Kids need to eat foods that come from the USDA's Food Pyramid, a structure built on the five major food groups. One of those food groups is fruit and another is vegetables. Both groups are important, although not always welcome. MayoClinic.com advises sprucing up their appeal by cutting fruits and vegetables into creative shapes, keeping them handy as immediate snacks or sneakily chopping them up to include in recipes without kids even realizing it.
Habit
Feeding kids fruits and vegetables can set up a lifelong habit of healthy eating. Rather than grabbing for potato chips, kids who grow up snacking on fruits and vegetables can reach for an apple or orange. Exposing toddlers to fruits and vegetables when they first start eating solid foods is especially vital, according to KidsHealth, as that's when kids are open to exploring different textures and tastes. Watching other family members also eat fruits and vegetables, instead of junk food, further reinforces the healthy eating habit.
Vitamins
Children do not need large doses of vitamins for proper health and development, but they do need some. The recommended amount of daily servings of fruits and vegetables most often fills the bill. This ensures you don't have to bother with vitamin supplements, which the American Academy of Pediatrics' website Healthy Children recommends against except in special circumstances, like insufficient quantities of Vitamin D, which is largely found in dairy products.
Fiber
Kids don't need too much fiber to stay healthy either, but fiber does play a big part in their diet. Fiber keeps the digestive system humming along, decreasing constipation, softening the stool and speeding up the time it takes food to make its rounds through the intestines. Fiber in fruit and vegetables also has the power to fill up a hungry tummy without a lot of calories, which will help cut down on a kid's desire to snack on less healthy fare.
Quantities
Your kid doesn't have to sit around chomping on apples and broccoli all day to get the daily dose of fruits and vegetables he needs, Healthy Kids notes. Children age 4 and older need two to four servings of fruit per day and three to five servings of vegetables per day. When kids start eating solid foods, start out with very small amounts and increase with age. The minimum needed for 2 year olds is 1 cup of fruits and 1 cup of vegetables per day, increased to 1.5 cups of each for 3 year olds. A serving size of fruit is one piece of fruit, like an orange or apple, or one-half cup of chopped fruit. A vegetable serving size is 1 cup of leafy raw vegetables or one-half cup other vegetables or cooked vegetables of any sort.
Considerations
While fresh fruit and vegetables are healthy, not all fruit and vegetable products are. Canned vegetables, for example, can have a very high salt content. Love of salt is another taste kids can pick up and carry throughout their lives, Healthy Children warns, and it's not a particularly healthy habit. Fruit and vegetable juices are another caveat. While three-fourths of a cup of 100 percent fruit or vegetable juice can substitute as a serving of either food group, some juices are loaded with sugar and calories.
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