Tips on Buying Healthy Kids Snacks

Tips on Buying Healthy Kids Snacks
Snacking helps increase variety in a child's diet, allowing children to get the recommended number of servings of fruit or dairy and reduce overeating at meals. How many times your child snacks depends on the size of your meals.
Some kids do well with a snack between breakfast and lunch, a second snack between lunch and dinner and a third snack before bedtime. You want your child to be hungry at mealtime. And kids shouldn't eat a snack when they're not hungry.

More Tips: Think these snacks are healthy?

What should parents be wary of when buying snacks? Marketing is a powerful, too. Most snacks display colorful packages and claim to promote good nutrition. Kids will eat anything if it has their favorite character on the box. A parent's job is to ignore the front of the box and look to the back. More often than not, snacks sporting such popular images are less than healthy.

Childhood obesity is reaching epidemic levels -- in no small part because of children's snack habits. According to the American Association of Obesity, the percentage of clinically obese children and adolescents has more than doubled since 1980. Portion sizes, mystery ingredients and clever, targeted marketing of less than stellar food choices are all to blame. But so are parents.

What parents shop for, buy and have in the house all influences how well (or not well) their kids will snack. The first step is truly getting parents to eat and snack healthy.

"To help children establish healthy habits, parents have to be good models of behavior," says Andrea Giancoli, M.P.H., R.D., Spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and author of healthline.com's new blog, "Family Fork: Feeding the Kids and You."

If you as a parent go through your entire day without stopping to nourish your body with food or reach for a candy bar instead of fruit, your kids will think it's OK to do the same.

What's a healthy kids snack? Foods that are nutrient dense and low in calories and fat. For the most part, that means whole foods and snacks that are not processed or packaged products. Try to avoid foods in a box altogether. But if you're looking for an easy conventional snack, read the labels and look for foods that have wholesome ingredients like 100 percent whole grain or whole wheat flour.

Here's a guide to healthy snacking with your kids health and taste buds in mind.

1. Read the ingredient list. Words like hydrogenated oil, high fructose corn syrup and "enriched" signify harmful fats and empty calories. And if you can't pronounce the main ingredients on the list, the snack product is probably best left on the shelf.

If a snack is providing 25 percent of a child's total calories, parents should aim for no more than 600 mg of sodium and between 10 and 15 grams of fat per snack. Sugar is tough because nutrition labels don't distinguish between naturally occurring sugar and added sugar. You don't want to restrict sugar from whole fruits, veggies or skim or low-fat milk. For sugar, scan the ingredient list and steer clear of snacks with high fructose corn syrup in the first few ingredients.

2. Look for snacks that are high in fiber. "Kids aren't getting enough fiber," says Giancoli. "We're so used to eating refined carbohydrate products, which are stripped of important nutrients."

Seek out foods with whole grain -- switch from regular pasta to whole wheat, for example. And if your kids turn up their noses, try mixing whole wheat pasta with regular for a smoother transition.

3. Pay attention to serving sizes. Many jumbo chip bags have between three and five servings in one bag -- which can really add up. Look for single snack servings that have between 100 and 200 calories to keep calorie counts and fat grams in check.

4. Offer healthy choices to your kids. And don't give up if they turn food away on the first try. "It might take 10 to 15 times for a kid to try a certain food," says Giancoli. "But if you give up, that demonizes the food for them." And they'll never eat it again -- at least not until they're adults!

Amy Paturel, M.S., M.P.H., is a freelance writer. Her work frequently appears in such magazines as Cooking Light, Health, Self, SHAPE and Marie Claire.