How I plan to get my daughter to eat #twohealthysnacks a day
All this media coverage lately about eating healthy snacks and the amount of sugar kids in the UK are eating (half of it from snacks), has got me looking a bit more carefully at my 6 year old daughter’s diet.
Mostly I’m pretty happy with what she eats. She usually has a good breakfast of eggs, whole meal toast and peanut butter or porridge. She loves fruit. She doesn’t leave her veggies at tea time. And she eats quite a wide variety of different meals. She’s very active and slim. However, there is one thing about her diet that concerns me — her snacks!
I thought maybe I didn’t need to worry too much — if the rest of her diet is healthy, and she’s not overweight — then where’s the harm? But the recent guidelines made me take a long hard look at how much sugar she really is consuming most days — and how much of it is from her snacks.
I’m worried about her teeth, but mostly I’m worried about a habit she’s making — I don’t want to set her up for a life of craving sweet things. I’m also really interested to see if less sugar = improved behaviour. I’ll let you know!
So, I decided to write a food diary for a couple of days to see roughly how much free sugar she is eating (I’m not counting the sugar in whole foods like fruit and veggies as this isn’t included in the 19g maximum advised for her age).
Here’s two days of what she ate:
- Breakfast: boiled eggs and wholemeal toast soldiers; Lunch: at school — Sweet and Sour Chicken with boiled rice and prawn crackers, smoothie; Tea: King prawns, wholemeal chapatti, mixed veg, some Christmas chocolate; Snacks: salty popcorn, YoYo, Haribos, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, apple.
- Breakfast: wholemeal bread, no sugar peanut butter, blueberries, satsuma segments, some banana; Lunch: at school — Pizza and watermelon; Tea: Sweet potato and butternut squash soup, whole meal bread with butter, about 15g Christmas chocolate; Snacks: Laughing Cow cheesy dippers, baked crisps, Haribos, cherries.
So how much sugar is that?
7g for a couple of tablespoons of Sweet and Sour Sauce; 7g for the smoothie; 13 g for the Christmas chocolate; 9.8g for both rolls in the YoYo; 7.5g in the packet of Haribos; 1.5 g for pizza (estimate); 5g Christmas chocolate (small piece); 7.5g Haribos; 1.5g Laughing Cow Cheese Dips; 1.6g Baked crisps (many crisps have more sugar that this — always worth checking the labels)
This adds up to 61g so her average over those two days is over 30g — way more than the 19g maximum recommended allowance. And 28g (almost half) of that 61g is from snacks!
And these two days are not untypical days plus there’s often jellies, mousses and cakes on offer at school lunch, cookies at the after school club and the dreaded tuck shop on Fridays! At weekends she has a lot more than this, what with birthday parties, ice cream at meals out, visits to Nana’s sweetie cupboard etc.
So, I’ve decided it’s time to take action by trying to at least half the amount of sugar she gets from snacks and desserts at home, for the next 5 weeks — to get her down to an average of the maximum recommended amount 19g of sugar a day. I’ve decided on 5 weeks as that’s apparently about the length of time it takes for your taste buds and gut to adapt, so that you end up craving less of the sweet stuff.
It’s going to be tricky — she LOVES to be greeted from school with a sweet snack, preferably Haribos or some other sugar coated jelly sweet, and she loves something sweet after tea.
So how am I going to do this?
Firstly I’ve got to convince her that it’s a good idea, or maybe bribe her? I’m not sure — there’s plenty of advice on the internet about what to swap snacks for but little about how to make the change.
Super Powers and making a plan
One suggestion I came across by Angela Lemond, RD @AngelaLemondRDN, a certified pediatric dietitian, was to explain “that high sugar, low nutrient foods are supposed to be enjoyed only “sometimes” because they contain no lasting “super powers” that will help them (insert child’s favorite past time).”
