There’s no denying that kids enjoy the taste of food high in sugar, fat, and salt. But while these ingredients might encourage them to eat three square meals a day, they’re probably not doing their bodies any good.
Interestingly, though, you don’t have to throw your hands up in the air and give up. There are ways to make burgers, ice cream, and pizza more nutritionally sound.
As you might suspect, it all comes down to what ingredients you put in them. When you buy shop-bought items, you don’t have much control over what goes into them. You have to accept what the manufacturer uses, and that’s it.
When you make your own treats, though, you have way more control.
On top of that, certain ingredients can make a massive difference to the overall healthiness of food. If you add avocado to white toast, for instance, you can massively reduce the blood sugar spike that follows. The avocado appears to blunt the insulin response in the body - a good thing for long-term, overall health.
Something similar is true when you eat berries after chowing down on a meat-heavy meal. Generally, meat leads to a spike in inflammation and harms the body’s metabolic response. But if you add berries, then you can blunt this inflammation, undoing some of the damage.
The trick here, therefore, is to combine ingredients so that you can make healthier meals while avoiding arguments at the dinner table.
Here are some ideas.
Add Matcha To Ice Cream
A lot of people are learning how to make matcha ice cream. The reason is simple: matcha offers all of the benefits of green tea in a concentrated form. When you add it to regular ice cream, you turn a decadent dessert into something with a more neutral effect on the body. The addition of the matcha helps to counteract the impact of some of the other ingredients.
Add Beans To Chillis And Casseroles
Beans are something of a miracle food - and perhaps the most underrated health ingredient in the world. Legumes have the semi-magical ability to blunt blood sugar responses, no matter what you’re eating. Adding a can of beans to your regular casseroles or chilli dishes does wonders for their overall healthiness and can improve the health of your kids automatically.
Put Flaxseed In Your Baking
Do you make a lot of cakes or pies? If so, you might want to consider adding flax.
For those of you who don’t know, flaxseed is a type of seed that contains an unusually high level of beneficial fats and phytochemicals. For this research, many nutritionists consider it to be one of the healthiest foods that you can eat.
On top of this, it has an almost neutral flavour. You can’t really taste it in baked goods. Adding it, though, helps to rebalance the fat profile of whatever you’re cooking. Plus it helps to blunt some of the damaging health effects of traditional baking ingredients like sugar, white flour and butter.
These are great ideas. I never though about hiding it in with ice cream. Then again, I have always been lucky as none of my kid have minded vegetables so they would just eat them.
ReplyDeleteI wish I would have known this when my kids were young! I was told that steak was good for them. That they needed the iron. The bean aspect, was to add them in their food without it making a noticeable difference!! My one daughter hated peas so much, she would pick them out and feed them to the dog. Mixing them up in mash potatoes was a popular way too. I like the flaxseed and matcha ideas. I didn’t know their benefits! I know the benefits of avocado �� for Diabetics. We enjoy a lot of guacamole here.
ReplyDeleteI pinned this to remember using these ingredients later. I like how we learn more about foods that help us, but to be fair to us who have already raised our kids, this is the way we knew. Thank you for sharing!