Teaching Your Kids Healthy Eating Habits (Podcast)

Are you struggling to get your kids to try new foods? Do you find yourself negotiating at the table? Teaching your kids healthy eating habits doesn’t have to be hard. In today’s podcast, Dr. Dina Rose, author of It’s Not About the Broccoli: Three Habits to Teach Your Kids for a Lifetime of Healthy Eating, explains how we can teach our children to love a variety of foods and create rules for happier family meals.

Download the show on iTunes & Stitcher

Dina Rose, PhD, is a sociologist, parent educator, and feeding expert. She is an author, writes for her blog, It’s Not About Nutrition, for The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today. Her work has been featured on TV, radio, and in both print and online news resources such as Fox News Boston, NBC Connecticut News, Martha Stewart Radio, HuffPost Live, Sound Medicine, Health Talk Wisconsin, Good Parenting Radio, Babble, The Globe & Mail, Mamapedia, Parenting Magazine, and Spirituality & Health.

I’m super excited to have Dina on the show because she gives us examples of how we can teach our kids habits for a lifetime of healthy eating. This show is jam-packed with information and practical ideas. You won’t want to miss it.

Shaping children’s mindset about food is an important theme in this podcast, and Dina gives us a great framework for reshaping our children’s and our ideas about food. Dina and I start by discussing whether restaurant kids’ menus and labeling items as “kid food” is a good thing or a bad thing and how it could influence their perception of food.

Many parents worry about whether their kids get enough variety in their diet. They feel like they need to frequently introduce new foods. Dina talks about using what she calls the rotation method to introduce variety into our kids’ diet—and you’ll want to hear this because it’s probably not what you think! Thinking outside the mealtime box is an important component of this method.

She also talks about establishing some household rules about eating zones, sticking to those rules, and how that can reduce mealtime stress. How do we find balance between being the food police or throwing our hands up in despair to avoid control issues over food? Dina has lots of wonderful information about this, and so much more, using her three most important habits to establish: proportion, variety, and moderation.

Links to items discussed during this show:

• Dina’s blog It’s Not About Nutrition
• Dina’s book It’s Not About the Broccoli

Did you enjoy the show? Please leave a review on iTunes and subscribe! E-mail me at podcast@momables.com to tell me what you thought of this week’s show and to offer suggestions for future episodes.