Menus and Recipes for Learning
You can assist your child’s learning behind the scenes by improving the breakfasts they eat. By preventing the blood sugar crash that occurs a few hours after eating a high carbohydrate meal, you increase the amount of time that your child’s brain performs its cognitive functions, including reading, spelling, verbal, creativity, and executive functions that allow good decisions to be made.
The primary strategy to create these children’s breakfasts is to keep the carbohydrates within a certain level of no more than 40 grams, keep the protein level high, and don’t worry too much about the fat. Below are four children’s breakfasts that your child will love.
Children’s Breakfast #1
Tomato Juice
Chicken Veggie Omelet
Half slice toast with butter
½ cup milk
To go: Apple or Orange
When you make the omelette, use as many non-starchy vegetables as you can. This could mean green onions, garlic, a red potato or yam, parsley, cilantro, mushrooms, and bell peppers.
Adding 2 oz. chicken per child to the omelet will keep his brain charged. You could even top the omelet with cheese.
Your child will feel like a king and as if he is truly important on a subconscious level because you are taking the time to make a nourishing breakfast.
By providing a serving of fruit to go, you’ll give him the choice of when he can get in a serving of fruit for the day. Most likely he’ll eat it on recess and the low level of carbohydrates will pick up a normally falling blood sugar level without causing a high insulin release.
You can even make this omelet the night before and then reheat it in the morning.
Children’s Breakfast #2
Orange Juice
1 to 2 scrambled eggs
Turkey bacon or turkey sausage
Half slice toast with butter
½ cup milk
To go: Almonds or roasted sunflower seeds
In this easy-to-make breakfast, engage the help of your child. Ask him to line the pan with bacon, start the toast and get out the eggs to scramble. During the two minutes the eggs are cooking, ask your child to bag up some raw almonds for mid-morning snack.
Children’s Breakfast #3
1/3 cup cinnamon oatmeal with diced apple (1/4 cup)
Handful of walnuts or almonds
Milk
Optional egg or sausage link
To go: Protein bar
On a cold morning, nothing warms us up better than a bowl of oatmeal. But if your child adds raisins, fruit and milk to it, the carbohydrate level is far too high to prevent hypoglycemia later.
Let your child add his own handful of nuts and choose the protein bar he’ll have later. In this meal, you need the nuts to provide enough calories for the meal. Grains are considered moderately high Glycemic Index and you need fat and protein to counter the blood sugar rise from them.
Children’s Breakfast #4
4-inch whole grain waffle
Butter / Sugar-free preserves
Egg Over Easy
2 oz. ham or 1 sausage patty
Milk
To go: Orange
Kids love waffles; there’s no doubt about it. But you must start to switch them off syrup to sugar-free preserves, which provides less sugar and antioxidants. There are many great sugar-free preserves on the market to choose from. Whole grain waffles provide more fiber and nutrients than ones made from white flour. The greater the amount of nutrients you can provide in a meal, the better the influence on the brain.
Starting the day off with a good breakfast makes a big difference in the life of your child. How soon will you see a difference? With the first meal. It’s that quick.
Since research shows that a good breakfast can curb hunger and lead to reduced portion sizes for the rest of the day, your decision to change this one aspect will create a ripple effect for many positive things to occur in your child’s life.