Your Sugar Smart child can know the difference between basic diet, energy supplement and enjoyment

Knowledge is not a guarantee that our children will choose a healthy lifestyle, but it, together with motivation and ownership, is a crucial prerequisite. In this blog post, I tell you why your child needs knowledge about the difference of resp. basic diet, energy supplements and enjoyment, and how this knowledge can form an important starting point for inspiring, educational and health-creating conversations at child height – about the importance of diet for the body’s biology.

The American author and philosopher Elbert Hubbard put it very well: “The purpose of teaching a child is to enable the child to fend for itself without its teacher.” His point is also really good if you as a parent (grandparent, professional in the field of children, etc.) want to contribute to your child’s healthy lifestyle, because here too the purpose and end goal must be a reflective and self-driving child who can actively choose health for and with biological knowledge and curiosity even be able to move safely, unmanipulated and consciously in the diet jungle.

If you want to help build the foundation for your child’s health, I recommend that you – when your child is ready for it of course – start talking to him or her about the interaction of food with the body. You can do this in a good way by dividing the food into three groups and telling your child that, respectively. available:

Basic diet – which is food that makes the body and intestinal flora stronger.

Energy supplement – which is food that makes the body grow and cope with extra hard training.

Enjoyment – which is food that contributes exclusively to enjoyment and which is enjoyed on special occasions.

If you create an understanding of the three groups, you are well on your way to forming a strong foundation for good, fun and not least educational conversations that your child can use on the journey towards a life as a sugar and health smart.

For example, when you shop or cook with your child, you can now, among other things. talk to each other about what food does for the body: Is it fuel, maintenance of the body’s cool functions – or pure enjoyment? At the same time, you can talk about which food best feeds the many bacteria that live in our gut. About why the gut bacteria are the world’s best mates. And about how instincts, habits and advertisements can tease us and manipulate our choices – although of course we decide for ourselves what we put in our mouths.

Surely – and on the child’s terms – you are in this way helping to equip your child with important health skills he or she will certainly not be without.

Of course, if you want to help your child make the ‘right’ health choices, do you need to include the children in your intermediate bills and assess what good food, energy supplements and enjoyment foods are?

Health must be fun and exciting!

Of course, part of the role of the child’s mad-sensei also includes that it is your job to make health as fun and inspiring as it deserves to be!

Make it a fun mystery when you and your child explore the supermarket and the product declarations. Maybe there may even be sports in your efforts to figure out when someone is trying to manipulate you? It may also be that you can come up with small and funny stories that make it much easier for your child to understand why it is important to feed the bacteria in the stomach with solid, real food that both makes us strong and keeps us healthy. .

Only the imagination sets limits, as long as your creativity is based on a good and healthy understanding of the body’s BIOLOGY.