Why Makeover?

Just as adults crave traditional comfort foods in times of stress, or after a long day, so too do children. However many comfort foods and kids’ favorites are loaded with fat sugar and salt, and repeatedly serving these foods to children is not setting the good example necessary for healthful eating for a lifetime. However serve children food they don’t like (or think they don’t like) and you may have dinnertime apocalypse on your hands. This is where a meal makeover comes in perfectly. A meal makeover is tweaking a favorite and familiar food and making it healthier without sacrificing taste.

When crafting a meal makeover it can be important that the foods look similar to what children already enjoy. For example, if your child is a “chicken” nugget junky, it will be important to replace these frozen treats with real foods that looks a little like their frozen prototype. Most frozen chicken nuggets are do have some chicken in them, nut often the chicken nugget is a breaded and fried vehicle for the chicken part castoffs which are pumped up with fluids that are often very high in sodium. One serving (five nuggets) of a popular grocery store frozen chicken nugget has 920 mg of sodium. Let’s put that in perspective. The maximum recommended amount of sodium for children ages 4-8 is 1200mg. So 5 chicken nuggets is dosing your child with 60% of the sodium they need for the whole day. On the other hand, making chicken nuggets from actual chicken breast provides almost double the protein (because there are no nutritionally void fillers making up the weight of the nugget) and there is significantly less sodium: 335 mg.

Desserts are another tricky area. It can be very tempting to offer a child a sweet treat after he or she finished all her broccoli, but sweet treats such as ice cream and brownies can fill children up with empty calories. Sweet treats can be a healthy part of a child’s diet; if done correctly. Using the most wholesome and lean ingredients is the first step. Choosing desserts that are fruit based is always a great start, and making chocolate treats from scratch with real cocoa can provide a lot of flavor without a lot of extra sugar and calories. There are a lot of great resources online for cooking up healthful alternatives to kids’ favorites, the first step is looking.