How To Encourage Your Children To Make Healthy Food Choices

Healthy eating can be very difficult in our world full of fast food, soft drinks, and sugary treats. Children are constantly bombarded by junk food advertisements, so it can be tricky to help them make good food choices. This article is going to outline a few steps that you can take in order to help your children eat healthy everyday. The first step to healthy eating is knowledge. Teach your children about why healthy foods are so important, and help them to understand the rewards and consequences that come from eating well.

You should have your children participate in the food preparation process. When they are involved, they will understand more about what goes into preparing good foods and how to plan a health meal. Take them to the grocery store with you, have them choose foods in the produce section. While you are shopping, explain about the different food choices and the benefits that we can gain from eating those kinds of food.

Also have them help in the kitchen. Washing, chopping, cooking and preparing is a great way to help children feel a sense of accomplishment with their food, so they will be more likely to eat it because they helped to create the meal. When your children are helping in the kitchen, make meal time a fun experience! Turn on some music, smile, and have a good time. They will associate those positive feelings with healthy eating. Teaching your children good habits when they are young is an essential step to set them up for success throughout their life. It is much easier to create those healthy habits earlier in life!

Short-term solutions only work in the short term. “As global, national, and human security become increasingly dependent on finding ethical and equitable ways to address issues like food security, it is vital that considerations of world food problems take holistic rather than piecemeal perspectives,’’ he argues. Based on human security thinking, he sets out four characteristics of human security thinking that dovetail with food security. First, the proposed solutions must be universal and relevant to people everywhere — as with his understanding of malnutrition, which may well apply to solutions proposed for any neighborhood in the world.

Second, they must deal with the interdependence of social issues. Third, they should prioritize prevention over cure. This style of thinking, which highlights food security as a “people issue” and empowerment opportunity, is fundamental to an advanced understanding of food security. There are three silences in the book that I find disappointing. First, there are virtually no references to food and cities — no references to cities as sites of food production, and not even references to recent hyper-migration to mega-cities as a factor in how food will be produced and distributed.

We should be long past the day when books can be written about food that do not take cities into account as a major factor in both supply and demand. Secondly, there are virtually no references to global corporations, the dominant form of economic organization associated with agricultural inputs and food distribution, processing, and preparation.

Food is one of the most monopolized and globalized sectors of the economy, and that needs to become a food security issue. Until reading this book, I would have thought it impossible to write about food security without writing about the concentrated power of global corporations in one way or another. It would be akin to the famous saying about writing Hamlet without the Prince.

The World Trade Organization was the engine room for one of the central, if least-known, propositions of what is called neo-liberalism. But few have heard of what is called “supply-side economics,” the counterpoint to Keynesian or “demand side” economics. During the demand-side era of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, governments ostensibly stimulated demand by loose lending policy and support for affordable housing and other construction infrastructure — all designed to bolster demand for goods.

By contrast, during the neo-liberal era, governments moved to drive low-cost supplies by deregulating practices and industries that once protected living standards from the harshest winds of global competition. Parallel to that, Joyce Kolko was one of the first to note in her book, Restructuring the World Economy, monopolies had to give up their monopoly.

This “race to the bottom” was particularly true of the food sector, where small and medium-sized producers, distributors and retailers — often bound to particular regions — have almost been driven to extinction. The disappearance of this business grouping — sometimes referred to as agriculture of the middle or infrastructure of the middle — is now a risk factor in the food security of communities. With the price decline of many basic goods have come marked declines in the global wages and working conditions of food workers, farmers and peasants.