When it comes to heart healthy eating, the things that we know we should eat are rarely as tempting as the things we know we shouldn’t even be considering.

We make unhealthy food choices for two simple reasons:

1. What we like is often cheaper than healthy alternatives.
2. The food that we’re told to avoid simply tastes better.

This is an issue attracting significant media attention; first lady Michelle Obama has even picked up the mantle to join in the healthy eating debate. Mrs. Obama has been working to combat childhood obesity, supporting Congress and schools to adopt the new federal guidelines for healthy eating across our school-age population.

U.S. guidelines are promoting heart-healthy choices

Activities such as promoting exercise for school kids, encouraging them to make healthy choices for drinks, like choosing water over sugary sodas, and avoiding snack foods with high unhealthy fats have all been in the agenda, as the federal guidelines state that our youngsters should be eating fruit every day, having whole grains above simple carbohydrate alternatives, and filling up on fresh vegetables.

GREAT BUT THERE’S ONE SMALL PROBLEM…

The children themselves are pretty unhappy with the new changes. Looking at views expressed across social media platforms like Twitter, there’s a chorus of dissent, demonstrating the true reaction our kids have to healthy eating goals.

Why aren’t our kids choosing healthy food options?

This brings us down to the fundamental problem with healthy eating campaigns. Many heart healthy foods, and really just healthy foods in general, simply don’t taste as great as alternatives laden with fat and sugar. Our brains are hard-wired to respond positively to the addictive elements of sweet foodstuffs, even while our bodies rebel in all sorts of ways including obesity, heightened blood pressure and risks of serious long-term health problems.

If this was the only issue, we’d still have a fighting chance of beating the childhood obesity epidemic. However, there’s another key factor influencing the taste buds and food choices of our younger generation: Heart-healthy food choices tend to be expensive.

When you compare the price of, for example, an organic, whole-food diet with one full of budget cupboard fillers such as chips, cookies, white pasta, bread and cereal, it doesn’t take a calculator to realize that making positive, heart-healthy choices has a strong impact on the family budget. For parents, it simply doesn’t make short-term economic sense to pay more for healthy foods, when cheap alternatives – that kids love – are so readily available at such a low price.

Beating the obesity epidemic

So what can we do to address these fundamental issues?

The first point is that there needs to be a radical change in the availability and pricing of healthy options for our kids – and the rest of us. Those on a restricted budget are not choosing poor food options through preference alone, they make decisions based on their weekly grocery budget as well.

This means that parents who want to encourage healthy eating in their children will struggle to promote a heart-healthy diet, even if they’re fully aware of the long-term dangers of high consumption of fat and sugar.

Changing traditional views of “healthy” eating

Similarly, we need to try to remove the whole concept of “healthy” and “unhealthy” food. Simply by branding an apple as “healthy” can make a child instinctively turn away from it. Healthy isn’t cool, or important to a young child. They make their food choices based on what their parents introduce them to initially, and then develop their taste through peer interaction, media persuasion and availability.

Parents who provide a balanced, varied diet, swapping in healthy substitutes like whole grain rice and pasta, and whole meal bread without even mentioning it, will promote a balanced outlook in their kids, setting them up to make positive choices in later life.

SO HOW DO YOU DO IT?

We’d love to hear your opinions, successes… even failures, regarding kids and healthy eating. Any discussion is a good discussion about a topic as important as the health of our children. Please share…