Are your children bored with food? Are they returning the snacks you pack for them to eat at school? Below are some recipes for tasty and nutritious snacks.
Banana salad:
Ingredients: Ripe bananas with brown spots on the skin, passion fruit juice or pineapple or both pineapple and passion fruit juice, roasted peeled crushed groundnuts or sim sim seeds.
Method:
1. Peel and cut bananas into small pieces
2. Combine ingredients of your choice in a bowl mix gently and serve as a snack or desert after meals.
Nutritional value.
Banana contains:
· The amino acid tyrosine, and the mineral magnesium. Both of which are brain function and memory enhancers.
· Potassium, which is important in nerve transmission, and facilitates proteins and carbohydrate metabolism.
· Vitamin B, a low intake of vitamin B might result in anaemia, which is characterised by tiredness, poor concentration, and exhaustion after even mild exertion.
· Some vitamin A, folate, vitamin C, and sugar. All of these nutrients contribute to a healthy body and wellbeing.
Yoghurt pineapple shake:
Ingredients: 1. Cut pineapples into very small pieces or crush it with a fork, or chop it in an electric blender.
2. Combine yoghurt with a small amount of crushed pineapple in a jar. Shake well, serve as a snack alone, or with roasted sweet potatoes, or as a desert after meals.
Nutritional value
Yoghurt and other dairy products contain:
· The amino acids phenylalanine, tyrosine, glutamine, vitamin B-12
· Phenylalanine has been found to improve attention span, learning, and memory. It also helps our bodies to produce more tyrosine important for alertness.
· Glutamine is known to enhance intelligence and improve memory function.
· The live bacteria known as lactobacillus in yogurt is known as friendly bacteria because it helps to destroy unfriendly bacteria in the intestines.
By the way, you can prepare your own yoghurt at home by adding a few table spoons of the yoghurt you have bought from the shop to a litre of cool boiled milk kept overnight.
For good feeding, it is strongly recommended that you serve your family with well balance meals including a variety of foods.
It is also important to remember that expensive fashionable foods do not necessarily make healthy feeding. They may instead lead to malnutrition in your child.
