Food for Learning: Foods that Should be Better

Unfortunately, most of the following list of foods tends to be the food most loved by our children. And even more unfortunately, it is food that we find easy to prepare and serve to hungry impatient pre-schoolers. And there is one more even more unfortunate thing about the foods I am about to list: they are often disguised as healthy.

LiveScience recently listed the top foods in their research that we often mistake for healthy but find that they are something completely opposite. Although I won’t list all of them, it is important that you understand at least the basics.

Fish sticks – the fish is good, but the batter making the otherwise healthy fish more tasty is not.
Yogurt – Unless you can get your kids to eat plain, fat-free yogurt, they are mostly eating a dairy dessert.
Soup – Home made is best. There is no second best.
Russet potatoes – They are often disguised as mashed, fried, or boiled and no matter how you twist them into different forms, they completely lack taste and nutrition.
Popcorn – Unless you pop the corn in a hot air popper, you are completely missing the point.
Bread – White is the worst, followed by mass produced whole wheat, which contains sugars, salt, and softeners.
Cereal – If your kids have not seen it on TV, it is probably good for them. Make a batch of oatmeal or malt-o-meal at the beginning of the week and warm it up every day and add fruit or raisins.
Commercial organic – This may come as a surprise but if you are buying organic from Wal-Mart, it is only organic in name and not in the sustainable, healthy principles that makes organic worth the trouble to find.
Pizza – Dominos is not pizza. Buy your own dough, roll it out, top it with cheese that you pick, sauce that you make, and meat that is not processed by a national chain and you have what pizza was originally intended to be.

Sure, it takes a few additional minutes but your kids will be better for it and you will – save money.