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RDs to the Nutritional Rescue — Help Parents of Vegetarian Children Ensure Nutrient-Rich Diets
By Carol Patton

How can parents ensure their vegetarian children, both younger and older, obtain the nutrients their growing bodies need? RDs can offer many suggestions to parents who may be struggling to feed their vegetarian children healthful meals and snacks and ensure their diets include nutrient-dense foods, especially those that may not initially please kids’ palates. They should also communicate this simple yet vital message: If parents expect their children to eat healthfully, they must model their own advice.

Focus on Protein and Vitamins
Identifying foods that offer protein and important vitamins such as B12 is a challenge in some families. Supermarket shelves are filled with choices that can easily confuse even the savviest shoppers, says Vesanto Melina, MS, RD, who practices in Vancouver.

She explains that RDs need to educate parents about foods that are good sources of protein and vitamins. If a child stops drinking milk, for instance, parents should consider fortified soymilk, which contains roughly 7 or 8 g of protein per cup along with calcium and vitamins D and B12.

Other suggestions for parents include the following:

  • Stock up on protein-packed foods such as frozen veggie burgers or hot dogs.
  • Prepare homemade bean soup—another protein source—then freeze it in single-serving containers.
  • Serve vegetables with hummus dip for after-school snacks. “[Kids] are starving and will eat anything,” says Melina, adding that they may consume four or five servings of vegetables without realizing it. “[Parents] can get them to eat a lot of good vegetables before dinner so they don’t need to hound them to eat boiled spinach.”
  • Plan a pizza party. Children can cut up a variety of vegetables for toppings.
  • Make smoothies that include fresh fruits, nut butters, and avocado.
  • Offer healthful chips with different flavors of hummus.
  • Prepare tacos for dinner with healthful fillers such as black or pinto beans, guacamole, salsa, lettuce, tomato, and low-fat cheese.

Despite parents’ best efforts, children may experience phases during which they simply won’t eat vegetables, whether or not they’re following vegetarian diets, says Melina, who coauthored Raising Vegetarian Children: A Guide to Good Health and Family Harmonyand The New Becoming Vegetarian: The Essential Guide to a Vegetarian Diet, which includes a section on children’s nutrition.

“Reassure parents that many of the nutrients like vitamins C and A or folate that we rely on in vegetables are in fruits,” she says. “They can eat papaya for vitamin A, strawberries for vitamin C, [and] use oranges for folate.”

Educate and Participate
Some parents insist their children sit at the dinner table until they’ve eaten all of their vegetables. However, forcing children to eat specific foods is ill advised, says Jill Nussinow, MS, RD, who teaches nutritional cooking at Santa Rosa Junior College in California.

Instead, parents should involve children in meal preparation (while providing appropriate supervision). Kids can chop up fixings for a salad bar, experiment with different seasonings for beans, or create healthful concoctions in the blender.

Nussinow says parents may need to serve new foods several times before children form opinions. They should start with those foods that are more likely to be appealing to the palate, and they should be creative: Serve half of a sweet potato as a snack. Mix leftover vegetables with pasta or a light dressing topped with toasted nuts. Cut baked tofu in strips. Blend turnips. Prepare potato-based soups with blended vegetables. Dip sugar snap peas in tofu-based ranch dip. Bake kale chips rubbed with oil and spices.

“What it comes down to is often what the parents eat,” says Nussinow, author of The Veggie Queen: Vegetables Get the Royal Treatment. “That’s the key. If [children] see them eating [nutrient-poor] food, they’ll want to eat [nutrient-poor food too].”

— Carol Patton is a freelance journalist in Las Vegas who covers health-related topics for various publications.