters will eat more if they have grown it themselves.
Consider what our family currently eats and make one or two small changes to make it more in line with the Eat Well Guide, once we are all used to those we can try one or two more.
Some recipes for you to try
Recipes – Healthier Families – NHS
Fussy Eating
Change can be little trickier if children have a small range of foods that they are willing to eat,
fussy eating is quite a common issue in childhood, so you are not alone!
What we know works well is “modelling” eating the foods you would like your children to eat
when eating together and to have these foods around regularly, so they become familiar. Let
your children get involved with meal preparation and allow them to explore food through
touch and smell, these are all steps towards accepting the food as a safe food to eat.
There are lots of useful resources that might help:
