Keep your preschooler healthy and away from junk food. Learn how to prepare healthy snacks for your child to take to school in this nutritional video.
Pack brain foods
Select whole wheat and vitamin-rich foods
Add foods with omega oils, protein and Vitamin B
Charles K. Bens, Ph.D. | President of Healthy @ Work, Inc., author of Healthy at Work: Your Pocket Guide to Good Health and The Healthy Smoker: How To Quit Smoking By Becoming Healthier First . Educational specialties include nutrition, smoking cessation, wellness and mental challenges. He is also the team leader for wellness consulting assignments.
DR. CHARLES BENS: Hi. I'm Dr. Charles Bens, president of Healthy @ Work. I'm here today to talk to you a little bit about healthy snacks for preschoolers to take to school. You know, preschoolers need energy. They need brain food. They need cell rebuilding food because their cells are replacing themselves all the time. Some simple snacks like whole wheat muffins with blueberries and nuts inside are a really amazing snack with some really good nutrients in it. Vanilla yogurt with berries and nuts in it is another thing that's great for preschoolers. Even apples with almond butter. You could make a celery stick and put almonds--almond butter on the inside and raisins. It looks like a floating log or a boat. Almond butter or low-fat cheese and whole-grain crackers is a great snack. Apple sauce with cinnamon in it or carrot sticks with a glaze of honey or sesame seeds would really be interesting for preschoolers. Some specific brain foods that you might think about--the brain needs magnesium, and the foods with magnesium in them are whole wheat, almonds, leafy greens, bananas. The brain also needs vitamin B, very, very important. Yogurt has a lot of vitamin B as do egg yolks and figs and cheese and chicken and nuts. So make sure that your child gets enough of those during the day in their snacks to make sure they get those vitamin B's. Omega oils, the brain is 40% fat. It needs a lot of oils. Salmon, tuna, flaxseeds, sunflower seeds, those are all good sources of omega oil. Some specific energy foods, you know, these oat and nut energy bars that they're making now are really wonderful and you should put one of those in their lunch with their snack. Send them some almond butter and blueberry-jam sandwiches. Use whole wheat bread, in fact, use whole grain bread and then put the almond butter and the blueberry jam on there. You've got a fantastic snack for a child. Fruit with nuts is important, but make sure you use walnuts and almonds and pecans because those are the kind of nuts that they really need. Some cell rebuilding foods, low-fat milk is really important; organic if you can get it. Tuna, chicken, salmon, these are proteins that the cells need to reproduce in a healthy form. You could actually make fish or chicken strips and put a glaze on them with a sweet soy. A whey protein smoothie with nuts and berries in it would be an excellent way to go. So for preschoolers, you want to make it fun. You want to make it interesting. You want to make it nutritious, and you want to stick to the foods that they like and try to make sure they're going to take those foods to school and eat them when they're there. Thanks very much for your time today.
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