Christiane Meister-Mathieu
ANN/THE STAR – The advice from the World Health Organization (WHO) is simple – we should all be eating five portions of fruit and vegetables every day (more specifically, that’s three vegetables and two fruits per day).
A portion is defined as the amount that fits in the palm of your hand. Some find it easy to reach this goal, but for others, it’s a real challenge.
Here are some tips to get your family eating the healthy food they need.
TIP 1: DEVELOP ROUTINES
Routines are a good way to get more vitamins on the table and into your children’s tummies.
“At some point vegetables and fruit will have become a natural part of every meal,” said Silke Restemeyer from the German Nutrition Society (DGE).
In concrete terms, this can mean adding fruit to muesli in the morning, and putting cucumber slices in a hearty sandwich at lunchtime.
A plate of raw vegetables is good, both as a starter to satisfy the first hunger pangs and as a snack between meals.
A hot meal should always include a portion of vegetables, a salad or both. And for dessert, serve up a piece of fruit.
TIP 2: INCREASE THE PROPORTION OF VEGETABLES
”You can add extra vegetables to many dishes,” said Restemeyer, giving the example of grating them into meatballs or potato pancakes.
It’s also simple to just add more vegetables to a pasta sauce, and vegetable noodles can also be added to pasta.
Noodles made from courgette have been a popular recipe for some time and can be easily made with a spiral cutter.
Another option is pasta made from pulses, because lentils, peas and beans, unlike potatoes, are also counted towards the five daily portions.
Restemeyer therefore recommends cooking pasta sauces with lentils instead of meat or fish as a source of protein.
TIP 3: RESPECT PREFERENCES, BUT STILL OFFER SPURNED FOODS
But what happens when the plate with raw vegetables is pushed away and the tiny pieces of vegetable are sifted out of your carefully-prepared sauces?
Pre-school age children are likely to go through phases when they insist on restricting their diet.
“This is not at all unusual,” said professor of nutritional sciences and Head of the Research Department of Child Nutrition (FKE) at the University Children’s Hospital in Bochum, Germany Dr Mathilde Kersting.
She said parents should remain calm about it.
“In these phases, you can simply prepare the vegetables that the children like to eat more often,” she said.
Nevertheless, she recommended that parents should put spurned vegetables on the table as usual at the joint family meal. ”If you want to make vegetables palatable to children, you should offer them repeatedly, in an informal atmosphere and without pushing.
“And praise them when they try something new or add a new vegetable to their repertoire.”
TIP 4: HIDING MIGHT WORK, BUT NOT ALWAYS
If that doesn’t help either, one last option is to sometimes hide the vegetables in dishes, said Professor Kersting.
Tomato sauce is popular with almost all children, and a pureed courgette, carrot or onion will often go unnoticed in it.
A mashed potato can also be supplemented with mashed celery, for example.
And a finely-grated cucumber is undetectable in a yoghurt dip.
There are many recipes for sweet cakes with vegetables in cookbooks and on the web, ranging from pumpkin or beetroot cakes to courgette brownies. Nevertheless, both experts said that vegetables should never be exclusively hidden on the table.
It’s only when children are consciously offered them again and again – and then try them – that they will learn to accept new types of vegetables.
And of course, all this advice can be applied to obstinate adult veggie refusers – it’s never to late to learn to love a more varied, healthy diet.
