Candy…gum…chips…soda…Twinkies (and similar)… Not only is that stuff not at all healthy, it’s amazingly expensive. Get your kids on the road to healthy eating with many healthier and cheaper alternatives. And the younger start, not only will it be easier, but you’ll develop a lifetime of healthy habits.

My kids are now 17 and 22, both seriously into food, and I think some of the reason is that we got them into stuff like the below at age 2 or 3:

• Celery sticks with peanut butter filling the curve (maybe a couple of raisins, for decoration)
• Cheap canned pitted black olives: let them put one on each finger and eat them off one at a time
• Thin slices of tofu, dipped in low-salt soy sauce or Bragg’s Amino sauce, rolled in nutritional yeast, and fried to a crisp
• Dried fruit (we find organic inexpensively at the remainder store or at Trader Joe’s
• Make-your-own whole grain cookies and even crackers–when kids participate in making them, they’re much more interested in eating them
• Darker, richer, less sweet chocolate (most kids will even eat a 55% cocoa bar, especially if it has nuts–and that’s far healthier than the 35% typical in even the better milk chocolates–though personally, I like it around 80%)
• Freshly toasted nuts (2-3 minutes in a toaster oven, and what a flavor and aroma!
• Apple slices with almond butter

Hundreds of others, but I’ll stop there.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 7:34 am and is filed under Frugal Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.