Foods and habits that can keep your kids healthy throughout the winter season
Keeping your kids healthy in the wintertime can be an extremely tall task. During the winter, sickness is everywhere, food lacks nutrition around the holidays, kids can become sedentary if you live somewhere that gets too cold to go outside, and screen time for their devices seems to increase each day. As examples, we have listed below some tips and a list of healthy food for toddlers in the winter you can prepare.
One way to boost your child’s immune system against terrible sicknesses like the flu and the common cold is to ensure that they’re eating healthy, getting protein and essential vitamins and avoiding foods that are high in sugar.
Sugar has an adverse effect on the immune system, and it can be difficult to keep sugar levels down around the holidays, but it’s possible. Also, staying hydrated is a key for your children, because keeping hydrated can not only help fight infection, but it also helps to flush toxins from their systems. Doctors recommend that your kids drink half their pound weight equivalent in ounces each day. So, for example, if your child weighs 40 pounds, they should be drinking 20 ounces of water daily.
What else should you take into account besides healthy nutrition
For the majority of this article, we’ll be focusing on how food and proper nutrition is possible for your kids in the winter, but there are additional ways for them to stay healthy as well.
- Getting enough sleep is crucial to staying healthy no matter if you’re a kid or a grown adult. And although adults are usually most prone to wintertime stress, secondhand stress from their adult family members and the business of the wintertime can also negatively affect the immune systems of children. For this reason, you should be ensuring that your kids are getting some downtime and some time for them to decompress.
- Also, keeping good hygiene by making sure they’re regularly washing their hands and changing out their toothbrushes can help to avoid the spread of germs. They should be washing their hands before every meal after they sneeze or cough, and after they do any activity where they’re around other kids or touching something unclean.
- Always make sure that your kids are getting their flu shots around October so that the doctors can pinpoint that year’s flu virus and so your chances of them catching it earlier than that are slim.
Healthy food for toddlers in the winter
Kids eating healthy in the winter means not only should they be getting well-balanced meals, but they should especially be getting sufficient protein, vitamins, and fluids.
- One great food that generally checks off all of these areas is soup. Soup is a great way to sneak extra fluids into a meal to ensure that your child is staying hydrated throughout the day and whatever you put in the soup can help to hit the other key areas, vitamins and protein. If you make vegetable beef soup, for example, it will offer a good source of vitamins in the vegetables and the beef will deliver a protein-packed punch to keep your kids’ immune systems fighting strong.
- Besides soup, other great ideas that can offer various sources of nutrition are pot pies, stuffed peppers, vegetable calzones, and more. And of course, you don’t have to make sure that your kids are getting all of their essential nutrients in the entrée. You can pair lunches with fruit, such as clementines, or give them orange juice with breakfast to make sure that they’re getting their daily vitamin C.
- Salmon is a great source of amino acids. Varying amino acids is essential to not only making sure that protein intake is high, but that your children are getting the essential amino acids for the various functions of their cells. Fish also are rich in Omega 3 fatty acids, which have vast health impacts including being shown to reduce depressive moods. Depressive moods can be a theme in the winter for many kids for many various reasons such as lack of activity, cabin fever, boredom, and more.
- Sweet potatoes can be a superfood for children in the winter because of their great supply of fiber, vitamin A, and potassium. These can be delivered in many ways, such as loaded, in a casserole, or substituted for French fries, a much less healthy food. It’s key lunch and dinner substitutes like swapping regular French fries for sweet potato fries that might make the biggest difference because you’re eliminating unhealthy food and introducing a healthy option in one fell swoop.
- Cauliflower can be one of the most impactful vegetables available to your child in the wintertime, and that’s saying a lot for such a powerful food group. It has high levels of vitamin C, vitamin K, and compounds that have been found to prevent infection. Furthermore, it also contains folate, which is a vitamin that is key to your child’s growth. Like sweet potatoes, cauliflower has a lot of fiber as well, which helps to boost your child’s energy and aids the digestive process. Cauliflower might not be the most popular food item for your children, but you can find creative ways to include it, such as using it to make an alternative form of rice and pairing it with dishes that usually are served over rice.
- Great options for snacks are nuts, which help your body’s metabolism and also offer a great protein source. Keeping snacks in mind, jaggery can be an ideal substitute for sugar and much more healthy at that. In combination with ginger, jaggery can be a great defense against coughs.
- Additional foods to consider are beef, garlic, yogurt, and any fruits high in vitamin C. Beef is a good source of zinc, a nutrient that is key to producing white blood cells that provide defense against negative bacteria. Fruit that is high in vitamin C includes oranges, strawberries, raspberries, and pomegranates. Garlic is known to have allicin, which is essential to fighting infection. Yogurt, especially if it involves probiotics, will keep your child’s digestive system from being prone to germs that might cause disease.
Why is breakfast the most important meal of the day for children?
One of the most overlooked and nutrition-void meals of the day is breakfast. Children sleep longer than adults, meaning that after an overnight break that can last for twelve hours, they urgently need a balanced and healthy breakfast. Nutritionists say that breakfast should cover 18 to 22 percent of all-day energy intake, and skipping it is a cause for developing obesity because it leads to overeating throughout the rest of the day.
So many breakfast foods are high in sugar such as Pop-Tarts, Toaster Strudels, and sugary cereals and cereal bars. Not only are these foods high in sugar, but they often lack the essentials that we’ve been talking about through much of this article such as protein and vitamins.
Instead of these sugary breakfasts, make your child some eggs or add some cottage cheese or yogurt to breakfast. If making eggs every morning is too much of a time consumer while you’re trying to shuffle the little ones off to school or daycare, maybe you can hard boil the eggs in advance.
Other great nutritious breakfast ideas are breakfast burritos and smoothies made with peanut butter and fruit for an easy to consume a meal that has protein and vitamins.
How to get your kids to eat healthy food
Eating healthy isn’t always the number one priority for young children, that’s understandable. For this reason, there are some tips that can make your kids more prone to eat the healthy meals that you’ve prepared for them.
For example, if your kids are given a few healthy options for lunch or breakfast and they can choose their favorite and help you prepare it, they’ll be more likely to trust it and eat it, rather than scowling in disgust before they even try it. So, before you take your trip to the grocery store and come home with a bunch of foods your kid won’t touch, run a few ideas by them before you leave the house and see what healthy options they’re in favor of most.
Also, the holidays are supposed to be a time of year that is fun for everyone, especially the little ones. So, keep in mind that you don’t have to throw out all of the sugary foods in the house and abstain from making holiday cookies or including treats in their presents. Your kids can and should still be able to indulge in a treat every now and then but keep it to no more than one sugary treat each day.
If they’re snacking on cookies and chocolate throughout the entirety of the day and eating a sugary breakfast, that’s when you start to run into major nutritional issues and immune deficiencies. But the holidays also shouldn’t be a time that your kids dread because they know that they’ll be on a strict diet of fish, beef, veggies and nothing else.
Final thoughts: Healthy food for toddlers in winter
If you take these suggestions into mind and implement them as much as you can, your kids will be better off for it. Perfection isn’t what you should be aiming for, especially with how stressful and busy the winter can be, but if you keep these healthy foods in mind when you’re preparing meals and going to the grocery store, it’ll go a long way.