How to Make Healthy Food for Children

Video Transcript

DR. CHARLES BENS: Hi. I'm Dr. Charles Bens, president of Healthy @ Work. I'm here today to talk about how to make healthy foods for children. You know, all foods aren't created equal, even when they seem to be very much the same. Let's take oatmeal as an example. You could give your child instant oatmeal. The problem is that's a refined carbohydrate; that's not a complex carbohydrate. Or you can take 15 or 20 minutes and cook the whole-grain oatmeal. That way they're going to get four or five times the nutrients that they would get from that instant oatmeal. Other cereals are a good example too because sugar coated and processed cereals really aren't the way to go. You want to make sure that you get foods that aren't processed and have very low or no sugar. Actually, a whole-grain cereal is the best way to go. You take the whole-grain cereal, you add the fruit, you add the low-fat organic milk, now you got a wonderfully nutritious breakfast. The same is true with vegetables. You know, all vegetables aren't created equal and you could again take the same thing. You could take peas or beans and just go through the same sequence. You could say that canned food really isn't the best. It has the least amount of nutrients in it. Then you could probably go to frozen food, not as bad as the canned, but still not as good as fresh. Now you can say there's a difference between fresh foods as well. There's fresh not locally bought and then there's fresh organic and local. That's by far the best. And you want to make sure that the vegetables you buy and serve to your children have the highest nutrients in them. Some of these processed foods or foods that are on the truck too long lose up to 70% or 80% of their nutrients. You always want to try to select whole, natural, unprocessed foods. You want to avoid at all cost refined foods, fatty foods, sugary foods. These all lead to diseases like diabetes and heart disease and cancer. Well, and this is not always easy to do, so you have to serve these foods in an interesting way. You want to mix these foods together in wraps, in salads and in casseroles. This is a great way to include vegetables in your child's eating plan during the day without them really thinking about it so much. So in making these foods, you want to make sure you serve the foods that are highest in nutrition, the least processed, the least cooked, as a mater of fact. Raw foods are a good thing, especially when you're talking fruits and vegetables. So those are my tips for making healthy foods for children. Thank you very much for your time today.