Healthy Kids Expo

Archive for October, 2011

Consuming snacks is very important part of every child’s daily meal plan. But this is especially true for kids with diabetes. Most diabetic meal plans will include at least 2 to three snacks daily in order to maintain a balanced diet. Of course this is dependent on the meal plan that as been specified by your personal physician or dietician.

The key to maintaining healthy blood glucose levels in active children is to find the balance between a child’s insulin, food intake, and physical activity. Insulin and exercise lower blood sugar levels, whereas, foods can raise blood sugar levels, especially carbohydrates.

Children who have diabetes food needs change as they grow and become more physically active. Studies from doctors and nutritionist from clinics indicate that snacks for children with diabetes should come from the following food groups: grains, dairy, fruits, and vegetables. Additionally, they recommend using the Food Pyramid for Kids as a reliable guide to understanding food groups and portion sizes.

Creative snack ideas:

A piece of fresh fruit is always a good idea.

3 to 6 cups of low fat popcorn

A handful of pretzels

A couple of rice cakes

Flour tortilla filled with low fat shredded cheese or a slice of lean meat.

Ants on a log: celery stick with peanut butter.

English muffin pizza: halve of an English muffin, pizza sauce, and low fat shredded cheese.

Bagel bites: Mini bagel with fruit spread.

Kids with diabetes either have tendency to over snack for fear of low blood sugar levels. Or they try to sneak snacks that they are not supposed to eat. If parents or teachers are not aware of either situation it can cause problems as they try to respond to the child’s elevated blood sugar levels.

That is why it is so important that their meal plans are followed and monitored by all responsible adults. If you find that your child is over snacking or trying to sneak snacks talk to your child about why this is not a good thing for them to do. Always be supportive and seek outside counseling when needed.

For some people, the task of cooking a homemade meal is full of mysterious complexities. The path to fast food and take-away meals seems to fit neatly into busy lifestyles and hectic family life, work and social schedules, oftentimes gulped down with little thought as to what the ingredients actually are, where they came from, and how they were grown and cooked. I will show you later a great resource for recipes, as well as useful discount cookbooks and health and fitness tips.

Healthy Easy Recipes

Cooking a meal doesn’t have to be complicated. The use of herbs and spices will elevate your cooking to a delicious new level. Don’t think you have to juggle numerous pots and pans at the same time, either. There are plenty of great recipes that only require one pot. It’s what you put in that pot that makes the difference.

How to Prepare Healthy Meals

Another tip towards healthy easy recipes is to make friends with your freezer. Instead of watching a mindless TV soap opera, spend some time to make a meal or two that can be popped in the freezer and pulled out for an instant dinner when time is short. You’ll be surprised how convenient this can make for your dinners.

Chart your culinary course with care and don’t let your nutritional path get sidetracked by media hype and alluring advertisements. Although price is important, it is equally important to read food labels and know how to interpret them. Ingredient labels are often small to discourage your investigation, so take the time to learn what to look for.

Avoid High Salt and Sugar Content

Experts advise to steer clear of high sodium and sugar content, harmful or chemical preservatives, and artificial additives. We are all becoming much more conscious of what’s in our food, and manufacturers are regulated and obligated to disclose what’s in their products.

Keep Your Family Healthy

Healthy easy recipes pay off in keeping you and your household healthy and aid in building your resistance to sickness and disease. You and your family and friends can rejoice that the onions were sautéed without butter, the salad dressing isn’t made with poor quality oil, the soup tastes delicious with all natural ingredients, the beans are tasty, the meat is lean and fat-free, the rice is nutritious, the fruit and vegetables are organically grown, and the dessert is full of sin-free goodness.

Did Sarah Palin’s daughter Willow “cross the line” with her gay slur on Facebook and is this considered Cyber-Bullying?

Well, yes she certainly did, and yes it certainly is! No question about it. But this question is not the basis of this article either because clearly anyone who uses defamatory words against another person using a public forum like Facebook has committed an act of bullying.

Because this highly publicized incident happened to be perpetrated by the offspring of a nationally recognizable political figure, a door has been flung wide open to bring this issue into the public spotlight.

The Spirit of Competition (Really?)

