5 Tricks to Get Your Children to Eat Healthy

"Studies have shown that life-long eating habits are formed early, and that parents have the biggest influence"

A mum of three shares tried-and-true nutrition tips

If you've ever struggled to slip those essential fruits and vegetables into your child's diet, or you worry that your children may actually turn into a bowl of mac 'n' cheese, keep reading! As a mum and naturopathic physician I have become an expert at balancing the goals of a raising a healthy family with the unpredictability of daily life. While my ideals haven't changed, I've had to find new, quick, and easy ways to help my family eat healthy and stay happy.

Studies have shown that life-long eating habits are formed at an early age, and that parents have the biggest influence on children' food choices. With that in mind, I developed these tips to make sure that my three children will grow up eating well, and will also enjoy what they eat:

1. Be realistic
When my oldest started school, she discovered all sorts of new and unhealthy snacks. Don't try to hide things that children love, just look for healthier alternatives like homemade fruit juice iced lollies, and whole-grain or multigrain foods instead of refined flour pastas, breads, and biscuits. Instead of fizzy drinks, try juice diluted with fizzy water.

2. Don't give up
It's funny: one day my children may gobble down stems of broccoli, other days they'll leave it to wither on the plate. We've found that if we keep putting a food in front of them that our children will eventually taste, if not like, it.

We avoid making special meals for our children by always including at least one food we know they'll like, and making sure that "problem" foods become part of a well-liked meal. Some of our favourites: spinach and squash puréed into a pasta sauce, chicken enchiladas filled with sweet peppers and courgettes, and pita bread hummous sandwiches topped with grated carrots and cucumbers.

3. Eat the rainbow
We try to include a colourful blend of vegetables at meal time both for nutrients and to appeal to our children' visual senses. A favourite trick: We set up a salad buffet and have a contest to see which child can get the most colours on their plate. Try it out: grated beetroot, sliced carrots, chopped red cabbage, cauliflower florets, tomatoes, sunflower or pumpkin seeds, cucumbers, green pepper slices, dried cranberries, and a couple of different salad dressings.

4. Look out for taste triggers
Pay attention to what your children like. One of ours likes vinegar, another likes sweet. While it may seem hard to please them both, it can be easier than you think. Cooked carrots release the sugars to make them sweeter, but a sprinkle of vinegar after cooking can add a bit of sour.

5. Get children involved
When at the store, let the children manage the produce part of the shopping list-challenge them to pick the freshest, best they can find. Even if it takes a little more time, invite children into the kitchen to chop, spread, sieve, or simply put the food on plates. We also started trying variations on favourite foods, which we write down as special family recipes. Jump in with something easy and flavoursome: build smoothies together using a variety of frozen fruits, 100% fruit juices, soya or rice milks, and low-fat yoghurts. When you find the perfect blend, write it down and later let your children make their own.

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Terrific Kid-Pleasing Picnic Ideas

Pack a basket with treats children make themselves for outdoor eating adventures

Say "picnic" to children and watch their faces light up. Magic happens when meals are eaten in the open air. Maybe it's eating in a different place-outdoors, on the ground-with no table or chairs! Maybe it's the special picnic food, the easy-to-transport-and-nibble treats. Even spontaneous rainy-day picnics inside on the playroom rug guarantee delight. Children also adore the opportunity to cook, so double the fun by letting them prepare their own picnic goodies.

Make these kid-friendly picnic favourites

Picnic foods children make themselves needn't be complicated. Think no-cook snacks and bite-size finger food, simple sandwiches, cheese sticks, fruit and vegetable chunks, drinkable yoghurt cups, and you're there. A little adult supervision is the trick to get things ready.

Combine handfuls of small biscuits, dried cranberries or raisins, almonds and a favourite dry cereal for a jazzy snack mix.

Make rainbow fruit wands alternating apple, pear, melon or pineapple chunks, strawberries, and grapes on wooden skewers; for safety's sake, break off the pointed end after the fruit is on.

Use rolls of sliced ham or turkey, cooked hot-dog or tofu-dog chunks, green pepper slices, stuffed olives, and cheese cubes to vary skewer combinations.

