Every parent want their child to eat well, but for parents focused on nutrition, Uncrustables® and Lunchables® are not even an option. Luckily as time goes on, more and more parents and school systems are making it easier to feed their children the way the parents see fit.
Unfortunately, today even some seemingly innocuous lunches similar to what I grew up on 30 years ago are highly industrialized and downright unhealthy for children to eat. Besides the obvious additives that we’re all trying to avoid, what was once normal food now contains rancid vegetable oils, heavy metals, high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners. These foods are indeed a major reason for all the health problems children are experiencing today.
If packing healthful lunches is a challenge for you, here are a few ideas:
- sandwiches made with tuna fish, roast beet, raw milk cheese, nitrate free back, or ham real mayonnaise made from healthy fish oils, apples, avocados, nut butters and other goodies
- quiche
- hard boiled eggs
- vegetable sticks with hummus
- fresh fruit — as an adjunct to something more substantial, of course
- roasted chicken
- baked sweet potato slices
- lacto-fermented pickles or sauerkraut
- fish, chicken, or hamburgers
- patés
- crackers with butter and raw milk cheese
- raw nuts with a little dried goji berries, apple or raisins
Food Sensitivities
Of course, if your little one has multiple food sensitivities or serious allergies, you’ll need to adjust this list accordingly. As a nutritionist, I must urge you to strive for real food that has a long history of safe consumption (i.e. is not made in a factory) and not to get hung up on avoiding the offending allergen.
For example, if your child is allergic to cow’s milk, don’t jump to soy, rice, hemp or store bought nut milk as an alternative. You would do better to track down goat’s or sheep’s milk to give that a try or make homemade almond, pecan or cashew milk.
Soy milk is a new invention with a little over 100 years of history. Amongst other things, soy foods have a serious impact on a child’s sexual and overall physical development. Boys fed soy foods are more apt to have low testosterone levels leading to abnormal breast development, small genitalia and testicular cancer as adults. Girls have been known to hit puberty even in infancy due to the increased estrogen intake. For more information about soy, you must read Kaayla Daniel’s The Whole Soy Story.
Other fake milks don’t have a long enough track record for me to recommend them. Don’t you want to eat real food anyway?
