October 5, 2018 In blog, food By Shani Breiter

How to Make a Balanced Breakfast Smoothie for Your Kids

Download Recipe: Balanced Breakfast Smoothie Recipe

In today’s video, you will learn how to make a balanced breakfast smoothie for your kids.

Hi, I’m Shani Mara Breiter, Dietician for families, kids and teens. Welcome to Yummy TV. The place to be to create a healthy lifestyle that you and your family will love. I have helped hundreds of families just like yours, and I can help you too. Subscribe to my channel and go to my website at ShaniMara.com to get great tips that you won’t find anywhere else.

So, the problem with most smoothies today, that I see, whether they’re store-bought or made at home is that there’s so many carbohydrates so your just … Your kids are getting a sugar rush in the morning. That I’m not a proponent of. The carbohydrates come in the form of a whole bunch of fruits or sugary yogurt or added honey and Agave. And lastly, juice. So my suggestion is that your carbohydrate comes from just some fruit, but not tons of it. And not multiple kinds of carbohydrates.

So, the key though to making it really nutritious is to make sure that you add in the protein and the fat. And that’s what I find is often missing in the smoothie. Maybe there’s a little bit of milk, but that’s not an adequate amount to actually, hold your child over or your teen over, until their morning snack at school. So the benefit of having the protein, is it helps to steady the blood sugar, keeping them more satisfied, longer. And the same thing with the fat. It actually helps them to stay satisfied. So, I really recommend that you work on this balance. And, there is one other bonus food that I would add into the smoothie, if you can get away with it. Which is, pre-washed baby spinach. Because even though it will change the color of the smoothie, it will not change the flavor, guaranteed. I have tried this with so many kids, and there’s never a problem. They may not like the color, but there is no difference in the actual taste of the smoothie.

The reason why I like a balanced breakfast smoothie for your kids, is because some kids are just not big breakfast eaters. But if you make them a really good nutritious smoothie, they’ll eat it and you won’t get any pushback. So, let’s talk about how to actually do that. The key is to take a balanced plate, like a balanced meal, and actually make that into a balanced smoothie. So first, take a look at this diagram, which shows you a balanced plate. And if you notice, there are four categories. There is the protein, right? There is the carbohydrate, which is either the grain or the fruit. And for our purposes for the smoothie, we’re going to use fruit. And then, you have healthy fat. So, the key is, is to balance it in the smoothie.

So, let’s break that down a little bit further. For the protein, you have a few options. You have some plain yogurt that you can use. Or you can use a really nice quality organic grass-fed whey protein. Or you can use vegan protein powder if your kids would prefer that. So that’s the first category. The second category is the fruits, and the typical fruits to use that are really good are bananas and berries. And I recommend that you can buy them even, frozen. And if you can’t get frozen bananas then go ahead and once they become super ripe, peel them, cut them in half and freeze them. And you’ll get a really nice consistency in your smoothie. So if you combine that with your kids favorite berries or mixed berries, you’re good to go.

And the third category are healthy fats. So those are things like, you can put some flax oil, you can use some avocado. And another thing that I love, another food that I love, are fresh nuts, raw nuts. Such as cashews, or almonds or something like that. There’s one other item that I’m a huge fan of, which is coconut butter. So if your kids like the flavor of coconut, or even if you’re not sure that they do. Go ahead and try it and see what they think. I have included a recipe with details down below.

So now here’s how you actually put the smoothie together, here’s the recipe. And remember, check below because I actually, give you the details of the quantities of each ingredient. So, you’re going to start with some nuts and put them in the blender. And then you’re going to add some water, and you’re going to blend that up until it becomes a pulp. So, I want you to blend and blend and blend more. I want it so that it’s really pureed in there, before you add any of the other ingredients. Because one sure way to have your kids not eat it, is if there are little pieces of nuts in there. So blend away and spend extra time blending. Then, when you’re done with that, when you have that pulp, is when you add all the other ingredients. Mainly your protein source, whether it’s the protein powder or the yogurt. So those are the two things that I would recommend. And then, you add in the fruit and the healthy fat. And that’s when you do your second blending.

So blend, blend, blend. Once that’s blended, what I would do is, I’d actually taste it to see how does it taste? At that time, you can also add in the spinach. So once that’s all blended, then you add in the ice. The ice will bring up the volume of it, and it will give it that consistency that your kids will really like. Blend that really well and then, you’re good to go.

I have a little trick with one particular product, that if you don’t want to add in tons of fruit and sugar and juice. There’s this great sugar substitute that is all-natural that has no weird aftertaste. And the brand is called “Lakanto”. It’s spelled L-A-K-A-N-T-O, and it’s a Monkfruit sweetener. So you can buy this online at Amazon and simply just, add in a couple of spoonfuls and there’s zero grams of sugar in it and it’s going to make it a little bit sweeter, and your kids will love it.

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August 28, 2018 In blog By Shani Breiter

The #1 Challenge with Kids Nutrition Today

In today’s video, you will learn the number one challenge in kids’ nutrition today and how to change it. Please stay til the end. I’d love you to get these great tips that you can apply immediately.

