With practices like eating a meal together and reading food labels, parents can ensure that their kids are eating right

Thanks to our frenetic lives, instant and packaged foods have become a convenient option over more wholesome, home-made foods enjoyed by previous generations who didn’t have as many choices as we do today. When convenience overrides conscious eating, an issue that parents of young kids have to constantly battle with is of how they can be more mindful of what their children eat. Lounge speaks to experts to find out how important it is to pay attention to what is on a child’s plate and the ways parents can strike a balance between their jam-packed lives and their children’s health. 

“We live in an age where kitchens have become modular and the food we eat is processed,” writes Bengaluru-based clinical nutritionist Gauravi Vinay in Gut, Set, Go, a children’s journal she has written to help them form a healthy relationship with food. The journal, Vinay reveals, was the result of the innumerable queries that she kept receiving from parents on how to get their kids to eat healthy.

 “I also conducted an online workshop on children’s nutrition during covid-19, for which a lot of people signed up,” she recollects. The journal hopes to educate children further about what goes into their bodies, and it does that by featuring pictorial descriptions of healthy foods, information about nutrients, and sections like ‘Know Your Food Colours’ and innovative ideas for school dabbas. Stressing that good eating habits start at home, Vinay says, “I didn’t have to make a lot of effort to get my son habituated to good food because in our house we have always placed importance on getting fresh produce. Also, he was always involved in grocery shopping where he saw us, his parents, opting for fresh food over processed food.”