Healthy Snack Ideas

Think Healthy Snacks!
Snacks are an important part of your children’s eating habits. Like stoking a fire, they provide the ongoing fuel needed for energetic children throughout the day. Try offering snacks two times a day, both mid-morning and mid-afternoon. By keeping them healthy and nutritious, you can take advantage of these occasions to “fill-in” areas if your children’s diet that may be lacking.
For example, if they don’t drink milk with their meals, then offer cheese or yogurt as a snack; if they don’t like eating meat, then try peanut butter on a small bagel. By focusing on healthy foods, you are setting your children down the path of lifelong good eating habits.

Snack Ideas
• High-fiber cookies.
• Homemade trail mix. Include dried fruit, mini M&M’s, peanuts, Cheerios, Life cereal, and pretzel sticks broken in half.
• Fruit and more fruit!
• “Bugs on a log” – celery or cucumber wedges with peanut butter or cream
cheese, with raisins placed on top.
• Healthy muffins.
• String cheeses.
• Pretzels, popcorn, graham crackers, rice cakes.
• Peanut butter and jelly or banana on whole wheat bread.
• Apple slices with peanut butter dip.
• Yogurt.
• Freeze chunks of watermelon on a stick
for healthy and tasty popsicles.
• Roll bananas in crushed pretzels.
• Freeze gogurts (yogurt in a tube).
• Frozen soybeans out of the pod (organic
food section) – boil, and add salt.
• Pumpkin has a lot of vitamins, try using it in your baking.
• Toast wheat germ to use as sprinkles.
• Partially boil carrot sticks.
• Put snack-food into small baggies or small snack cups and keep in cupboard so you
can grab them quickly.

A note on Toddlers!
Feeding toddlers can be a very challenging task. Continuously changing appetites and a growing need for independence and control often butt heads at the kitchen table. A food loved one week moves to the bottom of the list the next. They’ll refuse to eat for several days and then suddenly become a bottomless pit. Sandwiches better be cut the RIGHT way, or a tantrum will ensue.

Just So You Know…
• It is normal for toddlers to refuse previously preferred foods or to refuse to try new foods altogether. Sometimes they need 20-30 exposures to a new food before they will eat it. Choose a new food, put small amounts on your child’s plate at each meal and do not comment on it or draw attention to it. Most toddlers will immediately refuse a food if you push it on them.
• If you’re having a hard time getting your toddler to eat a balanced diet, monitor what they eat over 5-7 days, not on a daily basis. If they eat a variety in that longer period of time, don’t worry.
• Give them the “illusion of control” by offering two choices for a meal (both of which you are happy to prepare) and letting them choose what they would like.

Hints to Help with Vegetables
• Make edible veggie art pictures
• Put different cut-up fruits or vegetables in an ice-cube tray or small muffin pan
• Fill an ice-cream cone with cottage cheese and shredded veggies
• Slip them into foods your child likes, such as cottage or cream cheese, and rice. Cover them with healthy sauces, such as tomato or cheese
• Serve them with a dip (kids love dip!)
• Cut them into interesting shapes