10 ideas for getting your kids to eat their vegetables

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Research backs up these 10 ideas for getting your kids to eat their vegetables

Make getting more vegetables in your kids’ diet your 2012 resolution and succeed with help from Brian Wansink, the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, who headed up a study of the best way to get your children to eat more vegetables.

Birds Eye commissioned the research as part of the brand’s commitment to helping feed kids better and to inspire a new generation of vegetable lovers. Wansink is also the John Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University, and the lead author of over 100 academic articles and books on eating behavior.

Here, he shares 10 powerful tips for encouraging your children to eat their vegetables:

1. Model your vegetables: If you eat your vegetables then your kids will eat theirs too. Research suggests the chances a child eats recommended amounts of healthy foods double if their parents do.

2. Stock the freezer: Try fresh vegetables in frozen form to get your kids’ favorite vegetables all year round. Kids love carrots, corn and peppers all easy-to-prep options to keep in your “frozen pantry.”

3. Give kids a choice: Just giving kids a couple of options could mean more vegetables. Kids may prefer carrots to celery (they chose carrots 90 percent of the time, in a recent study) but when the choice was offered, they ate 18 percent more than when carrots were the only option.

4. Power kids’ plates: Help kids create their own vegetable-powered plate, and follow MyPlate advice to fill half the plate with fruits and veggies. The plate size (and even design) can affect how much kids eat. Research shows that large plates and certain plate designs can cause people to take an extra 20 percent or more without knowing it.

5. Play the name game: Several school studies have shown that vegetable sales increase as much as 27 percent after carrots become “X-ray vision carrots” and broccoli turns into “broccoli bites.” Come up with your own veggie names, or challenge the family to “name that vegetable.”

6. Get kids in the kitchen: Look for simple, easy recipes that the entire family can cook. Encourage your kids to discover what they enjoy about vegetables too. Incorporating already-prepped frozen vegetables and the microwave can make cooking safe and easy for kids.

7. Create super shoppers: Kids are more likely to eat what they help pick out, so bring the kids along on your next supermarket trip and let them pick their vegetables. Encourage them to try something new, such as blends of different vegetables, full of diverse tastes, colors, and textures.

8. Vegetable aspiration: Motivate the little ones and show them that eating healthy foods, like vegetables, can help set them up for success in the activities they love to do.

9. Go for the rainbow: Brighten up kids’ diets to help them eat a rainbow of nutrients. Choose different colors and varieties of vegetables, or vegetable blends, to create a palette of key nutrients kids need.

10. Always ready: Busy schedules make it important to have quick and easy options on hand for the kids. Stock the freezer with frozen vegetables year-round, and you’ll have convenient, and tasty, vegetables ready to serve at a moment’s notice.

Visit www.BirdsEye.com or www.Facebook.com/BirdsEyeVegetables to find more tips, recipes and tools to help feed kids better one veggie-powered plate at a time. People can join the Feed Kids Better initiative with Share Our Strength by visitingFacebook.com/BirdsEyeVegetables and building a veggie-powered plate. For every veggie-powered plate created on Facebook, Birds Eye will donate vegetables for 10 meals. Their goal is 1 million meals by September 2012.

2011, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Fruit and vegetables with Bill & Sheila

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