Across the globe, in every country that holds elections to fill positions in public office, verbal bullying is an acceptable norm. Well, maybe not entirely acceptable but certainly tolerated and actually viewed as a “strategy.”

Regardless of the forum used, verbal bullying has become deeply ingrained in our culture as a tool of completion widely used in sports, politics, business, education and the family. We have learned that to “win” we need to bring down or belittle our competition to increase our chances and we get increasingly brutal in our tactics. Nothing seems to be “out of bounds.” If we can bash our opponent’s lifestyle, sexual orientation, marital status/stability, age, education background, Religious beliefs etc. we stand a greater chance of “winning” the game, the promotion, the political seat or the boyfriend. It has gone from using simple distraction tactics like yelling “hey batter, batter” at a baseball game to “you should vote for me because my opponent sucks.”

If you, or your kids, have a television on during election time you are inundated with verbal bullying at all times of the day and night, so I don’t even need to expand on that, except that a question needs to be asked about this entirely acceptable means of completion:

How does this culture of acceptable “social bullying” in politics affect our children?

I think the answer to this question is as obvious as darkness coming when the sun goes down, and the recent Willow Palin incident is clearly an answer! NOT WELL!!

Parenting experts across the board will tell you that we model for our children the behavior we see in them. In this recent case involving Sarah Palin’s daughter, was Willow simply modeling a behavior she has observed and deemed acceptable?

But this isn’t just a Sarah and Willow Palin issue. This is an extremely prevalent and wide-spread social issue that touches every level of our society from Main Street to Wall Street, the Back-Woods to Hollywood and high society to the inner city.

Social bullying can have disastrous effects on one’s psychological wellbeing and can last a lifetime. Regardless of where or when it occurs, in the school playground, on social media or on television or radio, the epidemic levels of child, adolescent and teen depression and suicides is clearly an extremely loud alarm sounding.

This recent case of Willow Palin using homo-phobic gay slurs using Facebook will hopefully open some ears to hear the alarm and actually ask,

“WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OUR CHILDREN, AND OUR FUTURE?”

Our kids are seeing it and hearing it from the grown-ups in their life from their parents at home and from their teachers and coaches at school. On television and the internet they hear and see brutal verbal and physical attacks and even in the make-believe world of video games our children are being taught to hurt others.
What Can We Do?

I recently had the honor of interviewing Izzy Kalman, the creator of a remarkable program called Bullies to Buddies in an on-line expo for parents and teachers called Happier Kids Now, where he shared his program in depth and he asked me to take part in a role play that was brutally real and confrontational, yet hit on a message that directly addresses the issue of children choosing to use words to hurt others and how to teach them to resolve conflict and engage in healthy competition.

But ultimately these lessons need to be taught at home first by parents by showing their children the right way to compete, how to stand up for themselves and others and how to engage in peaceful conflict resolution.

We need to teach our children that the way to the top is not through stepping on others or making our competitors flaws work in our favor by pointing them out publicly.

In fact, I just had a very small yet significant opportunity in my own home to give this lesson to my kids over a simple issue of who gets the last cinnamon swirl oatmeal for breakfast. At first I wanted to see how they would deal with this issue on their own, and that turned into a mini war of words between them.

I ask my youngest first why he feels he should have the oatmeal, but I made a rule that his reason cannot include his brother’s name. Meaning you can’t give me a reason you should have it by telling me why your brother shouldn’t have it.

The result was truly remarkable because he told me that if he really wanted he could be equally as satisfied with the maple brown sugar oatmeal, so that’s what he chose and gave the cinnamon swirl to his big brother. His big brother agreed and suggested we combine both cereals and they would both get what they wanted.

It really comes down to what Izzy Kalman from Bullies to Buddies suggests, that we take a closer look at the Golden Rule and teach our children that conflict and negativity is not resolved through conflict and negativity.

In my opinion, regarding the Willow Palin incident, given her mother’s public status as a civil servant Willow should be made to do a nationally televised public service announcement about the social and personal harmful effects of social bullying and homo-phobia.

Izzy Kalman also spoke about “accountability” and this is a case where the bully needs to be held publicly accountable for her actions by making a public apology to the person to whom she bullied on Facebook. This would send a clear message that regardless of WHO you are, bullying IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!