Getting Kids to Eat Fruit and Vegetables

[no dialogue]. Hi, my name is Alicia Hart, and I'm a graduate student here at Eastern Illinois University in the School of Family and Consumer Sciences. Today, I'd like to talk to you about how to get our children to eat more fruits and vegetables. As we all know, as a parent myself, this can be very difficult. It's so difficult it's cliche. So I think that we realize that most children tend to want to eat more chips and cookies and crackers than they want to eat fresh fruits and vegetables. So one of the ways that we can kind of encourage them to eat more fruits and vegetables is through the use of dips, and that's what I'm going to talk about today, using different kinds of dips. According to the Dole five-a-day health program, it is recommended that we all eat five to nine servings of fresh fruits and vegetables, and that's a lot for anyone, especially for children though. Fruits and vegetables contain a lot of important nutrients and most importantly, they're low in fat and calories and they contain no cholesterol. So that makes them nature's perfect snack food. But children generally don't see that as the best snack. When they're in the kitchen, they usually grab the chips and the cookies. So today, I'd like to talk about some quick and easy ways to incorporate fresh fruits into your snacks for your children by using all of these different dips. The first thing that I think is a good place to start is by looking at the weekly ads that come in the newpaper for what's on sale. So you can look through that with your children and they can actually pick out the foods that they want, so they can pick out all of the fruits and vegetables that they think taste good or look good. They can actually cut those out of the ads before you go to the store so they have an idea of what they want to see or what they want to pick out while they're there. A good idea is to pick out what's on sale or what's seasonal. Fresh fruits and vegetables can get expensive, so like right now strawberries are expensive, and broccoli and other ones are much cheaper. So its a good idea to start there and then work your way as you get to the store and find out different varieties that might be a little bit more tasty. So there are different varieties of apples and pears. This is a Honeycrisp, and that's actually one that my husband and my family like the best out of all the different apples. So its nice to try different types of fruits even if you like apples you can try different kinds of apples, you can try different kinds of pears. The same goes for all of the other fruits and vegetables that are out there. So the first few dips that I want to show you are, the first one would be more for vegetables. This is a hummus dip, and you can make this yourself, but if you don't have the time, that's okay, you can buy a hummus dip at the store, and these are really healthy, they have all kinds of good stuff in them. One thing that I like to do is to get fresh lemon, fresh lemon juice on there, so I like to squirt that right on before I serve that. I think that's a pretty tasty way and its a fun thing for kids to do with the juicer. They like doing this, its a good time. Its a good way to get them to dip some of the things like celery or broccoli in that. Another one of my absolute favorite dips, and this is a favorite in my family, is powdered sugar. We just mix in a little bit of cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice and it goes very well with oranges, it goes well with apples, different fruits, they all taste really good in that. One that we don't use very often but it's one that I do like, is apple sauce, and we get the kinds that have a little bit of cinnamon already flavored in it but you can buy plain apple sauce as well. One that most people have probably already used is peanut butter, and so this goes really well with apples, it goes great with bananas, it even goes well with carrots and some celery. So it does fruits and vegetables, which is nice. Another one that I like is pudding. People don't often think of pudding as a dip, but they have some really good flavors right now at Jell-O and certainly even the generic kind. They have banana cream, and this one here is cheese cake. So this goes really well with apples and strawberries and bananas. Pudding, chocolate pudding is really good too, just always try different flavors. This one is really fun for kids to make, and it is crushed graham crackers. And sometimes I'll buy the kind that already has cinnamon on them or I'll buy the ones that are just plain. My kids just get to crunch those up as much as they can and then we put a little bit of pumpkin pie spice in there, and you can actually just dip your fruit or vegetables right in there and coat it, so bananas taste really good with that. This one is really fun for kids to make, too, it's really easy, it's cool whip. It just has a little bit of cinnamon and sugar on there and you just kind of mix that up, and that's a nice way to incorporate dips with fruits. Grapes go really well with that as well. This one is yogurt, and we got a vanilla-flavored yogurt, but you can get any flavor yogurt that you want. You can get one that has no flavor at all, you can get some that has chunks of fruit already in it, and you can dip fruits and vegetables into that. So if you get a plain yogurt, you can dip vegetables in that, you can even put some of your favorite vegetable spices in those like onion powder or paprika. Just try different things with that. This one is a cream cheese, and you can experiment with that with your children so they get to actually make the dip themselves. So you start with a cream cheese base, and you can put paprika on that, you can put onion powder on that. There are just different types of spices that can go with any fruits and vegetables that you think might work with that. Obviously, the favorite in our house is chocolate syrup, and instead of just maybe using Hershey's syrup or a different kind, I choose the Nesquik one because it has calcium in it. So if I'm looking to add a little bit of a boost to some of that, I would use this instead of just a regular chocolate syrup. One of the most important things to remember is to have fun with it and to do it with your children or have them start preparing some of their own and be creative. A way to cut down on time is to cut some of these beforehand and put them in baggies and put them in the refridgerator. You can use a vegetable tray like this or you can just use a paper plate, you can use a regular plate, that's not really the point, the point is to have fun with it. But to make it easy you can cut it beforehand, you can buy vegetable trays at the store that are already cut or cut vegetables. But its generally cheaper to start with the whole fruits and vegetables and to cut them yourself. A fun thing for children instead of using knives to cut up broccoli is to just pop them and that gives them a little bit of a time to experience serving food and preparing food. Doing the grapes, obviously, can be really fun for very young children that are preschool and kindergarten age where they get to take the grapes off of the bunch. That's really all that we have today for snacks and for dips. And I would just encourage everyone that the next time snack time rolls around instead of grabbing the chips and pretzels, to grab the dip instead and try that with your fruits and vegetables. Thank you.