Hi. I’m Shani Mara Breiter, dietician. Welcome to Yummy TV, the place to be to create a healthy lifestyle that you and your family will love. Consider me like your family dietician, for you, your kids, and your teens. I have helped hundreds of families just like yours learn about nutrition in a healthy, doable, and yummy way.

Subscribe to my channel and go to my website at ShaniMara.com where you will get great tips that you won’t find anywhere else. Now, before we begin, remember that healthy nutrition starts with you rather than your kids and you can begin to make healthy lifestyle changes for your family without even talking to your kids about it yet.

The question for the day: can you guess what the number one challenge in kids’ nutrition today is? Do you have any idea? Because I see it all the time in my practice. Any ideas at all? Well, the answer is the carbohydrate load that the average kid diet has on a daily basis. What do I actually mean by that? Carbohydrates are foods that have some form of food sugar in them. Carbohydrates are very important. We must have carbohydrates. They’re important to a balanced meal. However, many times multiple carbohydrates can appear in meals including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. My recommendation is to begin to balance meals and snacks rather than give so many carbohydrates at one meal.

Carbohydrates are food that, again, have some form of food sugar. An example of them would be all fruits, for example. Whether it’s fresh fruit or dried fruit or frozen fruit or fruit juice. There all have some sort of fruit sugar called fructose in them. Another category would be grains. Grains include bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, chips, crackers, cookies, all those kinds of things, any sort of grain or starch. The next category is dairy, in particular milk and yogurt. Many times yogurts have added sugar into them.

Next category are sugary beverages. Those are really to just drink because they’re yummy and kids like them, but keep in mind that is a liquid form of carbohydrate. Then, you have just … you know, sweets that kids like. You also have sweeteners, whether it’s granulated sugar, evaporated cane juice, honey, molasses, maple syrup, date sugar, coconut sugar, whatever the source is. They’re all carbohydrates. The key is to balance the meals and to not give so many carbohydrates at one meal.

Reason why you wanna balance meals, rather than having such carb-heavy meals and snacks, is because it can actually affect your kids’ health, and here’s how. Number one, it can cause them to crave more and more carbohydrates. I don’t know if you’ve seen that with your kids, but the more carbohydrates they have, the more they want more. It can also affect their energy. It can affect their mood, and it can also cause some sort of weight related issue if that is at all a concern for you. It does behoove you to begin to balance meals.

Now, let’s take each meal and break it down. Let’s take … let’s start with breakfast. An example of a carbohydrate-heavy breakfast could be a bagel with fruit juice and fruit and yogurt that is flavored with some granola on top. Every item in that breakfast is a carbohydrate. An example of a more balanced breakfast would be eggs with some fruits and maybe some avocado along with the eggs and a piece of toast. What you’re doing is you’re cutting back on the amount of carbohydrates that you’re serving. That’s breakfast.

Let’s move on to lunch. An example of a carbohydrate-heavy lunch could be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with some fruit and, say, a cookie and some sort of chip or cracker. If you notice every single item there has a carbohydrate as opposed to doing a lunch that say is a sandwich with some sort of protein in it such as turkey or maybe sliced chicken and then you do a serving of vegetables and little bit of fruit. Maybe a couple times a week you give some sort of sweet, but you do a small amount, like maybe a Hershey’s kiss or something like that because kids do need to be kids and have something fun to eat. That gives you an example of the difference.

Now, let’s look at afternoon snack. Here’s an average example that I hear. It could be some sort of corn puff, like Pirate’s Booty, or it could be a potato chip along with some fruit. Again, it’s two carbohydrates. Or it could be leftovers, such as leftover pasta, something like that. My suggestion, instead, would be to balance it. Have one carbohydrate with, say, a protein or a fat such as fruit with some nut butter, or fruits with some nuts or some cheese, or many some guacamole dipped in some carrots. It’s a balance, so that rather than giving two carbohydrates, you’re giving one carbohydrate.

Now, let’s look at dinner. An example of a typical dinner could be a bowl of pasta maybe with a few carrot sticks on the end. That plate is not very balanced. What I might suggest you do, is rather than a whole plate of pasta, do a quarter plate of pasta with a quarter plate of some sort of protein, whether it’s chicken, fish, meat, eggs, something like that, and then fill up the other part of the plate, the other half of the plate with vegetables. It could be cooked, raw vegetables, a combination, and that way you get more of a balance and you’re not giving such a heavy carb load to your children. Those are examples of meals and snacks and how to make the changes. I hope that this is helpful for you.

This does take pre-planning on your part, but balanced nutrition for your kids is so worth it, so I recommend you take the time and begin to do it. Also remember that healthy nutrition starts with you and not with your kids.

If you like this video, please subscribe below and hit the like button. Also leave a comment because I would really love to hear topics of interest to you that I can cover in future videos. Also, go to my website at ShaniMara.com and sign up so that you can get great tips that you won’t find anywhere else. Thank you for being a part of Yummy TV and for watching today. See you in the next video.

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