Kids and Healthy Lifestyles: How Camps Can Help

Many camps look for innovative, fun, tasty ways to provide healthy choices and decision-making skills to their campers and staff. Parents can adapt these tips to promote healthy eating and enjoy the results along with their children. Watch what happens when you:

1. Teach your children to alter food preferences by giving them good choices
    
   1. Serve only green leaf (or other dark green versus iceberg lettuce).
   2. Serve whole wheat bread items in place of white (i.e., hamburger buns).
   3. Serve all sauces, dressings, and gravies on the side.
   4. Make fresh vegetables and dips available in colorful arrays.
   5. Offer whole wheat or graham crackers instead of chips.
       
2. Offer taste tests, expose your children to new foods. For example . . . .
    
   1. Make kiwi the "fruit of the day" by providing your child with a half kiwi and a spoon.
   2. Serve slices of jicama and cookie cutters at the table for your child to make edible shapes.
   3. Provide frilly toothpicks for eating Gardenburgers or other new items.
   4. Offer a dinner table contest, giving points for numbers of spinach leaves consumed.
   5. Provide an array of "Guess what it is" taste-testing food items.
       
3. Encourage eating breakfast
    
   1. Studies show children perform better in school and at play.
   2. A healthy breakfast is a good deterrent for overeating at lunch.
   3. Those who skip breakfast have more problems with weight control.
       
4. Introduce a new exercise or activity program
    
   1. Consider enrolling your child in a dance/ethnic dance/movement program.
   2. Offer your child the opportunity to try a new sport.
       
5. Promote a "5-a-Day Summer Club" at home
    
   1. Offer different colored fruits and vegetable pieces and toothpicks so your child can build a fruit animal shape or vegetable creation, and then eat it.
   2. Display a poster in your kitchen to track 5-a-day foods.
   3. Offer points for healthy eating choices.
       
6. Reduce "fast food" and junk food for snacks and side dishes (chips, cookies, candy, etc.)
    
   1. Replace chips at meals with soy crisps or home-made potato dishes.
   2. Have a "make your own trail mix" party, providing healthy choices (dried banana or other fruit chips, nuts, raisins, Cheerios, sunflower seeds, coconut flakes, toasted oatmeal or granola, carob chips).

Camps play a vital role in addressing the obesity epidemic but so can you. Children need to be given the opportunity to start and practice good nutritious habits both at home and at camp. Camp is a great place to offer good food, great activities, a positive environment, a safe and secure location, and most of all, fun.

Adapted from the article, "Kids and Healthy Lifestyles," by Viki Kappel Spain; M. Deborah Bialeschki, Ph.D.; and Karla A. Henderson, Ph.D., which will be published in the September/October 2005 issue of Camping Magazine.

Healthy Kids