Q&A: Helping kids establish healthy holiday eating habits
The holidays are a time to gather with family, friends …. and food. How can you help children navigate the sugary sweets that seem to be everywhere during the holidays?
We asked Jessica Graumann, RD, a registered dietitian working with families at M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital and M Health Fairview Pediatric Specialty Clinic - Burnsville, for advice. Below, she discusses how to help kids establish healthy boundaries in a way that doesn’t involve guilt or shame.
What food-related challenges do you see families encountering around the holidays?
Tempting traditional foods like cookies, bars, and fudge become a staple around the house and are often available at any time. Another challenge is the frequency of get-togethers. There can be a lot of different occasions to celebrate, and food is often available as a buffet.
The holidays can also be a stressful time. We see more binge eating this time of year (a large amount of food in a very short amount of time). Children are stressed maybe due to the end of the school semester, or they pick up on their family members’ stress getting everything ready for the holidays. Emotional and binge eating — including eating out of boredom, rather than hunger — has also been an issue during the pandemic. People have been home a lot these past couple years and had constant access to food and snacks.
What can families do to help maintain healthy eating habits over the holidays?
No matter the time of year, I encourage families to have one dessert night a week — whether that’s going out for ice cream or baking something at home, limit those sweet or tempting foods to once a week. During the holidays, that rule can be a little restrictive. This time of year, I recommend trying to limit exposure to sugary foods as much as possible. For example, put cookies away during the day instead of leaving them out on the table.
I also recommend keeping drinks as close to zero calories as possible. There are a lot of sugary beverages during the holidays, but they’re basically empty calories. Our body isn’t getting much nutrition from them, and they often contain an enormous amount of sugar. Like desserts, I recommend trying to limit festive holiday beverages to once a week.
Go into events with a plan. Talk with your family and establish guidelines before you arrive at the event, whether that’s aiming to have only one plate of food or one dessert. Make it a family thing. This isn’t a rule that only one child should follow, it’s something that everyone should do together.
What are the effects of too much sugar?
In the short term, we don’t feel good after an overload of sugar. When we eat too many sweets, our blood sugar goes up dramatically and then crashes. It’s a rollercoaster of ups and downs that our bodies don’t do well with. In the very long term, if we’re not getting the right nutrition, it can lead to chronic high blood sugar and conditions like prediabetes.
How can families discuss eating habits in a positive way?
Don’t talk about weight, talk about health. Healthy eating is about supplying our body with all the nutrients it needs and helping it get the right kind of energy that will sustain us, as opposed to too much processed sugar or too many processed carbohydrates, which cause this rollercoaster of energy spikes and crashes.
Learn more about nutrition recommendations through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s MyPlate initiative here.
When should families meet with a dietitian?
If your child’s body mass index (BMI) is above the 95th percentile, I usually recommend talking to your doctor. If this isn’t the case but you have concerns about the kinds of food your child is eating or their eating habits, talk to your pediatrician, who can refer you to a dietitian if needed.
When you first meet your dietitian, there are going to be a lot of questions specifically around typical eating patterns. A lot of people are worried about meeting with a dietitian or coming to our weight management clinic, and we try to ease their worry as much as possible. We understand the complexity of weight management and healthy living — it’s not as easy as “exercise more, eat less.” It’s a team effort between us and the patient to see where we can make changes.
We’ve been working with children with weight-related conditions for more than 10 years using a research-based approach. Learn more about the Healthy You! Pediatric Weight Management Program.
