Nutrition | Help give your kids a bump in nutrients

Your job as a parent is to encourage healthy eating habits and to provide a good variety of healthy foods. Of course, as you know, providing it and getting the kids to actually eat it seem mutually exclusive. Not to worry.

Research consistently shows that despite the frustrating appearance of the almost-untouched dinner plate, even the pickiest kids generally meet or exceed their recommended energy and dietary requirements.

However, there are ways to get beyond eating nothing but the white food group and develop healthy lifelong habits and attitudes:

Don’t let your children fill up on sugar or fat, especially less than two hours before a meal. Children who are reasonably hungry at dinnertime are much more likely to eat what’s put in front of them.

Follow the “rainbow-on-a-plate” principle (offering foods with a variety of colors) to cover the widest range of vitamins and minerals.

Don’t prepare different meals for the kids and yourself. Find a happy (or at least reasonable) medium that everyone can eat.

Get the kids involved in food preparation — measuring out and adding ingredients, stirring in milk, grating cheese and so on. They’re much less likely to reject something when they’ve invested their own time and effort.

Have them help you shop. And, if you’re feeling brave, every once in a while let the kids find something new for you to try!

Try, try again. Research indicates that young children won’t accept a new food until it has been offered at least eight times.

It’s perfectly reasonable to ask children to take at least one bite of everything on their plate and to stay at the table until everyone is finished.

When (to your surprise, and theirs) a new food passes muster, write it down and serve it again soon.

Include a supplemental vitamin with breakfast to close whatever vitamin and mineral gaps there may be.

Cheat a little. If all else fails, you may be able to slip some nutritious foods unnoticed into their mac and cheese. The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine, has a ton of great recipes, as does her Web site, the sneakychef.com.

— Armin Brott | McClatchy-Tribune