Healthy Eating Begins At Home

The sights and sounds of the circus are exciting and overwhelming. Don’t you remember? A three ring performance with clowns, wild animals and trapeze artists is a mesmerising experience. It’s amazing for an organisation to perform several different acts without dismal failure night after night.

Their success is contributed to establishing good habits, which earned your applause.

Your family may or may not have a three ring circus, but your family may have a demanding schedule, a single parent or new parents, which challenges the ability and knowledge to healthy eating at home. Without the basic knowledge and proper habits of eating healthy, your child will adopt the eating habits you instill in them for the rest of their life.

According to a BBC Documentary, “Fast Food Babies”, the short documentary illustrated three different real life family scenarios.

Scenario 1:

A family, two working adults with children, discovers it’s challenging to cook meals at home because of their long working hours. After work, the parents fight traffic, run errands and have minimal time to eat, therefore, fast food is convenient answer to their daily routine.

Because of their fast food diet, their youngest child is consuming half a liter of oil per week and six cans of soda per day. The child’s calorie intake is 3,200 calories per day, which is 700 calories more than an adult male. If the child continues on this diet regime, he is in danger of becoming anemic, and a primary candidate for heart disease.

Scenario 2:

Another family attempts to feed their child healthy food, the toddler refuses to eat, therefore, the parents resort to fast food, so their child will eat. The child is consuming 3,000 calories per day, and he is a future health risk for heart disease.

Scenario 3:

A young, single mother engages solely in a fast food diet because she is a student with minimal time in her schedule, therefore, her child follows the same diet discipline. The child consumes 150 grams of sugar per day, which is four times the daily allowance.

The child’s diet consists of the following week food allotments.

·         8 pieces of fried chicken

·         4 portions of chips

·         2 frozen pizzas

·         20 frozen nuggets

·         24 glasses of soda

These scenarios are drastic, but they are real.

Your family diet regime may not perfectly parallel one of these scenarios, however, your family’s diet regiment is a leading cause to your children’s future health and healthy eating habits.

The United Kingdom’s family diet is at risk.

·         1 in 8 children are iron deficient.

·         1 in 5 children are over-weight.

·         The fast food diet commands 3,000 to 3,200 calories per day.

Healthy diet changes require an effective plan.

If your family situation is challenged by time restrictions, you can start with eliminating one fast food meal per week. If you are a new parent, your toddler may be interested in a homemade meal by playing with the food textures. This seems completely foreign, however, children usually need 16 tastes before they accept a new food in their regular diet.

Whether your family is a dual or single parent home or your household is composed of one child, several children or teenagers, you have to accept your actions and habits will be absorbed by your children. Ultimately, a poor diet at home fuels the opportunity for increased health risks and a continuing dismal diet regime.