Healthy Children - Parents Have Influence
By Connie Bednar 
What do we want for our children?
Parents want many things for their children. Good health would be the most important one among them.
Some diseases are inherited; parents are not able to control the genes they pass on to their children
In other cases illness is the result of a lack of understanding. The importance of helping our children develop good nutritional habits is often overlooked. Teaching children to live a healthy lifestyle is especially challenging today. Why, I’m thinking plain old TV just for starters.
How does television rob children of opportunity to be healthy? My first thought is advertising. What are children bombarded with while sitting in front of the TV. There is advertisement after advertisement enticing our kids to eat and drink junk. Even cereals today are coated with sugar. So much so that they may often feel like they are eating candy.
Beverages such as soda are the beverage of choice in the minds of our kids. It’s got to be sweet to be good. High fructose corn syrup is recognized as contributing to obesity today. One of the most frequently used products today in processed foods. It replaces sugar to make things taste sweet. Read labels and you will find this in so many things our children are drinking and eating. Actually, it is not just the children, we adults are consuming these products too.
Nutritionists will sight high fructose corn syrup intake as a key factor in the reason for the obesity we see today. Our bodies and the bodies of our children process this sweetener differently than old fashioned sugar. It actually causes the liver to send more fat into the system.
I’m not advocating eating loads of sugar, rather in the case of beverages I would suggest drinking something natural that contains no sugar. There is rooibos tea, herbal tea, tisanes and green, black and white tea. Greats drinks, no sugar necessary and lots of healthy advantages to drinking them. Enjoy them as a hot drink or add ice if that’s your mood.
Teas and tisanes have vitamins and minerals that are beneficial. Does this sound like a healthier choice to you? It does to me. Tisanes have the added benefit of having no caffeine.
When is the right time to introduce your children to a healthier life style? Should we do it when they are in high school, after years of consuming foods that aren’t nutritious? Maybe we should wait a little longer when our kids are away at college to let them know about nutrition. We can email them all kinds of information about healthier options for them. Do you think they would be interested then?
Come on, you know when the time is right. When you can still hold them in your arms and rock them to sleep. Before you have the thrill of watching them takes that first step.
That is the time, those precious years we have with them. Those are the years when we can encourage our kids to acquire a taste for healthy things.
Children learn well by example. The old cliché “Do as I say not as I do doesn’t carry the same strength that it did when I was young.
Dump all that soda, all those fruit drinks that have high fructose corn syrup down the sink. Acquire a taste for something healthier, something easy and quick to make at home and something you can take with you in a thermos or sports bottle.
Focus on becoming a healthier adult. It becomes easier then to encourage healthy children to follow in your foot steps.
Connie Bednar writes about tea at http://www.your-cup-of-tea.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Connie_Bedn
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