Effective Strategies For Reducing Junk Food And Promoting Healthier Eating Habits

In today's world, immunity is a hot topic. One of the best ways to boost your child's immunity is by ensuring they eat healthy foods.

For various reasons, we have allowed a wide range of processed foods to invade our lives. Our children are hooked on packaged snacks high in unhealthy fats, and soft drinks loaded with sugar. Our meals include highly refined foods (think white bread, sugar and polished rice), stripped of their natural nutrients, and chemically preserved foods and beverages. Most of these junk foods offer only empty calories. For all the calories they add to our children's diet, they hardly provide them with the essential nutrients needed to keep their immune systems up and running! So let's make an effort to minimize junk food in our children's diet.

Although getting your child to eat healthy is easier said than done, here are a few tips:

Don't buy or stock junk food

It is much harder to convince your child to eat healthy when they know there are packaged snacks available at home. Are they smart detectives with a talent for ferreting out treats hidden in unlikely places, biscuits buried in the rice drum, chips stashed in the wardrobe, or chocolates tucked away in a corner of the fridge? Have they performed stunts right out of Kung Fu Panda to reach the cookie jar? You can spare them and yourself the trouble by resisting the urge to buy and store junk food. As a Chennai-based working mom, Geetha Arun, reveals, "We stopped getting packaged items, such as chips and fruit juices. Instead, I make healthy snacks and beverages at home."

If you want to keep some packaged nibbles at home, choose the ones low in saturated fats, sugar, additives, and preservatives, like energy bars and ragi cookies.

Prepare to invest time and effort in making the switch

Junk food is attractive and addictive. If your child wakes up one day to find all their treats gone, with only nutritious (read boring) foods available at home, they will resist with every fibre of their being. Brace yourself for persistent requests that can escalate into tears, tantrums, and unreasonable demands for snacks. Prepare to face rejection each time you offer healthy, freshly cooked food. This could go on for days and weeks.

Take it one step at a time.

A good approach is to not try and change everything overnight, but go category-wise, replacing unhealthy beverages, cooking oils, treats, and snacks gradually, one by one. Talking about their family's switch to healthy eating, Geetha adds, not everything happens in a day. I added nutritious foods to my children's diet one item at a time. We reduced the frequency of having noodles to once a month, and pizza to once in 3 to 4 months. We have replaced refined oils with cold-pressed ones. And we use palm jaggery instead of sugar.

Bring your child on board the healthy eating train

Explain the reason for your choices by focusing more on the positive impact of nutritious food than on the negative effects of junk food. Tell your child how a balanced diet will give them more energy, help them stay stronger, and fight germs that cause infections and diseases. You can also weave a story in which the superfoods are like their favorite superheroes, fighting against bad guys like obesity and microbes. While keeping the overall control of food choices with yourself, allow your child to choose and tinker with the building blocks of a meal. They will be more invested in eating what they helped you make in the kitchen. Get them to pick a vegetable or fruit they want to eat or ask them to help you wash and prep it. Your child can help shell peas, peel oranges, and remove watermelon seeds. You can together make funky faces with fruits, or rustle up a rainbow salad with veggies.

Get your child to organize a chaat night or a pizza party where the entire family helps with food prep. Try keeping it as fresh and DIY as possible, making your pani puris, papdi chaats, pizza base, and sauce. It could be a fun family kitchen activity!

Expose children to new tastes, colors, textures, and flavors

When it comes to developing children's palate, it's best to catch them young. The ideal flavor window is between 4 to 18 months of age when they are most open to trying new things. But don't fret if you've missed this opportunity. Older kids can also be trained to try and accept a wide variety of foods.

Here's how to make children eat a variety of foods:

• Keep offering them small portions, even though they are likely to be rejected repeatedly.
• Give them non-food treats when they accept a new, healthy food option. A new book, extra playtime, or a trip to the park can act as incentives.
• Offer new foods in combination with old favorites, thus increasing their chances of acceptance.
• Allow them to eat the same food that the adults eat, as our traditional diet is already full of variety.

Keep some healthy quick fixes ready

There will always be days when you don't have the time to prepare a meal or snack or are caught unawares by a hunger wave. For such emergencies, you can prepare and store roasted nuts, and roasted chiwda (puffed rice) with a tempering of chili and curry leaves or stock some dry ingredients for a 5-minute microwave mug cake.

We fervently hope for the day when our child reaches for an apple instead of chips or biscuits. While it may seem like a distant dream, this is a project worth investing in. Food is at the core of good health, and we must do everything we can to give our children a fighting chance in a world filled with junk food. Lead by example, and eat the food that you want to see your child eating. Show them the way to choose and stay healthy.

So, dear parents, don't fill up your shelves with cookies and cakes for your consumption either!