My friend Natalie Bournemouth Mini Bites has recently removed refined sugar from her two kids’ diets. She told me that she sat down with her 6 year old son “and explained about how good foods help you to be big and strong like Batman, give you energy and build big muscles. . .When I put it in terms of being able to grow up and be like Batman he was sold . . . I then realised that the hardest time (for us at least) is snack time after school, when the boys are starving and just want Barney Bears!! So I sat down with him and we made a list together of all the foods he likes and we made a plan of 3 weeks worth of after school snacks that were sugar free. We stuck this on the fridge and every morning he asks what’s for his snack after school — he hasn’t once asked for anything sweet — I am absolutely amazed!!”.
I love these tactics — they could be winners — my daughter is a big fan of Spider-Man, is learning gymnastics, ice-skating and swimming, so explaining that Haribos contain no ‘lasting powers’ might have just the effect I’m looking for.
She’s also at that age where she wants to be in control (in fact she’s been at that age since about 12 months!!) so writing a list together of snack choices could work really well with her. I’ve been scouring the internet and my cook books for some good ones that will satisfy her — more on that in a mo.
Snack swaps
So what do I swap her current snacks for? Each school day she has three snacks — two to take in with her, and one that I greet her with at home time. I’m going to focus on getting at least two of these healthier, ideally all three of them.
In an ideal world I’d like all of the snacks to be full of good nutritious stuff as well as being low in sugar. I could just offer her a piece of fruit or carrot sticks. But I’ve also got to be realistic. A home-made apricot flapjack in place of a packet of Haribos just isn’t going to cut it for her every time. Plus there’s the peer pressure of the exciting looking snacks her classmates have.
So, my plan is to include a mix of nutritious homemade snacks, fruit & veg options, savoury snacks and low sugar shop bought ones, so she has a choice each day. I know sweeteners aren’t a great idea as they don’t help re-set taste buds, but I will try some out just to see if they have a place in a low sugar diet. Plus I’ve heard that fruit sugars such as Xylitol are actually good for the teeth!
In addition I’ve invested in some new packaging from Nom-Nom Kids — re-useable food pouches so I can make fruit yoghurts and re-usable snack bags to make any home-made snacks look that little bit more fun.
I also plan to make a few low sugar desserts to have at home, and try out a lower sugar shop bought chocolate ice-cream — to see if I can find something with a little less sugar, that will still feel like a treat.
I came across this list of lower sugar alternatives too, so I’ll try some of these out and let you know what we thought of them.
Over Christmas I made a start by making fun shapes out of fruit — and this really opened my eyes to how it could make such a difference — my daughter kept asking for the apple Christmas tree, or funny faces, or a candy cane. So, I plan to continue to be inventive with fruit desserts, making them just as tempting an option as ice-cream.
As suggested by Natalie Bournemouth Mini Bites I’ll include my daughter in the snack plan, first by explaining why we’re doing this and then showing her which options she can choose from that week. I’ll also try to involve her in making the healthy snacks for the week — in the hope that’ll make her more inclined to try them. I may need to also add in a bribe — like a toy if she can get her sugar down to an average of 19g a day by the end of five weeks. .
I hope that after 5 weeks of trying this, Wee Fingers will have been weaned off the high sugar snacks she loves, and will accept them as an occasional treat rather than everyday occurrence.
Whilst I’m doing this I’ll bear in mind the words of Dr. Katja Rowell , that “Kids will be kids, and they have sweeter tastes than ours, so some whining, even if everything is going well is normal.”
I’ll be sharing our experiences, our wins and loses over on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. If you fancy down-sugaring your kids snacks with us, I’d love it if you’d follow us there and share how you get on. I’ll be using #twohealthysnacks and it would be amazing if you could post any ideas and photos using this hashtag too. I’d love to hear about your wins and loses, tips and progress.
Further info
PS: During my research for this project I came across some really good articles on cutting out sugar — I’ve shared these with you here in case you find them useful too:
10 Strategies for ending kids sugar obession
How one family gave up sugar
10 Easy ways to reduce sugar in your kids diet
https://www.myfussyeater.com/10-easy-ways-to-reduce-sugar-in-your-kids-diet/
Did banning sugar turn my kids into sweet little angels
A Guide to cutting down on sugar
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/17/a-guide-to-cutting-down-on-sugar
Simple supermarket sugar swaps
What’s really in those ‘healthy fruit snacks’
Raising sugar free kids
“Healthy” foods destroying kids teeth
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