After many years of trying to set personal goals in various ways and then failing to stick to them, I’m finally having some success. I can’t claim all the credit for this. To get from someone who has never been able to be consistent at anything, to someone who appears to be making the [...]
We should all encourage healthy eating in our children, most of us do that by making sure they eat the right things, but how many parents have you come across who report that their children will only eat junk food despite eating well in their early years? One possible reason for this is that they are eating only what they saw their parents eating. Children learn a lot from observation, so it follows that to make sure our kids make the right food choices in their later life, we need to let them see us making the right food choices for ourselves in their early life.
I decided to make sure that my child sees me eat a lot of fibre rich foods. There is a family history of high cholesterol and bowel cancer on both sides of my parents, making fibre very important to us. The problem I found was that while I can use Doctor Internet for research it doesn’t give me very much to work with. It gives me tables of statistics, or statements like ‘eat more grains’, but really that just means I’m back to people creating pages for ranking and traffic, not actual use. So, as usual, I did it myself.
First I needed a little science, not too much, but just enough for me to explain to my family what they are eating. I came up with the fact that there are two types of fibre. One type turns into a jelly after you eat it (that’s the soluble type). It helps to make you feel full for longer by helping your body take it’s time to digest the food, as well as soaking up bad cholesterol. The other type (the insoluble type) acts like a cleaner, it collects up all the stuff your body doesn’t need and helps get it out of your body. Obviously you need both.
The amount you should eat is a tough one to establish. Opinions vary from country to country and medical advice ranges anywhere from 20g to 38g per day. Making it even harder is the fact that scientists have struggled to work out how much fibre exists in food, apparently it’s complex. One thing on our side though is that foods generally contain a 50:50 mix between soluble and insoluble and that’s roughly how we’re supposed to split the amount that we eat.
I decided to simplify the entire thing. I reasoned that by finding easy fibre rich foods that I could include in my weekly shop, I would be pretty confident that I’d be seen eating the right foods without number crunching or over thinking. This is the list I came up with:
That’s it, just 7 easily palatable, easily prepared foods high in fibre. If I ate all that each day I’d be eating somewhere between 36g and 42g of fibre. I don’t, but I try, I probably get to about 25g on average though. My aim is for my family to see me eating those foods and that is certainly being achieved.
As ever, if you have any comments, corrections, arguments or suggestions, send them in.
Tags: fibre, food, health, lifestyle, Parenting