Healthy After School Snacks For your kids

Part of healthy eating is offering healthy snacks at snack time for children.  By serving a variety of healthy snacks, you are helping provide added nutritional value throughout the day to meet minimum daily requirements of the children.     

What should you serve? Healthcare providers and nutritionists advise incorporating fresh fruits and vegetables into your healthy snacks as much as possible, leaving out unhealthy sugary foods and food loaded with unhealthy fat content. However, a number one challenge for most adults is to learn how to whip up snacks consisting of these fresh fruits and vegetables that are appealing to children.

Fret not! Here are several healthy snack ideas to play around with:

• Fresh fruit salad made up of fruits of the season where you are, then topped with low-fat flavoured yogurt.
• Pizza topped with healthy alternatives like plenty of veggies and low fat mozzarella cheese.
• Apple and cheese chunks on slim celery sticks (like shish-kabobs)
• Graham crackers and peanut butter sandwiches.
• Homemade or store bought fruit juice Popsicles or cubes (made in your ice cube bins)
• Flavoured rice cakes.
• Flavoured popcorn.
• Fresh veggie sticks with peanut butter dip and flavoured yogurt dips.
• Pita pocket bread stuffed with veggies and low fat cheese.
• Tacos shells (hard or soft) stuffed with fresh veggies and low fat cheese.
• Trail Mix – make your own with different varieties of Chex Mix, nuts, tiny pretzels and snack crackers.

Healthy Snacking Tips:
Use whole wheat grain breads and crackers when possible because they are low in sugar and fat.

Skip serving fruit juices with high fructose and other sugary content amount. Real fruit juice should be 100% fruit juice. Plus limit servings to 6 ounces daily for children under 6 and 12 ounces daily for children up to 18 from there.

Pretzels and other refined grains should not be on the snack menus a lot.
Keep snacks light; i.e. these are not full-course meals and shouldn’t be substitutes for them, either.

Serve snacks like teachers do, if you prefer – in the afternoon, like after nap time for younger ones. Or serve children right after their regular school day if they are in after school programs, or after their sports or other extracurricular activities of the afternoon.
Just make sure that when you plan healthy snacks for children, you do leave plenty of time for their next meal so that they are not too full to eat it for mom or dad – or you! You don’t want to spoil meal times.

for more info:
http://www.concerningkids.com/healthy-after-school-snacks-for-kids.php

Posted in My kids Health