The Road To Healthier Snacking

Developing healthy eating habits is a lifelong journey that starts with the first swallow. Earth's Best can help nurture take those first, healthy eating steps. Beginning with Organic Infant formula followed by a full line of organic infant foods, it's easy to start your children on a path of wholesome eating.

Controlling your child's diet when they are babies is simple. But once they've developed a mind of their own, keeping them on the right path becomes more and more challenging. Snacks, in addition to meals, are necessary to get all the recommended daily nutrients into a toddler's diet. Snacks have traditionally been viewed as the place to loosen the nutrition shackles a bit, but that doesn’t need to be the case. Doing so represents a lost nutritional opportunity.

The lost opportunity comes from the fact that you haven't taken advantage of a hunger that may be satisfied with a more nutritious food. It's also a lost opportunity in terms of meeting daily nutritional needs, and a lost opportunity to develop taste preferences for more wholesome foods.

Earth's Best and Sesame Street recognize the unique challenges that toddlers pose when it comes to healthy eating and have created a few new vehicles to use.

Earth's Best and Sesame Street have joined together and developed nutritionally rich snacks that kids will choose on their own. Enticing kids into eating healthy snacks is easy when the more nutritious snacks are also naturally appealing to them.

One tactic for encouraging self-directed healthy snacks is allowing your toddler to choose his own snack. That doesn't mean allowing choices from the whole array of foods in the house, but rather, allowing him to choose between a couple of items that are also acceptable to you. For example--- propose a limited, nutritious offering such as “Do you want apple juice or pear juice?” “Do you some Snackin Fruit Hearts & Rings or Chocolate Crunchin' Grahams?”

The United States Department of Agriculture also knows the importance of a healthy diet, and recognizes that there are kid friendly ways to approach it. A terrific tool is My Pyramid for Preschoolers.

Enjoy the Healthy Eating Journey!