Reduce the sugar high that’s just waiting for your little trick-or-treaters this Halloween by making homemade goodies, instead of buying bags of candy or grocery store cupcakes. These are the perfect way to treat the kids to some festive snacks without nose-diving into fat, sugar and calories.
Plus, you can put their busy little hands to work to help you prepare these for their school parties or for a fun-filled Halloween night at home.
Trick or Treat Trail Mix
A simple snack to fill goody bags, or just keep handy during a scary movie, this trail mix takes minutes to prepare. Pretzles, reduced-fat cheese crackers, dried fruits, nuts and a few M&M candies will have them asking for more!
Sugar-Free Dirt and Worms
This is a funny little snack that sends imaginations running wild. Fill tiny flower pots or Halloween paper cups with pumpkin pudding, homemade granola and sugar-free gummy worms you make yourself for an unforgettable treat.
You’ve seen the cookbooks and heard the buzz. “It’s a great way to sneak vegetables into your kid’s daily diets and bypass their picky palates!” scream the reviews. I’m talking, of course, about the practice of adding veggie purees to foods that you wouldn’t ordinarily suspect – beets in brownies or spinach in chocolate chip cookies, for example.
No, I’m not kidding. Spinach is a fine food and a great addition to an entire roster of dishes – but not, in my mind, a yummy addition to my beloved chocolate chip cookies. Which are just fine on their own.
I think that vegetables are a tricky subject for many kids. Vegetables have strong flavors, and many children are averse to them, but in my mind sneaking them into other, less nefarious foods is the wrong tact to take. Don’t get me wrong – I frequently add shredded carrots to my bolognese sauce, for extra flavor, and have been known to add cauliflower chunks to my homemade macaroni and cheese – but my kids know that I’ve done so.
Kids are just getting back into the school groove and you may have noticed that you have started to slack on your intentions to send your child off to school with a healthy and nutritious lunch every day. Maybe the chips were on sale or it was faster to hand your kids lunch money instead of a sack lunch.
So before your well-intentioned efforts of healthy school lunches resemble more and more like your New Year’s resolutions in mid-February, the School Nutrition Association has declared the week of October 12-16 as National School Lunch Week. The organization is dedicated to supporting schools in creating healthy, nutritious and affordable school lunches.
A little effort goes a long way when it comes to weight loss. And that goes for your kids, as well. A new study examined the consequences of family health programs on very obese children. They found that even modest weight loss had significant health benefits.
According to the researchers, there hasn’t been much research done on these kinds of programs for severely obese children.
“Modest weight loss is associated with real health benefits. That’s the take-home message, it’s worth doing,” says Dr. Marsha D. Marcus of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the authors of the study.
Being a busy mom, I find that mornings are especially chaotic and not friendly to a leisurely, home-cooked breakfast. Not only that, my kids’ favorite breakfasts involve foods that are high in fat and calories and not healthy choices. One of the best breakfast options out there is cereal. So many cereals on the shelf are full of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial colorings and lacking in protein – but appealing to kids, thanks to colorful pictures, candy-like flavors and cartoon characters. It’s hard to find a cereal that pleases both children and parents, but it is possible. Here are some guidelines that I try to follow when I’m shopping for cereal. (Psst – I never bring the kids.)
- Keep the sugar low - I remember when I was a child my mom always told me never to buy cereal with a sugar count over the magic number of “10.” Ten grams of sugar means that the box is 10% sugar, and that’s high enough for it to still be tasty.
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