Science Made Simple: Talking to Your Kids about Nutrition

Confused at how best to talk to your kids about food?  Trust us, you’re not alone.  Most adults aren’t well versed in nutrition, as evidenced by the overload of fad diets and self help books and likely a product of the lack of general education around the topic.

At Vitaminis, we believe in a teach, don’t preach philosophy (for the littlest ones, think of it even more as a show, don’t tell approach).  Food should be fun, not feared, hence why we agree with the current thinking that there aren’t good and bad foods, but more so foods that fuel (we talked a bit about this in our post on how Your Nutrients Make You Mighty.

Kids generally love to see how things work, ask a gazillion questions, and test to learn.  So, consider making nutrition an experiment with things like taste tests (the classic bitter/sour/sweet is great for grade schoolers while a simple raw vs cooked is fun for early eaters), age appropriate books (we adore Dr. Suess’ Inside Your Outside as well as Eating the Alphabet) and involving kids in meal prep to see how flavors combine and talk about how the nutrients work together (for info to backup your conversation, check out our post on Maximizing Nutrient Absorption) - even a simple Smoothie works for this “experiment”.