Wondering how to feed your toddler or baby a plant-based diet or if it’s even safe? What about how you communicate around the relationship we have with food? Well, the Plant-Based Juniors crew is here to help.
Enter Whitney English and Alex Caspero, Registered Dietitian, Certified Personal Trainers, and Moms who founded Plant-Based Juniors (PBJ). Together, they created a community and incredible resource for families who want to raise their kids with a mostly plant-based diet. Relying on evidence-based nutrition advice, Whitney and Alex empower parents to make the best nutrition decisions for their families. And pssst, not only is safe to feed your children a plant-based diet, but there are many positive short-term and long-term health benefits. Studies show that plant-based children have a much lower risk of obesity, have lower levels of inflammatory signaling molecules, and they learn to love fruits and vegetables from an early age. Plant-based children are also exposed to much fewer environmental toxins typically found in animal tissue. And an unexpected finding? It might even be beneficial for cognitive development.
PBJ is for parents who wish to create any type of dietary environment at home – vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, and more. Focusing on science, PBJ offers recipes, meal planning tips, kitchen hacks, and more. They have so many free resources on their website answering just about any question you can think of. With the understanding that getting kids their nutrition needs takes strategic planning, PBJ offers many free resources and recommendations based on research for parents to successfully implement plant-based nutrition at home.
With a recently released book, The Plant-Based Baby and Toddler, Whitney and Alex join The Sonya Looney Show to discuss plant-based diets for kids, healthy eating, and more.
This podcast isn’t just about nutrition and helping your kids (plant-based or not) eat more fruits, veggies, and legumes. It’s about how we communicate with our kids about food, treats, body image, labeling food and so much more.
“There are so many times when my child is eating at the table and all I want to do is be like just, ‘Eat it! You ate it yesterday and you loved it, what do you mean you don’t want it anymore? Why are we having a tantrum? I don’t understand!’ I know how hard this is and I know how sometimes this feels really complicated, but I think if we just take a step back and say, we’re just really trying to give our children more ability to decide how much they need and what they need and really trusting them more. Things like the clean plate club and the one bite rule takes away that trust. The more our kids learn they can trust their bodies and trust what they want and the types of foods that feel good to them, ideally that’s going to set them up with a much better relationship with food as they continue to get older.“
Alex Caspero, MA, RDN
“We definitely recommend against using food of any kind, whether it be a treat or anything else, as a reward because that’s putting the food up on a pedestal, that’s making it a highly sought after special thing instead of a food of equal value in the diet as everything else…You might also get food tied up in emotions. If we’re always associating success or celebration with sweet foods, then that really gets tied up into a kid’s value system of what they’re supposed to do when they’re feeling good or conversely when they’re feeling bad.”
Whitney English, MS, RDN
Topics Discussed in the Podcast
- Health benefits of feeding children plant-based diets
- How to get your kids to eat healthy
- Picky eating
- Getting the right amount of fat in the diet
- How to reward your kids without using food
- How to create structure around eating
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Listen Now to Plant-Based Juniors
Links
- Check out Whitney and Alex’s new book The Plant-Based Baby and Toddler
- Subscribe to my newsletter
- Go to Plant-Based Juniors website for free downloads
- Listen to my podcast episodes on plant-based nutrition
- Check out my Plant-Powered Cookbook (simple and easy recipes)
- Read my Ultimate Guide to Vegan Pregnancy
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