How to Build Healthy Brown Bag Lunches for Your Kids

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A Growing Child Needs Proper Nutrition

When you have you children what they eat can be very important. This is especially true these days with obesity in America on the rise. In addition to the obesity epidemic, there is also the fact that to perform in school young children need good nutrition to keep their brain healthy and control hunger. There are various ways that you can do this with the ideas that I am going to provide. These will cover the basics of a good nutritious lunch that children will like. I am assuming that there are no food allergies or dietary restrictions for the purpose of this article. Gives some ideas.

Your first ingredient in a good lunch is going to be your sandwich. There are a few good choices here. One good choice is a turkey sandwich on wheat bread with mozzarella cheese and veggies of your choice like lettuce, tomato, onions or pickles. The turkey and cheese are high in protein and low in fat. Instead of turkey you could also use healthy choice ham as it is very lean and also their roast beef. As a reference mozzarella is one of the lower fat cheeses that you can eat compared to American or cheddar cheese. This has much more fat, but a peanut butter sandwich with a little bit of jelly is also a good choice on wheat. You get a good balance of protein and good fats from the peanut butter. The jelly is just sugar, but its hard to have a peanut butter sandwich without jelly. For some variety you can also grill the sandwiches. I personally don’t grill peanut butter sandwiches unless they are Elvis style, but to each his own.

Next you typically want your side item. Chips are most common. The baked variety of chips have much less fat and actually taste rather good. I like Doritos and potato chips best, but pretzels can also be used. I have heard of some parents using carrot sticks, celery sticks or apple chips, but those I think are good to have anyway and not used as a side item.

Another thing most kids will look for are a couple snacks. This is really were the age and how into fitness the child is into matters. Many high school kids get to the point were they like a protein bar as a side, but I would not send that with a ten year old to lunch. A couple good choices could be wheat crackers and a lower fat cheese. If that is not to their liking you could go with something a bit sweeter. Pudding is not that bad, but has lots of sugar unless you get sugar free. If you did not do the peanut butter sandwich trail mix is great here. What I like to do is make it mostly nuts and dried fruit with maybe a very little amount of m&ms. That way they are getting a bit of a treat but not overdoing it. Fruit is also good to throw in. Apple or pear slices are pretty good. Oranges are nice but I always found them to be rather messy to eat.

Notice that there are not regular potato chips here or candy. That is exactly the way to go. A little bit of chocolate in a trail mix is not that bad or pudding, but many parents go overboard and that is the problem.