Question – balance of different carbohydrates
What is a good balance of toast, potatoes, rice, pasta, etc.? Isobel will not eat rice, but she enjoys pasta for lunch and she gets a little toast in the morning and every other evening at tea time. Is this too much? I buy all natural wholegrain bread from a small bakery. Please give me some advice.
Answer:
As with every food group, it is a good idea to eat different types of starchy carbohydrate foods, in other words a variety of grains plus potatoes. This is particularly important for younger children, so they get used to eating a wide range of foods, and judging from your question you obviously realise this. I don’t think toast twice every second day will be a problem nutritionally, but here are a few ideas to help you increase the variety of starchy foods in Isobel’s diet. You could start by thinking about different grains to include. As both bread and pasta are wheat-based, you might like to offer other grains such as oats (as oat cakes, baby muesli or porridge) or rye (as rye-bread). Barley, millet and quinoa are grains we don’t tend to eat frequently but you can get them at a large supermarket or health-food store and they are a good accompaniment to a stew, or could be mixed or mashed in for a young child. Barley can also be added to a soup and blended in if necessary. Though Isobel doesn’t like rice with a main meal at the moment, she might like it as rice cakes or as a rice pudding for dessert. As non-grain alternatives you could offer potatoes or sweet potatoes, either mashed or as small chunks if Isobel is old enough. You could also mash them and mix in a little salmon or tuna and cheese to make fishcakes. She might also like cous cous, which my children loved from an early age. Like pasta, cous cous is wheat-based but it cooks in a flash and if you add cooked, frozen vegetables and cooked meat or fish of your choice (mashed if necessary) it makes a quick, easy meal.
Isobel is certainly keen on toast, so you could offer some slightly different bread-type foods, such as crumpets, bread sticks, scones, hot cross buns, pitta breads and raisin bread.
One last point to note: while it’s good for children to get used to some wholegrain foods, if all of their diet is based on wholegrain, high-fibre foods it can make them too full to eat enough to sustain their growth. For this reason it’s recommended that not all foods they’re offered are wholegrain until they’re five years old, though having some wholegrain foods is absolutely fine. After your child’s first birthday, you should gradually alter the balance of refined and wholegrain foods he is eating, so that by the age of five, your child should be eating a high-fibre diet, rich in wholegrains, along with the rest of the family.
For more information on recommended amounts and types of starchy or carbohydrate foods for different age groups, you could consult The Contented Child’s Food Bible by Gina Ford and Paul Sacher.