Make funny face sandwiches using a 3- or 4-inch (8- to 10-cm) round pastry cutter to cut out bread slice circles. Place a circle of cheese on the bread and use cucumber rounds, pepper slices, cherry tomato halves, and sliced olives to make eyes, nose, eyebrows, and mouth.

Spread whole-wheat tortillas with softened cream cheese, then layer your child's favourite salad leaves, turkey or ham slices, and grated carrots; roll them up and they're ready to go. "Hold them together with a party toothpick and they'll look pretty, too," advises Gillen Freebing, age 13, of Memphis, Tennessee.

Toss precooked bow tie or elbow pasta with mayonnaise, peas, and halved cherry tomatoes; season with salt and pepper for a flavoursome picnic salad.

Stash water bottles or juice boxes in the freezer an hour before leaving so they're super cold; add fizzy water to juice for a fizzy drink substitute.

Buy these picnic essentials, too

Ensure children have a super-fine picnic by packing these basics in their basket:

Large blanket or tablecloth to sit on

Nonbreakable plates, cups, and utensils

Napkins, handiwipes, and paper towels

A large rubbish bag (don't leave any litter behind)

Sunscreen, insect repellent

Technorati : Children, Healthy, food, kids food, lifestyle, nutrition, true nutrition tips

Steve Winwood returns on May 5th with his eagerly anticipated new studio album ‘Nine Lives’

Steve Winwood returns on May 5th with his eagerly anticipated new studio album ‘Nine Lives’. His first studio LP since 2003’s acclaimed ‘About Time’.

Written and co-produced by Steve Winwood with Johnson Somerset- whose previous credits include Roxy Music and Duran Duran. The new album features nine arresting songs including a rousing collaboration with Eric Clapton, who plays guitar on ‘Dirty City’.


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Each of the nine tracks on ‘Nine Lives’ continue the exploration of soul, rock, blues and world music that Steve Winwood is renowned for.

Amongst the many highlights on the album, ‘Fly’ is a brave and ambitious track featuring soaring powerful vocals set against a cacophony of sound.

Other highlights on the album are many and include ‘Forget About Him’, a joyous and moving six-minute journey through horns, keyboards and world instruments.

Alongside ‘Hungry Man’, ‘We’re All Looking’, and the captivating track ‘Secrets’ means the album is as consistently strong as it is diverse.

On ‘Nine Lives’ Steve Winwood turns another musical corner, showcasing his ability to still create relevant and evocative music. It gives his fans, old and new, nine new reasons to celebrate the life and music of this ageless, and still prodigious, musical treasure.

Steve and Eric Clapton played three sold out nights at Madison Square Gardens, New York in February. Steve and his band will be special guests to Tom Petty on his US tour this summer.

UK Dates to be announced shortly.

Track list:

I’m Not Drowning

Fly

Raging Sea

Dirty City

We’re All Looking

Hungry Man

Secrets

At Times We Do Forget

Other Shore

Top Tip For Travelling

1. Get enough sleep
Sleep is essential for the body to function properly and most people require an average of 8 hours a night. Try to catch up on lost sleep before you depart on holiday and during long-haul flights do your best to get as much sleep as possible. This way you will arrive refreshed and relaxed at your holiday destination.

2. Manage your time.

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Plan ahead and create time buffers to deal with unexpected circumstances or emergencies. For example, you may encounter some delay on the way to the airport so make sure you allow plenty of time.

3. Use technology wisely

Use technology that will save you time, for example check in online at ba.com and avoid the check-in queues. Once on the plane you will have to turn your mobile phone off so consider leaving it off for the rest of the holiday. Leave the number of the hotel with people at home in case of emergencies.

4. Keep active

When you exercise, your body produces endorphins - these are hormones that help you relax and can help counter the effects of stress. On holiday there are usually many opportunities to try some physical exercise: hire a bike for an afternoon, go on a walking tour, go dancing one evening or even just take a brisk walk rather than a taxi to your local restaurant for supper.

5. Keep hydrated

If you're feeling stressed, you might reach for nicotine, alcohol, caffeine or chocolate to calm you down. However, these substances all contain stimulants. Try instead to stock up on healthy snacks like fresh or dried fruit or nuts, and keep topping up your water. Water is essential for every body function and even more than usual will be required if you're holidaying in the sun.
6. Remain calm

When you have a problem on holiday it is very easy to react negatively by arguing endlessly or by fuming silently! It is much better to take a deep breath in, stay calm, and accept that there are some things in life that you just can't change. Use your time more constructively, for example if you have to wait for a flight play 'I spy' with the children.
7. Tackle signs of tension early.

