Eat The Rainbow

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Remember that candy ad that told you to Taste the Rainbow?

It wasn’t far off.

While eating a rainbow of candy isn’t all that healthy, eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables is just what you need to do in your quest to have a healthy, balanced diet.

I’ve mentioned before that I met Connie Diekman at the Sara Lee Back to School Nutrition Summit, but she wasn’t the only nutritionist who spoke with us. I also met Kim Kerchher, Registered Dietician for the Jewel-Osco chain of grocery stores.

Kim had a lot of terrific suggestions for getting kids to eat veggies, but two of my favorites were to eat the rainbow and to make things into games.

Think about a typical kid-friendly meal – chicken nuggets with honey, french fries, pretzels, and a sugar cookie – brown, beige, brown, and beige. We all know that it’s not the healthiest meal, right?

When was the last time you saw beige or brown on the rainbow?

Exactly.

I looked at Grace’s lunch one day this week, and I was shocked.  The whole meal was orange: cantaloupe, cheesy popcorn, carrot sticks, cheddar cheese, and goldfish crackers. By coincidence, the entire meal was orange.

Wouldn’t it be fun to give each day of the week a color? Monday could be red day. Tuesday, orange. Wednesday, yellow. Thursday, green. Friday, blue. Saturday, purple. Sunday, white. Your kids would love it, and it would make planning much easier for you, provided you didn’t go overboard and become completely rigid and fussy about it.

Another fun thing to do is to try to eat each color of the rainbow each day. You could post a chart in the kitchen and let your kids check off the colors as they eat throughout the day. Tune in this week for my version of such a chart.

Grace’s Kitchen Friends

Please join in Grace’s Kitchen Friends! To play along, all you have to do is fill out MckLinky below.  You can link up any post that talks about kids and food:

• feeding kids
• cooking with kids
• kids’ nutrition
• play with food or play kitchens
• crafts with or about food
• There are a lot of other kids and food things I haven’t listed (like growing food with kids or fun recipes that kids love!), so please don’t feel limited.

I’m easy like that, Dear Reader. The only thing I ask is that you link back here to Grace’s Kitchen Friends in your post. I can’t wait to see what your kids are doing!

Photo courtesy of andrivete on Flickr

© 2009 – 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

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