| Meet Child Obesity Fighter Mitch Spinach |
| Friday, 11 March 2011 17:39 | |||
 Everywhere, USA, March 2011 — Everybody’s talking about staying healthy, fighting obesity and coercing children to eat right, but who’s teaching them how? What works and what doesn’t?Introducing Mitch Spinach, Veggie Superhero! www.mitchspinach.com The creators of Mitch have two young children of their own, a girl and a boy. Before their first child came along, they began looking more deeply into infant and maternal nutrition, and the basics of healthy eating for children. Later, when their daughter began Kindergarten, and was bombarded with junk food, the parents do what they could to make a difference. They set out to create new books that would not only be an entertainment outlet for children, it would motivate them naturally to eat more of the right foods. The result was Mitch Spinach, a healthy role model for children. The authors collaborated with a well-known family physician who specialized in healthy eating and good nutritional concepts for the family — a researcher who works to prevent and reverse diseases such as type II diabetes, childhood obesity, ADD, ADHD, and chronically low immune systems. As parents, they knew that kids don't like to be lectured about eating. However, they also knew they desperately needed a cool hero who espouses a healthy lifestyle that they could emulate. While many books for children focus on a child's dislike of a certain food (usually a vegetable), the Mitch Spinach books avoid the negative, and instead transform healthy eating into a behavior to be copied in order to gain "super" powers like those of Mitch Spinach. The Secret Life of Mitch Spinach is a new book series with the power to significantly change the way that children eat because it actually prompts children to ask for healthy food without preaching to them about the benefits of a healthy diet. Good health begins in childhood, and scientific evidence suggests that the food children eat in the first ten years of their lives can have a critical and profound effect on their life-long health. The authors also created the Mitch Spinach website – www.MitchSpinach.com – to serve as a resource for parents, teachers, and kids. It offers creative, multidisciplinary lesson plans and outlines the importance of sound nutrition. Kids can print educational games, such as crossword puzzles and word searches that pertain to the healthy foods used in the books to reinforce what they have learned. As a teaser, here are six tips to encourage your children to eat their veggies: a) Make food preparation a family affair. The more you involve your kids when preparing meals and snacks, the more willing they become to try healthy foods. Take them along to the grocery store and allow them to help pick the fruits and vegetables for the week; b) Hold a make-your-own smoothie party. Have several ingredients displayed in bowls and let your children pick what they want; c) The same hold for preparing salads. Begin with lettuce but have seeds, dried fruits, peas, etc; d) Make a quick dressing/dip and encourage eat string beans, carrots, celery and other veggies cut into strips for dipping; e) Using cutters, make different shapes out of veggies and fruits, creating more fun; f) Prepare a vegetarian soup at least one night of each week. Pureed soups are good because you can’t see what’s in them. Blenders are good tools to have. To find out more about the Secret Life of Mitch Spinach, visit www.mitchspinach.com. SOURCE: Mitch Spinach
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