Healthy eating
Maintaining a healthy weight isn’t about eating less, it’s about eating sensibly. If you want your kids to eat healthy foods, you need to practice what you preach or how can you expect them to develop healthy eating habits?If you don’t want your kids to eat chocolate or sweets, then don’t eat it in front of them. They will only question why they can’t eat it when you can.
Five a day
It’s important to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. It only counts if they’re five different fruit and vegetables (and potatoes don’t count).
An easy way to include five a day:
Breakfast – 1 glass of fruit juice (150ml is one portion)
Snack – 1 piece of fresh fruit
Lunch – Sandwich with salad and a piece of fruit i.e. an apple
Evening meal – Chicken and vegetable stir fry with noodles
Fat fighters
There are some easy ways to cut out fat when you eat, which can help with weight loss, reduce the risk of heart disease, some cancers and type 2 diabetes:
- Cut down on takeaway meals and ready meals – they’re high in fat and salt.
- Use semi-skimmed or skimmed milk.
- Grill, bake or steam instead of frying.
- Use polyunsaturated margarines instead of butter.
Salt
On average we eat 2 teaspoons of salt (sodium chloride) a day. It’s sensible to reduce this.
- 75% of the salt we eat comes from takeaways and ready meals. Cut down on these.
- Check the labels on processed food. 0.5g of sodium per 100g is a lot and 0.1g per 100g is a little sodium.
- Don’t add salt when you’re cooking and cut down on salty snacks such as crisps.
‘Traffic light’ labelling
You may have heard about the new pack labelling that will provide ‘at a glance’ information on labels about the nutritional content of food. Find out more on the Food Standards Agency ‘Food’ website.