Orange Foods

If you have a picky kid he or she might want to eat only orange foods. My little girl loves pink foods at the moment but when she was younger she would only eat orange foods. This is not a bad thing because that yellow color means the food has a lot of Vitamin A.
Most kids like oranges. Just one small orange has 116 percent of all the Vitamin C that your kids need to get through the day. If your kid won't eat the orange straight then mellow it out a little by whipping orange pieces into Cool Whip or Whipped cream. Sometimes I can also fool the kid into thinking he or she is drinking Orange Crush by adding a little soda water to make the orange juice bubbly.
Another food that most kids love is cantaloupe but if not you can take ice, milk and frozen cantaloupe chunks and drop them into a blender. Whip it up into a froth and you have one the most amazing tasting and completely nutritious shakes that you could ever serve a growing human.
You can do the same with mangoes. Most kids love eating mangos raw but if not try freezing chunks so that they are like ice cubes and giving them to your kid to suck on. Mangoes are really healthy because they have folic acid and iron in them.
Carrots are good for your kid's eyes. Can't get them to eat the raw stuff? Try julienning them and sprinkling them with salt. If that doesn't work bake them into a carrot cake.
Squash is another nutritious food for kids but not a lot of kids will eat it. This is where Spaghetti Squash comes in hand. This type of squash is stringy and looks like strands of spaghetti. You serve that with their favorite spaghetti sauce on top and they are happy as clams.
Most kids won't eat sweet potatoes or yams if they are just sliced up on a plate. That is your cue to cut them up into French fries, spice them a little with pepper, salt and even a bit of chili pepper and pop them into the oven.
There are lots of orange flavored yogurts on the market. Yoplait makes an orange cream yogurt that kids love and that is full of calcium as well. The trick is that it tastes just like a creamsicle.

Parenting Tips
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Healthy Sugar Substitutes

My kids have sweet tooths and so do I and my husband. Still we all know how sugar is supposed to be bad for you.
The first thing that you have to do is cut the level of refined sugar that you take on board every day. This means that you must cut right back on sugar rich foods such as cakes, cookies, candies, chocolate, jellies and the like and if you currently ladle sugar all over your breakfast cereal in the morning, stop doing it right now.
In addition, if you take sugar with your tea or coffee, try to wean yourself off sweetening your drinks or if this is something that you cannot imagine doing, try a natural sweetener like stevia or sucanat as alternative.
The first of these natural sweeteners is somewhat controversial in that it is approved by the FDA as a dietary supplement but not as a sweetener. Nevertheless, even though it is a little expensive, the extreme sweetness of stevia means that a little goes an awful long way, so the cost per cup of tea or coffee is probably no different to cost of the sugar you are currently buying.
On the other hand, sucanat is a one-for-one direct replacement for processed sugar and as always, there are plenty of places on the net where you can obtain both of these substances.
The point about having too much sugar in your diet is that not only does all of that instant energy tend to get piled on as fat if it is not used, processed sugar is bad for your immune system and particularly for your skin. Consequently, if you consume too much processed sugar or products made from sugar, it is pretty much a given that you are going to suffer boils and other skin problems.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean that you have to cut all sweet foods from your diet, but what you should do is replace the sweets that you used to use with natural sweet substances wherever possible. For example, eating plenty of fruit and vegetables is an essential of any well-balanced diet, and if you want to boost your immune system, then you can replace some of the sweetness that you have lost with the sweetness of fruit.
Furthermore, there are lots of other entirely natural sweet substances that you can use to satisfy your sweet tooth. The sweet syrup that is commercially extracted from Agave comes in three different variations, ranging from a ‘light version' that has little traceable taste of the plant (just sweetness) to the version that carries a noticeable taste of the plant itself.
You then have reliable old standbys like maple syrup as well as less known but entirely natural sweeteners such as barley malt, date sugar, fruit juice concentrate and sorghum syrup.
There is also honey with some varieties such as manuka honey from New Zealand having acknowledged antibacterial qualities as well as being stunningly sweet as well. Indeed, as you can read on the website, the antibacterial qualities of this particular honey are so pronounced that you can even apply it to wounds for its antibacterial qualities!

Parenting Tips
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