My Four-year-old Grandson Invented a New Way to Get Kids to Eat Their Vegetables

My four-year-old grandson invented a new way to get kids to eat their vegetables. Simply spoon slightly melted chocolate ice cream onto your jicama. He said it tasted great and gave me a bite. I had to admit that it tasted good. He liked it on carrots too, but I didn’t give that one a try.

Now you know that I’m not an advocate of eating sweet stuff because of the way it causes inflammation and deterioration of our bodies. But we can expand on my grandson’s creativity by dressing up the taste of veggies with some healthy creations that spark your creativity and tickle the taste buds of your children. Let’s be brilliant in how to get children to eat their vegetables.

Tickle the Taste Buds 

He likes it!

For cooked vegetables add butter, garlic or tasty herbal/spice mixtures to pique the taste buds.

Kids love to dip stuff. The most common dip of choice for veggies seems to be Ranch Dressing which can be healthy if made with healthy oil mayonnaise and organic fresh buttermilk. Years ago I developed this ranch dressing recipe:

Pinch of salt

½ tsp garlic powder

½ tsp dried onion flakes

¼ tsp black pepper

1 tsp dried parsley flakes

1 cup mayonnaise (Follow Your Heart grape seed mayo the healthiest mayo) or homemade mayo

1 cup buttermilk (probably less)

Stir spices into mayonnaise first. Then add the buttermilk a little at a time as you stir it until you have the consistency you like. It usually takes less buttermilk than the recipe ingredients indicates.

Do not blend.

You can also make your own healthy mayo from the recipe on page 104 of Dr. Jo’s Natural Healing Cookbook.

Bean dips add their own special flavors and textures to that of the colorful vegetables dipped into them. Hummus remains a popular dip and can be found readymade as a quick and convenient snack for your kids. (Let’s face it folks, most of us are kids at heart and we love hummus too.)

For a specialty bean dip my Marinated Black Beans are a big hit at parties. (Found on page 94 of Dr. Jo’s Natural Healing Cookbook.) You’ll find some other innovative bean dips in that cookbook too.

Make a Rainbow Game

Kids love colors. So challenge them to see how many different colors of vegetables they can eat in a day or a week. Create a chart of colors, maybe with pictures of vegetables too. Whenever they eat a vegetable from that color group, they add a star or sticker to their chart for that day.

Add some fruit to the chart too for a greater variety of colors. Keep fruit servings to 2 per day and encourage more than 5 servings of vegetables per day (and 10 is better).

Eating a big variety of different colors of vegetables provides a wide variety of phytonutrients to feed the cells and anti-oxidants to fight toxins and inflammation.

Make Vegetables Handy to Grab

Keep kid size bags of vegetables handy in the refrigerator on a shelf that a child can easily reach. How many times per day do kids open the frig to search about for a snack? That seems to be a favorite past time at my house.

A small container of one of those taste tickling healthy dips would be handy too.

On the other hand…

Keep the Junk Food Snacks Out of the House

Kids go browsing in pantries for snacks too, so keep the junk food snacks out of the house. Because the food manufacturers know how to make “fake food” addicting, children will opt for these inflammatory substances that look like food over vegetables if given a choice.

Help them teach their palates to like clean, healthy, nutritious, tasty food. It will become a wonderful healthy habit for them.

Let’s help our children develop a Culture of Health.

Blessings,

Dr. Jo