With the school year and the return to routine, one of the main concerns of parents is to establish a balanced menu for their children, whether they eat at school or at home. If it is because they eat at the school because they do not know for sure what they have eaten and if they do it at home to be able to make a balanced balance.
Sometimes the lack of nutritional knowledge makes us give our children the wrong education. And food is essential, much more in the growth phase.Ana Bergua, nurse and nutritionist from the University of Navarra, created your nutrition website some time ago where she offers advice on how to eat well and menu ideas. She also cares for many mothers (and fathers) who, through her online consultations, ask her simple questions to answer.
“Are Spanish children well fed?”
—My experience, and studies and surveys confirm it, says that children are not well nourished and, what is much worse, their parents believe that they are. 80% of them think that their children eat well, despite the fact that more than half of them barely eat vegetables once a week , as confirmed by the Spanish Confederation of Consumers and Users (Cecu).
Spanish children are overfed in some nutrients (proteins, fats, sugars) that should be replaced by healthier ones, such as fruits, vegetables and legumes. In general, her parents, the GBS generation, ate better.
Surprisingly, our society, which is increasingly informed and aware of everything that concerns food, seems not to know how to stop the trend towards the Americanization (I mean fast food) of food. Instead of promoting our Mediterranean diet, which is the healthiest, we let ourselves be carried away by a fast food chain: we reward the children with a pre-made pizza every Friday and we cannot conceive of seeing anything in the cinema without a bowl of salty popcorn .
“We reward the children with a pre-made pizza every Friday”
What to eat, and what not
—What are the most frequent mistakes when making menus?
—Often we observe in the consultation that some parents of children with little eaters are in check: that the child eats whatever, but that he eats. That should not be so. Children who have food in the fridge do not die of malnutrition, so children with small appetites should eat a small but balanced amount.
At the other extreme, children who eat well, who seem to never be satisfied, if we do not give them enough carbohydrates to obtain the necessary energy, whether in the form of bread, pasta, legumes, potatoes, or rice, will tend to Snacking outside of meals, and what is most within your reach, often, are pastries and snacks loaded with fat and salt. Those, along with sugar-laden soft drinks and poor quality fast food, are, in my opinion, the worst enemies of children’s health, because they lead to overweight.
“What should a growing child eat?” How should your menu be? What should never be missing and what should almost always be left over?
—We nutritionists repeat ourselves ad nauseam, but the reality is that there is no better way to eat than with the Mediterranean diet. This diet is characterized by having a high content of vegetables, legumes, cereals, traditionally wheat, it is rich in fish and poor in red meat and dairy, unlike other countries further north. And, of course, use olive oil.
The quantity and variety of fruits, vegetables and legumes that children eat in our country is below the recommended level. And, on the other hand, the second courses, so to speak, the protein of animal origin, which is usually associated with the presence of fats, is excessive. But the elderly also eat too much meat (fish not as much as would be desirable, but this data is variable in different areas of Spain).
The greater variety of these foods that make up our diet we can offer children, the easier it is to provide varied nutrients. A child’s menu, in amounts appropriate to his age, must provide between two and four servings of milk or a dairy equivalent, must contain a portion of carbohydrate both at breakfast and at snack time and at lunch and dinner , between one and two servings per meal between 5 and 7 in total. The recommendation for fruits and vegetables is five servings a day, and two servings of protein food.
“The ideal is five daily servings of fruits and vegetables”
And sweets, the less the better. Because many of the foods they eat already have sugar in their composition, from tomato sauce to breakfast cereals or sliced bread. Sometimes it is not so easy to know how to make a balanced menu, that is why Your Nutrition Website has a menu preparation service for those parents who want to adopt a healthy diet but do not know where to start, even if it is only to supplement the school menus with the ideal dinner.
Cooking mistakes
“What mistakes do we make when cooking or combining food?”
—When shopping, I recommend reading the product labels carefully, not paying attention to the colorful letters that promise vitamins (of which, by the way, our children do not have deficiencies but rather excess, and that fruits and vegetables have almost always higher amounts ), but in the amount of salt and sugar added, in the type of fats it contains (that does not contain trans fats, or palm and coconut oil or fats of animal origin). And fill our pantry with a variety of fresh and healthy foods.
The best ways of cooking for everyone are the oven, cooking with water or steam, the microwave (it gives us time and preserves the properties of the food very well) and the iron. The fried foods and batters that children love should be reserved for a few special occasions. And olive oil is always better for cooking and frying.
As for the combinations, I recommend educating the taste of children by offering them variety, not combining, for example, different carbohydrates in the same meal (macaroni first and cutlet with fried potatoes second, I have a particular cross with children’s menus restaurants in that sense), but we should teach them to eat vegetable side dishes, for example.
“What suggestions do you make to balance the scales?”
—Educating children and parents is basic. We eat five times a day and many people do not know the foundation of a balanced diet, they sometimes ask me in the office if they can change the milk for breakfast for a juice, or they believe that this juice is a valid substitute for fruit. We try to do a nutritional education not of imposition, but of explanation, because what is best known is what is adopted as our own. If instead of advising children to eat fruit we tell their parents how to overcome their children’s reluctance, surely it will be easier to adopt that habit. Parents who come to the consultation usually ask us, precisely, ways to bring the foods that are usually rejected, usually fish, legumes, fruits and vegetables, the healthiest!
And our recommendation is to start working on healthy eating habits from the beginning, as soon as complementary feeding is incorporated into breastfeeding. Because as soon as boys and girls reach adolescence, creating healthy habits is practically impossible, we must have done it before. Their socialization means that parents have little weight in their decisions, and that includes the type of food they choose.
We try to provide families with the tools that facilitate, precisely, the creation of those habits, how to organize purchases and menus so that healthy eating is within reach at home, learn to have criteria when choosing between one or other types of food depending on its nutritional properties. We do not forget that, despite all the nutritional education in the world in schools and in the environment, if the child opens the door of the pantry at home and finds industrial pastries within reach instead of a sandwich and an apple, that will be what you will eat.
For children to eat well, it is essential to reduce trinkets, industrial pastries, salty snacks, fast food on rare occasions. And once this is done, start offering fruit and / or vegetables at all meals of the day, go back to the spoon dish, and I mean legumes, stew soup and traditional healthy cuisine.
