Fruits and vegetables provide a myriad of health benefits that can help protect your kids against all kinds of diseases. By starting a healthy lifestyle during their formative years, your kids can have long-term advantages that they can hold onto later in their life.
In promoting healthy eating habits, Beko, has recently launched its Eat Like A Pro advocacy in the Philippines. The campaign aims to help parents feed their children healthier food. This effort is in support of the company’s current global initiative of inspiring and educating families, especially the young ones, on the importance of a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
Beko has conducted Eat Like A Pro: The Cook-Off, a contest for a parent-child tandem, which showed how they can work together in preparing delicious, budget-friendly, and healthy meals for the whole family. Participants brought their preferred healthy dish, which were tried by designated judges who selected the final 8 tandems. Contestants were required to bring the dish recipe together with its cooking instructions.
To help eliminate poor eating habits, Beko listed some of the benefits of encouraging your child to #EatLikeAPro.
Boosts immune system
The first step to having a strong immune system is nutrition, and a well-balanced diet will do the trick at providing your kids with the proper nutrients they need. Fruits and vegetables offer different vitamins and minerals, so it is important that you round up your kids’ plates with a variety of it. In particular, tomatoes, carrots, citrus fruits, berries, and dark green leafy vegetables, are abundant in immunity-boosting phytonutrients, which help the body create more white blood cells responsible in warding off infection and illness.
Fewer calories compared to processed or fast foods
Replacing unhealthy sugary snacks and fat-laden foods with fruits and vegetables can help reduce the risk of obesity among children. That is why it is important to encourage your kids to develop good eating habits by finding ways to make their favorite dishes healthier. It is especially crucial since the number of obese children and adolescents rose to 124 million in 2016—10 times higher than the 11 million considered as obese 40 years ago, in 1975, as revealed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Helps improve academic performance
Children with bad eating habits or imbalanced diet are more likely to perform poorly in school. Failing to get the required amount of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients for health could lead to focus loss, fatigue, and a loss of concentration. On the other hand, a study conducted by the Journal of School Health suggests that good nutrition impacts children’s academic performance by identifying specific dietary factors. Particularly, students with an increased fruit and vegetable intake and lower caloric intake of fat were significantly less likely to fail a literacy assessment.
Fruits and vegetables are important part of a well-balanced diet. However, a report recently released by Food Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) revealed that Filipinos’ intake of fruits and vegetable is declining while their consumption of meat and eggs is increasing. Kids are among those who are most affected by these habits, especially that they are passed on to them.