VegMoms

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: Encourage your child’s pride in his or her vegan lifestyle. Here are some fun ways you can support that:

1) Buy her a cool veg-message T-shirt or bag from PETA’s catalog online.

2) Offer a great vegan snack he can take to call.

3) Visit a farm sanctuary, and help your child create a class report about it.

4) Volunteer together at an animal shelter.

5) Help her write a letter to the editor of your newspaper or a kids’ magazine about why she’s vegan and why others should consider it, too.

6) Help him get politically active by writing letters to politicians about law changes.

7) Let her choose a veg-positive bumper sticker for the family car (or her bike, guitar case, locker, etc.)

From Chapter Three of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. (Photo Petacatalog.com)

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: There’s a new cloud hanging over The Snack. A new study suggests that too many kids are eating too many snacks comprised of the wrong kinds of foods. 

In our book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids we recommend that vegan kids eat healthy snacks often, especially after school or when they’re on the go in between sports and other events. Snacking isn’t necessarily bad for vegan kids whose daily food choices may be high in nutrients and fiber and potentially low on calories. But that doesn’t mean that all snacks are created equal or incessant snacking is healthy for kids, any kids — vegan, vegetarian or omnivorous. In fact, a recent UNC-Chapel Hill study found that kids today eat around three snacks per day on average, compared to fewer than two snacks per day in 1977. The study showed that in 1977, only 74 percent of kids ate snacks at all, while 98 percent of kids do today. And the obesity and overweight rates for children continue to climb. Today, 16.4 percent of kids ages 10-17 have a Body Mass Index in the 95th percentile or higher. That’s obese.

This is dangerous, and snacks may be part of the problem as “…our children are moving toward constant eating,” one researcher is quoted as saying. We know many common snack foods are not at all healthy. Children are eating more candy, drinking more sugary drinks and eating less fruit as snacks.

Clearly, snacking isn’t bad in and of itself. If a child is hungry at 10 am or 3 pm or 8 pm, we need to let him eat! We try to make sure our cabinets and fridge are stocked with healthy snacks, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grain snack foods and non-dairy desserts. We have a snack drawer that all of our kids can reach on their own that’s stocked with only pre-approved foods that are okay for our kids to grab at any time, day or night. Vegan snacking for kids remains important eating, if done right.   (Photo: iStockphoto.com)

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: It’s almost Easter for Christians around the world, a time that celebrates new life by coloring dead eggs and eating pigs and lamb. There’s an irony there (my husband says I’m being too harsh and he’s going to stop sending my blog out to his non-vegan friends if I rain on too many people’s Easter parades, so I won’t explore that train of thought any further here), but there’s also a lot of alternative ways to celebrate Easter. Peta’s Easter Site has a lot of great ideas, including egg coloring alternatives and sources of vegan candy for your bunnies’ baskets. An animal-free, completely vegan Easter celebration may be one of the best ways to help symbolize in a concrete way the new life of Easter for your kids.

Photo Source: Peta.com

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: It’s easy to let too much salt creep into our kids’ daily diets without even noticing. Too much salt can contribute to high blood pressure and obesity, even in childhood. But more than that, kids who eat a high sodium diet may expect all food to taste unnaturally highly flavored, thereby predisposing them to want all the foods that are high in salt (like fast food, chips and other junk foods) and to dislike milder flavored, natural foods like whole grains, fruits and veggies.

Here are some simple ways to help your child avoid salt:

1. When you cook, use low-sodium veggie stock and low-sodium soy sauce.
2. Rinse canned beans, and cook with dried beans as much as possible.
3. Buy natural, no salt added peanut butter.
4. Choose low-sodium canned soups.
5. Eliminate potato chips and other salty snacks from your child’s daily food choices.

When you do use salt, choose iodized salt because iodine is essential to your child’s health. Salt doesn’t have to be a complete no-no for kids — let’s be real, we all like some salty popcorn or a shake or two on some steamed veggies every now and again.  Just be aware that too much of a good thing like salt can shake our children’s health and, with all of the low-sodium products on the market today, it’s an easy hazard to avoid.

Blog post adapted from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. (Photo: iStockphoto.com)

Wednesday’s VegKids: Many kids go through phases where they will eat pasta, bread, crackers, rice, tortillas and cereal in abundance, but turn up their noses at nearly anything else — even anything in, on or over those beloved carbs. Solution: Begin to put small amounts of healthful toppings, spreads and vegetables on or in those favorite carb-based meals — and I mean small(barely noticeable) amounts: Vegan Parmesan on the pasta, a few kernels of cooked frozen corn and carrots mixed into the rice, less than a spoonful of hummus on the tortilla. When you find a few of these add-ons that your child will eat, begin to add more of those. Then expand to other healthful additions such as tomato sauce on the pasta (again, lightly at first), small tofu chunks on the rice, or a couple of bananas or strawberry slices in the cereal. Advance incrementally.

Because most carbs are rather blandly colored, color may be one of your child’s hindrance to trying other more brightly colored foods. So first go simply with colored fruits and veggies such as peeled apples, bananas, celery, corn — nothing outlandishly purple or bright green! Build up to those challenges.

And one final rule on carbs: Simply do not introduce white bread to your child. The taste- and texture-stunting nature of bleached white breads turns kids away from whole grains like nothing else.

(adapted from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids, Chapter 7).