“Healthy Food” and “Teenager” can coexist in the same sentence. Dr. J. Shawn Leatherman

Most adolescents are responsible for making their own lunches or buying it at school. You can load up your teenager’s lunch with kale bunches, apple slices, broccoli spears, organic milk and whole grain bread slathered in hummus, but, seriously, what is the likelihood they will actually eat it? The likelihood is higher when you model the same behavior and provide the reasons why. Unfortunately, if your child’s health and nutrition is left up to their school, you are probably in big trouble! The majority of schools in the nation plan your child’s meal around their budget, not nutrition and health. Parents need to give their children basic guidelines for what is included in a nutritious lunch, and should always be role models for healthy eating ourselves. In reality, we often leave the rest up to the kids, believing they are old enough to take responsibility for their own food choices. Some are! Some aren’t!

Numerous choices however, include using their lunch money on occasion, or more than occasion, to buy junk food and soft drinks from vending machines inside the school or in the lunch line itself. Sometimes adolescents skip lunch all together.

According to nutrition expert, Dr. Renu Mansukhani, The eating behavior of adolescents is influenced by a number of variables. Unfortunately, as your kids age, become teens, and develop their own values, your influence no longer trumps all the rest as it did when they were younger. While we can still model and give them good food choices, a teen’s own personality and body image, peer influence, societal norms, school and community environment, all affect what he or she will eat.

Parents need to be proactive in their child’s choices by recognizing how their adolescent actually thinks about health and nutrition. Offer sound advice on proper food choices. If you don’t know what these choices are, seek them out. Teens are more independent in their food choices than younger children. Even teens brought up eating healthy may make the wrong choices. Here are the four worst food habits of teens, what you can do about them, and a few ideas to help your child recognize and make improved food choices.

• Skipping breakfast is the foremost bad food habit for teenagers. According to the American Dietetic Association, more than half of male teens and more than two-thirds of female teens do not eat breakfast on a regular basis. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Eating breakfast can upstart your teen’s metabolism, which helps with weight control, mood and school performance. Skipping breakfast increases the desire to snack on refined foods and sweets (empty carbohydrates) to boost energy levels.

You can ensure that your teen eats a healthy breakfast by making the foods readily accessible to him. Make it a part of your routine to put breakfast on the table and sit with your teen while you both enjoy a healthy breakfast. If time is a problem, initiate earlier to bed, earlier to rise principles. Or, go for the grab and eat on the way breakfasts such as hard boiled eggs, nuts, fruit, or hearty bran muffins.

• Emphasize the here and now. “Don’t you want to grow up to be big and strong?”, may work for younger kids, but not teens. They live for the moment as their lives are in constant transition. Emphasize how eating healthy, including their daily breakfast, will help them feel better now, give them more energy for activities they love, and improve their complexion and appearance.
• Soft drink consumption is the second bad habit. Let’s start with the facts. According to the Centers for Disease Control, carbonated soft drinks are the number one source of calories in the American diet for adults and kids. Given that soda has zero nutritional value, this is an alarming statistic. The American Academy of Pediatrics says sweetened drinks like soda and sports drinks contribute to obesity because the calories are in liquid form. The theory is that eating solid food creates satiety, you feel full, and thus eat only a certain amount. Liquid does not give you the same sensation of fullness, so sweetened drinks with their loads of calories are adding to the normal dietary intake.

A study looking at American youths aged 6-17 found an increase in the prevalence of soft drink consumption from 37% in 1978 to 56% in 1998. A Harvard study published in the journal Pediatrics, concluded that when sweetened drinks, (soda, sweetened iced tea, sports drinks and juice drinks with less than 100 percent juice), were replaced with bottled water in the home, kids decreased their consumption of the sugary stuff by about 80 percent. In other words, out of sight, out of mind. This study is evidence that improving nutrition at home, and hopefully at school, can have a significant impact on kids’ behavior. You can help your teen choose a healthier drink by not buying soda having water and organic fruit juice available. Artificially sweetened beverages and diet colas have their own problems and are even worse than sugary beverages. They should not be consumed at all!

• The next unhealthy food habit teens have is increased foods from ‘other’ food group. Think of the food pyramid, the ‘other’ food group is the smallest section at the top, with what is supposed to be the least amount of servings. Teens tend to eat too much high fat, trans-fat, processed, artificially flavored and colored, refined, and empty calorie snack foods that are categorized in the ‘other’ food group.

Break this habit by having fruits and healthy snacks available more often. Slowly eliminate having high trans-fat, processed and high calorie snacks. Bagged chips with orange goop may be easy to grab at the grocery store, but picking up a bag of oranges and remembering to wash, quarter and put them out on the table during snack time is much smarter. The benefits to your teen’s health are worth the effort.

Pack for their lifestyle. Teenagers and kids are on the go, especially at school. They eat what they can get their hands on and consume the fastest, and that’s usually not your carefully-packed lunch. So try giving them healthy, eat-on-the-go options, like organic granola bars, unflavored popcorn, organic cheese, bananas, apples, and baggies of grapes or nuts. Instead of sandwiches, make wraps and teach them how to do it. Wraps can be rolled in foil and stuffed in the outside pocket of a backpack with a small icepack – no lunch bag required. Buy bottled water in bulk which they can grab as they run out the door.

The final big problem: Increased eating/snacking outside of the home. Teens hit the fast food restaurants much more often then they did when they were younger. This is inevitable due to school, sports and work schedules overlapping regular meal times. To circumvent this bad habit, talk to your teen about limiting fast food to once a week. Make dinner and healthy food available to him/her when they are home. This is as easy as fixing a plate for them and allowing him to heat it up when they are home. Providing cut veggies, fruit, granola, nuts, organic yogurt etc… will promote healthy snacking.

Have your child do the math. If adolescents are using their money to buy junk food at school, have them figure out how much they are spending weekly and monthly. They will be surprised at how it adds up. Emphasize how much sooner they could buy that new pair of jeans or ipod they’ve had their eye on if they ate their packed lunch, eliminated vending machine items, and reduced fast food consumption.

The bottom line: kids are aware. They watch Discovery Health, read fitness magazines, and do know how to make reasonably healthy food choices, for the most part. But remember, they are bombarded with advertising hundreds of times a day. Your duty is to encourage proper choices and help them make it easier to fit quality nutritional foods into their lifestyle as well as yours. The common denominator for getting teens to eat healthier and avoid bad food habits is your active role in providing healthy foods. When you get in the habit of making these foods more readily available to your teen, you will see a change in their eating habits.