Parents of young children today were raised during some of the most damaging times in diet culture. From diet and “light” foods and drinks to expensive “superfoods”, a constant in these changing trends has been the moralization of food as “good” or “bad”.
These food movements have led many of us to have difficult relationships with food, diet and diet. If this sounds familiar, you might be wondering how to use the fun characteristics of healthy foods to encourage kids to eat more of them.
“Eating the rainbow” means eating a variety of fruits and vegetables of different colors on a regular basis. Encouraging your child to eat a rainbow is supported by evidence and can start more complete and positive conversations with them about food.
Encourage variety
All fruits and vegetables are good for us. Depending on your child’s age and gender, Australian dietary recommendations recommend they eat 2-5.5 servings of vegetables and 0.5-2 servings of fruit each day.
Each fruit and vegetable has its own unique nutrient profile, so the more variety of fruits and vegetables you eat in these servings, the better.
Eating a variety of fruits and vegetables each day has more benefits than eating just one type repeatedly, so aiming for the rainbow can help encourage variety.
Serving varied and colorful meals can also encourages us to eat more. So if you or your kids are struggling to eat enough fruits and vegetables, you can use the rainbow to help you fit in all those servings.
The sparkling adventure
Rainbow chasing can also help push kids out of their comfort zone and can be an early way to encourage adventure for new foods.
While children can benefit from routine, there are links between how adventurous we are in trying new foods and other healthy traits and habits. Those who enjoy trying new things tend to have a better quality food than those who hate trying new things.
Start early conversations about the complexities of food
Most parents of today’s children were raised during the “reductionist” age of nutrition. The focus was not on whole and complex foods, but on the major macro and micronutrients they contain. So bread becomes all about carbs and citrus becomes all about vitamin C.
When we think about it, it’s easy to think that bread is “bad” and citrus fruits are just a good source of vitamin C.
But food is much more complex than that. Nutrients are rarely found in a single food, and each food is rarely composed of a single nutrient. And more importantly, foods aren’t just nutrients — they also contain “bioactive compounds.”
These bioactives, which you might also see called phytonutrients or phytochemicals (phyto medium of plants), are naturally present in plant foods. They are not essential to our survival like nutrients are, but they can have health benefits.
Often these bioactives are color related, so foods of different colors not only have different nutrient profiles, they also have different bioactive profiles.
Indeed, the pigments that give fruits and vegetables their colors are often bioactive. For example, reds can be lycopenes, linked to heart and blood vessel health, and purples can be anothcyanines, linked to improved inflammation.
Kids don’t need to know which bioactive goes with which color, or what they all do. But you can start conversations about the complexity of our biology and the food that feeds it.
Where does fresh food come from?
Survey Data watch regularly many children do not know where their food comes from or which fruits and vegetables are which.
Fruits and vegetables often change color as they ripen, and the different parts of the plants they come from are different colors. So talking about the rainbow can open up conversations about:
- where does the food come from
- how does it grow
- which parts of each plant are safe to eat
- which parts of plants are tasty.
Rainbows go with everything
As children get older, you can start talking about what happens to the color of food when you cook or mix it. Some foods that aren’t very tasty on their own can be more appetizing when mixed with other colors. For example, bitter leafy greens can be tastier if we combine them with the sourness of citrus fruits or the sweetness of berries.
Cooking can make foods brighter or duller and can release or change nutrients and bioactives.
Colors can be used in cooking science experiments – such as cabbage or blueberries acting as natural indicators of acidity.
Kids don’t need to know all the details to enjoy eating the rainbow, but talking about colors can spark curiosity. The rainbow is diverse, so it reduces the focus on individual foods, making healthy eating easier and more fun.
