Appetite for Life: The Thumbs-Up, No-Yucks Guide to Getting Your Kid to Be a Great Eater--Including Over 100 Kid-Approved Recipes

by Stacey Antine

From fluorescent yogurt to 100-calorie snack packs, most "kid friendly" food has little nutritional benefit. We've convinced ourselves that in order to get kids to eat it, food needs to be packaged into something fake, colored, and far from its natural source. No wonder kids protest when we ask them to eat their vegetables. They don't come in a box!

Enter Stacey Antine, founder of HealthBarn USA, an organization at the front lines of introducing kids and their families to healthy eating habits and real food. While some parents "sneak" nutritious foods into meals, Antine knows from experience that the key to raising adventurous, wise eaters is to connect kids to the food they eat. Kids are more likely to try new foods and make healthy choices if they understand where ingredients come from, know why certain foods are good for their bodies and minds, and have an active role in preparation, from gathering ingredients to cooking.

In Appetite for Life, mealtime is no longer a battleground, but an opportunity for fun and experimentation. In fact, Antine encourages giving children a voice: with her "no yucks allowed" method, kids use a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system for each new food they try, but they always have to try at least one bite.

Featuring food the whole family will love (no more separate kids menu!), this book includes: nutritious, easy-to-make recipes for all three meals plus snack time, which have been tested and approved by the thousands of kids who attend HealthBarn; family activities like Stacey's Supermarket Spy Kids game; and great-tasting, home-made alternatives to your go-to store-bought foods, with side-by-side nutritional analysis to highlight the benefits of learning to eat the HealthBarn way. Appetite for Life is the key ingredient to a healthier, happier dinner table.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Cooking

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 11, 2012

About the author

Stacey Antine, MS, RD, is the founder and CEO of HealthBarn USA, a leader in proven hands-on healthy-lifestyle education for children and their families, and a registered dietitian with over twenty years of experience as a nutrition counselor, speaker, and media spokesperson. HealthBarn USA has served over 30,000 kids and their families and has been featured on the Rachael Ray Show and CNN's House Call with Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Reviews

[Julia Farthing Kitay · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of these recipes my picky kid wouldn't even touch.

[Liss Carmody · Rating 2 out of 5]

There wasn't anything actually wrong with this book, and I espouse most of the author's feelings as far as whole foods, kid menus, etc. go. I'm rating it 'meh' mostly because I was underwhelmed, and didn't find as much as I was hoping for in terms of specific concrete ways to broaden the taste buds of a slightly picky eater. Lots of information about why kids should eat whole, real foods (which I totally believe!), but there were only a few specific ideas that I might add to my arsenal. Maybe I'm just already doing everything right? Maybe this book is just a little spare. Most of the space is taken up with recipes, which was fine, but I don't really need a lot of kid-friendly recipes. I did appreciate that she included specific suggestions about steps in the recipes that kids of different ages could do.

I had a couple of minor quibbles, the first being her insistence that low-fat dairy products are the way to go (I totally disagree), but it's not a deal breaker. You could definitely make her recipes with full-fat dairy products and they would still taste fine, you'd just have to adjust the nutritional info accordingly. My second complaint is that her side-by-side comparisons of some of her recipes vs. a similar standard commercial product seemed disingenuous - like, it was a nice idea and I see what she was trying to do there, but at the same time she included parenthetical ingredients in the commercial products (i.e.: "enriched macaroni product (wheat flour, niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), but not in her homemade recipes. Sorry, but the pasta she used for her spaghetti is full of ingredients too, and probably even a couple of preservatives. Not that I'm saying that she should have made every single thing from scratch (I, too, use commercial pasta products!), but it's not really a fair comparison to leave that info out.

Anyway, this would probably be more useful to a family that didn't already really have a predominantly whole-foods diet, or who needed coaching into that transition.

[Brittney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book as an ARC from Goodreads Giveaways.
I really enjoyed trying these recipes. I have a picky eater at home and the recipes i have tries have almost all worked in my favor! I can get my child to eat good for you things that taste good as well.

[Reading For Sanity · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this review and others at http://readingforsanity.blogspot.com/...