Stress can affect your neck, shoulders and back. These quick techniques can help avoid this:

Sit with your feet on the ground, back supported against your chair and hands and arms open and relaxed. Take a deep breath in, raise your shoulders towards your ears and hold them raised for a few seconds. Then slowly breathe out and drop the shoulders. Repeat several times. Place your left hand on your right shoulder and squeeze gently. Repeat down the right arm to the elbow. Repeat several times. Place your right hand on your left shoulder and repeat the exercise. Place the fingers of both hands at the base of your skull; apply slow circular pressures down from the base of the skull to the base of the neck.

Researchers Find That Fat Cells Die and Are Replaced With New Ones

Every year, whether you are fat or thin, whether you lose weight or gain, 10 percent of your fat cells die. And every year, those cells that die are replaced with new fat cells, researchers in Sweden reported Sunday.

The result is that the total number of fat cells in the body remains the same, year after year throughout adulthood. Losing or gaining weight affects only the amount of fat stored in the cells, not the number of cells.

The finding was published online Sunday in the journal Nature.

Obesity investigators say the study raises tantalizing questions: What determines how many fat cells are in a person’s body? When is that number determined? Is there a way to intervene so people end up with fewer fat cells when they reach adulthood? And could obesity be treated by making fat cells die faster than they are born?

“This is a new way of looking at obesity,” said Dr. Lester Salans, an obesity researcher and emeritus professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

But for now, researchers say, they do not have a clue about how to answer those questions.

“There is a system waiting to be discovered,” said Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, an obesity researcher and dean of Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Flier and other obesity researchers cautioned, though, that even if scientists knew how the fat cell system worked, it was not clear that it would be safe or effective to treat obesity by intervening. One of the hard lessons of the past couple of decades has been that the body has redundant controls to maintain weight.

“I suspect that the body’s regulation of weight is so complex that if you intervene at this site, something else is going to happen to neutralize this intervention,” Dr. Salans said.

But the discovery is also leading to new ways to address other questions about obesity. For example, what happens to people who are thin until adulthood and then gain a lot of weight? The study focused on people who had been fat since childhood, the usual route for adult obesity. The situation may be different for people who got fat later. They may actually grow new fat cells — the ones they had may have become so stuffed with fat that they could hold no more.

Another question is whether fat cells removed with liposuction grow back.

Both questions are now under investigation by the Swedish researchers.

In a way, Dr. Flier noted, the discovery is a sort of back-to-the-future moment. There was a time a few decades ago, before the current interest in how the brain regulates how much is eaten, when obesity researchers spent all their time studying and discussing fat cells. Investigators discovered that fat people had more fat cells than thin people and that fat cells shrank with weight loss and bulged with weight gain.

Dr. Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University in New York, who did many of the initial studies with humans, said he started because he could not understand why people who lost weight regained. “They should have been cured,” Dr. Hirsch said. After all, he said, if you cut out a fatty tumor, the fat does not grow back. Why was fat lost from dieting different?

The result was the fat cell hypothesis, a notion that obsessed researchers. Fat cells, the hypothesis said, are laid down early in life and after that, they can change only in size, not in number. When people lose weight and their fat cells shrink, that creates a signal to fill the cells again, making people regain. “We didn’t know a lot about obesity, so that was what we talked about,” Dr. Flier said.

But the discussions stalled. It was not clear what to do about those discoveries or what they meant to efforts to help people lose weight. And no one had a method to ask whether fat cells were being created and destroyed during life. Few even thought to ask that question.

That changed only recently when the new paper’s first author, Kirsty L. Spalding, a neurobiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, developed a way to ask whether new cells grow in the cortical and cerebellum regions of the human brain. She found no new cells there since birth. One day, she was giving a talk on her brain study when a scientist in the audience, Erik Arner, suggested she use the method to look at fat cells. (Dr. Arner is the second author of Dr. Spalding’s paper.) The method for dating human cells takes advantage of an effect caused by above-ground nuclear bomb testing that took place from 1955 to 1963.

