Why Should We Increase Fruit and Vegetable Intake in Kid’s Diet?

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a study which stated that about 60% of children don’t eat fruits and about 93% don’t eat vegetables, and it also suggesting designing new strategies to encourage kids to eat more fruits and veggies.

Today the kids are spending more time indoors and their sedentary lifestyle has put an adverse impact on them too. They rarely go out and play because they lack the energy to feel like doing so. Kids are slowly becoming deficient in many vitamins and nutrients which we get only from fruits and vegetables that we eat, and it can develop some serious disabilities in the long term.

As modern parents, we don’t get much time to prepare a wholesome meal at home every day, so we always try to quick fix everything, but we forget that in between all this, our kids are not getting the proper nutrition.

Liane Roe, a research nutritionist at Penn state said – “for most foods, kids will eat more when served larger portions, so we wanted to test whether increasing the number of fruits and vegetables that are served over five days would increase intake”,

and also added – “we also wondered whether substituting produce for other foods would increase intake more than simple adding extra fruits and veggies”.

“When deciding what to feed the kids, it’s easy to remember that half of the food should be fruits and vegetables” – Barbara Rolls, Helen A Guthrie Chair and director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Penn state said, adding – “if you start seeing that you are serving too much and have more waste, you could cut back the high calorie-dense food while adding more produce. Experiment and have some fun trying different fruits and vegetables to see what they like and so you can serve meals with sensitivity to their personal taste.”

Simple by adding 50% more fruits and vegetables side dishes in your child’s meal or by 50% more fruits and vegetables for an equivalent weight of the other foods, for example – if you add 50 grams of veggies to the lunch meal, you should also subtract 50 grams of Mac and cheese.