Rainbow Blog

Eating A Rainbow

posted by: Kia

By breaking produce into color groups of fire-engine red, bright orange, sunshine yellow, emerald green, and rich purples you can make eating fruits and vegetables fun and easy for your kids!  Even at a very young age, kids can easily grasp the concept of eating a rainbow.

So what can we do as parents to encourage our children to eat more fruits and vegetables?  Here are 8 suggestions:

1. Keep Fruits and Vegetables in Sight: Stock your fridge full of washed and ready to eat fruits and veggies.  Having them cut up in slices makes it even easier for your kids to reach in and grab a quick healthy snack.

2. Remove the Competition: If you have unhealthy food options like cookies, chips and other junk food around they will win out every time over fruits and veggies!  If you provide only healthy options they will get eaten!  Leave the junk food for an occasional treat!

3. Prepare Meals Together: Bring kids into the kitchen starting at a young age. Toddlers can wash and rip lettuce, preschoolers can measure and stir, and older kids can find recipes and help create meals. Children are far more likely to dig into a new dish if they helped prepare it!

4. Serve a Fruit or Vegetable with Every Meal: Every day and every meal, fruits and veggies should be on the menu. Eating this way makes it easy to get the minimum 5 servings of produce a day!

 5. Be a good Role Model: One of the strongest predictors of what children eat is what their parents eat. If you expect your child to eat vegetables, you need to be eating them, too!

6. Eat the Same Meals: Make one meal for the family. Don’t start the habit of serving different menus for everyone as you’ll end up with a house full of picky eaters and a lot of extra work in the kitchen!!

7.  Keep trying: Kids need to be exposed to, and ideally taste, a new food as many as 10 to 15 times before they’ll accept it.  Just getting them to take one bite is a victory!  Small baby steps lead to healthy eating!

8. Make it Fun:  Kids want to have fun! It’s part of what makes them such great people to be around! So when you want to get your kids on board for something try making a game out of it! Look at your kitchen through the eyes of your little one and suddenly the salad spinner becomes a merry-go-round for lettuce and the sink turns into a carwash for vegetable shaped vehicles! Use mini cookie cutters to cut out fun shapes in fruits and vegetables. Keeping things light and fun will help your picky eater be more open to trying new things!

Here is a fun way to eat a rainbow:

Rainbow Fruit Sticks

All you need is a collection of colorful fruit and some skewers! I like to use: Pineapple, Green Grapes, Cantaloupe, Raspberries, Honeydew Melon and Blackberries to give the skewers a nice rainbow effect!

1. Wash your fruit and let dry a little so that they are easy to work with.
2. Arrange your fruit and skewer them in the same order.
3. Display your Rainbow Fruit Sticks on a platter and get ready for the compliments!