Читать книгу The Secret Ingredient: Family Cookbook - Sally Bee - Страница 11

Children who eat a healthy diet from birth are much better equipped to eat well throughout their lives and will have a reduced risk of health conditions as they grow up. Children gain a taste for the things they eat often so if you give your children healthy foods right from the beginning, they will develop a liking for those foods and continue to want them as they grow.

Teaching them early is important and so is getting them to listen to their bodies. My children know what it feels like to be healthy. To know this and understand what it means provides a fabulous tool which will hopefully help them make good healthy choices independently. At home my children have healthy home-cooked food without additives. This, to them, is completely normal. If they then go elsewhere and have processed food which is usually high in salt and fat, they immediately know they feel different. They talk about being too thirsty (because of the salt) and the fact that drinking to excess makes them feel bloated. One of my sons, who’s energetic to say the least, has real problems concentrating and staying calm after a processed meal. This is simply because he reacts badly to the additives included in processed food.

So my children do understand and feel the immediate effect of healthy and unhealthy food. I try to explain that balance is the key. It’s perfectly fine to enjoy a delicious dessert as long as it follows a healthy nutritious meal and isn’t eaten every day.

Looking back to when my daughter was around eight months old, I remember sitting her in a high chair next to her little friend, Tom, who was the same age. Tom’s mum gave him some specially prepared vegetable purée, mashed banana and baby breadsticks. I gave Lela a slice of home-made pizza! Shock! Horror! Well, actually no, I was very happy to give this to Lela. I have never given us adults and the children different food. I don’t understand how a parent can give their weaning baby the best, most natural, unprocessed food, but sit their other children down in front of the devil’s food that is chicken nuggets and chips!

I was able to let Lela, at eight months old, suck all the contents off the slice of pizza, because I had made it and I knew exactly what was on it and in it. I had made the bread base, with no preservatives and no added salt, and on top I’d put tomato passata, sliced mushrooms, peppers, sweet onions and herbs. All good natural stuff that I was happy for every member of my family to eat. Obviously Lela didn’t have a full set of gnashers, but she was able to suck off all the good bits and then gum the pizza base to death! I must also point out that there was nothing wrong with Tom’s food either, but as a mum of three I wanted to spend my time making food that everyone could eat.

So, the final word here is to treat all your family with the same respect. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t give it to others. And if you have fed your baby the best of everything at the beginning, don’t stop doing it once they grow a little.