Healthy Eating Resolutions for Children (and Families) on their Summer Break

Today, I came across a sugar calculator created by the National Health Service in the UK. It’s a simple online calculator that lets parents put in how many of the given foods they might feed their children in a day… and then with that information, it adds up the sugars and translates the sum into the amount in sugar cubes (the better to understand how much sugar the children eat in a day).

While most of those foods are not found in our household anymore (we had to change our diet two years ago), there are still plenty of sources of added sugar that we do consume. From the NHS list, we do have juice drinks, chocolate bars, cookies, and fun-sized sweets (usually received as gifts when the girls’ classmates celebrate their birthdays) in our home—resulting in 10 sugar cubes a day, assuming the children ate one pack of each of those things throughout one day. That’s a lot of added sugar! You wouldn’t eat 10 sugar cubes in one sitting, but you can really do it easily just by not thinking about what you buy from the grocery. That’s why it’s important to learn to read food labels.

Summer resolutions

Now that the children’s summer vacation has started, we can really slowly ease out on the packets of sweets and the cookies because now the kids don’t need to have “emergency food” for when they get hungry in school.

Here are some food resolutions that hopefully make the kids eat a little better or form healthier food-related habits during these hot summer months.

1. Eat healthier snacks. During the school year, the kids tend to ask for sweets when they get home at odd hours. So, a candy bar at 2pm as a “late dessert” is not unheard of. But this summer, they can enjoy chocolates or ice cream as desserts only right after a meal and then eat a better kind of food, such as applesauce, fruits, nuts, or peanut butter toast, for snack time.

2. Limit the eating time. When children are free to spend the day however they want, it’s wise to enforce a limit to eating at certain times of the day. If you don’t, they’ll graze all day long. What I mean about limiting the eating time is: after breakfast, no more food until lunch; after lunch, no more food until snack time; and after snack time, no more food until dinner. Stopping from eating may just be good for the health, too. Listen to this podcast by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, in which Tim Spector, a professor of Genetic Epidemiology, discusses with the doctor that there may just be some benefits to fasting (as opposed to grazing, which is snacking all throughout the day).

3. Drink water. I mention this in my positive diet post, and I mention it here as well because it cannot be emphasized enough: drinking water is good for you. In the podcast I linked earlier, they said that children these days cannot imagine drinking just plain water. It made me recall the odd drinks I see in the grocery store (what in the world is vitamin water?)—has it gone this way for the local population as well? Children cannot imagine drinking “just water?” Whether or not that is true for your home, this is a good resolution to have.

4. Choose to care for the teeth. Okay, this is not an eating resolution, but it’s related! Tooth decay happens when acid forms on the teeth and decay-causing bacteria feed on it. Acid makes the tooth enamel soft, so the bacteria in the mouth can destroy the protective barrier little by little until dental caries happen. In a column written by pediatric dentist Dr. Fina Gupit-Lopez way back in the July 2008 issue of Baby Magazine, she identified acidic drinks (sodas, citrus drinks), foods containing fermentable carbohydrates (cookies, cakes, chips), and retentive foods (foods that oh-so-slowly clear the mouth because they get stuck to the teeth, such as biscuits and chips) as the main culprits of tooth decay in children. Simply picking better options to eat can mean better dental health (and in turn better overall health) in the long run! Of course, fostering good dental health habits goes hand in hand with this.

I hope this little list has inspired you to make your own healthy summer resolutions. We can always make new resolutions throughout the year… because making better, healthier choices matter more than waiting for a suitable time to do so.

"When children are free to spend the day however they want, it’s wise to enforce a limit to eating at certain times of the day. If you don’t, they’ll graze all day long."