When the bombs were tested, their radioactivity created a spike in the amount of a carbon isotope, C14, in the atmosphere. The C14 made its way into plants and animals that ate the plants. When people ate those plants and meat from the animals, the C14 was incorporated into their human DNA. After the nuclear test ban, C14 levels started to drop. The result is that every cell has a C14 level that reflects the level in the atmosphere at the time the cell was born.

“Each cell is a time capsule of sorts,” Dr. Spalding said.

First the researchers confirmed that the number of fat cells remained constant in adults. Obese people who had weight loss surgery had as many fat cells two years after the surgery as before it, even though they were much thinner.

Then the investigators asked whether fat cells were being born and dying. To do that, they examined fat cells taken from 35 people, fat and lean, who had had liposuction or abdominal wall reconstruction. The amount of C14 in the cells would reveal how old the cells were. Since the number of fat cells remained constant, the number being born had to equal the number dying. And a mathematical model would reveal the dynamics of the cell turnover.

“We found the cells were really quite young,” Dr. Spalding said. “That tells us new cells are being born.”

She added: “The million-dollar question now is, What regulates this process? And where can we intervene?”

HERE’S one way to introduce a new cocktail: hire a stripper to take a bath in a giant replica of it.

A drink named for Dita von Teese.
What Not to Wear to a Cocktail Party
That’s the latest gambit from Cointreau, the French liqueur distiller, which recently was host to a party featuring the company’s new spokesmodel, the retro-glam burlesque performer (and former wife of Marilyn Manson) Dita von Teese, splashing around in her skivvies inside a jumbo cocktail glass.

“Cointreau is a brand that’s 160 years old,” said Stéphanie Fasquelle, the company’s marketing director. “It needed to be refreshed. We have a claim: ‘Be Cointreauversial.’ Dita represents that. This is a brand that’s especially appreciated by women, and Dita is very aspirational for women.”

At the party, held at the cavernous Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side, bartenders in black Willy Wonka top hats rattled shakers while the crowd awaited Miss von Teese’s performance.

The crowd was a downtown mix, with young men sporting felt fedoras, bow ties and eyeliner. A wiry, raccoon-eyed young woman passed through the crowd wearing a brown tank top emblazoned with a rudely worded question about the identity of the indie rocker Stephen Malkmus. “RuPaul is here,” someone announced. “As a man!”

Then Miss von Teese took the stage, emerging from a bottle-shaped cutout in the rear wall of the stage and dressed in an orange costume that was bedecked with 350,000 Swarovski crystals. The dress was said to weigh 75 pounds; no wonder Miss von Teese wanted to ditch it.

She waved an orange boa, which resembled a giant sea anemone, while a pert mime collected the falling portions of her costume. Then she lowered herself into a revolving cocktail-glass-shaped vat of purple liquid, where she kicked and sploshed before servers arrived bearing the Cointreau Teese, Miss von Teese’s new signature cocktail, on trays.

The drink — a mixture of Cointreau, apple and lemon juice and violet syrup, and presently available at the Lower East Side restaurant Rayuela — is said to have been painstakingly tailored to Miss von Teese’s tastes. My suspicion: Miss von Teese has a thing for Choward’s violet mints, those purple candies sold in New York delis, because that’s what the drink evokes.

“It’s a little sweet, but pretty good,” said Whitney Spaner, 26, an editor at Paper magazine, as she took her first sips. She was unfamiliar with Choward’s mints. “I like the violet flower floating in there. I think a lot of violet drinks are coming out. I’ve seen three of them in the last few weeks.”

Perhaps Miss Fasquelle is correct, however, about the appeal of Miss von Teese’s drink tilting toward women. Bobby Manley, 23, paused for a long while after being asked his opinion of the drink. “The liquid that Dita bathed in?” he finally said. “I’d rather drink that.”

COINTREAU TEESE

1 ½ ounces Cointreau

¾ ounce apple juice

½ ounce Monin Violet syrup

½ ounce fresh lemon juice

Slice of ginger.

Rub the edge of a chilled martini glass with the ginger slice, then discard the ginger. Combine the rest of the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake well, and strain into the glass.