Eating meals together is one of the best ways to encourage a healthy family diet. Serve wholesome foods in attractive ways, and include your children in the shopping process. A trip to the market is a great time to discuss ingredients and to read labels if your youngsters are old enough. Make it entertaining by telling them they're sleuths hunting for the "hidden" sodium and calories in packaged and canned goods.
Breakfast
Breakfasts get more popular if you vary the fare. Top bowls of oatmeal with decorations made of nuts, dried fruit and banana slices. Create outrageous designs such as monster faces, or let the kids make their own. Serve fresh produce in different ways each morning. One day present skewers with grapes, melon, pineapple and strawberries. Other mornings bake carrot muffins, add berries to your pancake batter, blend fruit smoothies or make sundaes with layers of fruit, granola and nonfat yogurt.
Lunch
Make lunch a hands-on meal filled with healthy choices. Let family members design their own mini-pizzas and pop them into a toaster oven. All you have to do is provide whole-wheat English muffins, pasta sauce and a variety of toppings like grated cheese and chopped tomatoes, olives and green peppers. Do the same thing with sandwich ingredients and whole-grain bread. Kids and adults enjoy choosing the foods they like including ham, cheese, lettuce and tomato.
Dinner
Use one basic set of ingredients for dinner and vary them slightly to create meals for all generations. For adults, roast skinless chicken for the main dish, and for youngsters coat the chicken with an egg-cereal mixture to make a wholesome version of chicken nuggets. If you're serving quesadillas, use whole-wheat tortillas. Fill the adults' portions with low-fat cheese and sliced onions and peppers. A lot of kids like simpler foods, so make cheese-only quesadillas for them and serve vegetable sticks on the side.
Snacks
Many healthy family diets go awry at snack time, but you can take steps to prevent that. Stock the pantry and refrigerator with easy-to-eat, nutritious snacks -- think grapes, banana chips, whole-grain pretzels and small cartons of yogurt. Create your own snacks, too, including trail mix with nuts, dried fruits and chocolate chips. Have the kids use the freezer to make their own juice bars in ice cube trays. They can also make frozen bananas -- just put a banana on a stick and dip it into melted chocolate. For an extra touch, roll it in coconuts or chopped nuts before it goes into the freezer.
