Season 2, Episode 1: Creating Better Family Mealtimes

Transcript

Conner:
Welcome to Kiddos in the Kitchen, a podcast hosted by my mom.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
I often will get asked as a pediatrician, if there was one thing that you would recommend to parents or to families, what would it be? And I have to honestly say it would be eating family meals together. And you'd be like, what? One thing, and that's it? But we have a lot of evidence that shows that kids who grow up eating with an adult or a couple of adults together, whether it's breakfast, lunch, dinner, it doesn't matter, but the act of sitting down and eating a meal together, those kids not only have healthier nutrition and overall healthier eating habits, but they have a stronger relationship with their parents or the adults that they're spending that time eating together with.

Stephanie Conner:
That's Dr. Natalie Muth, a pediatrician and registered dietician in Carlsbad, California. In addition to a general pediatrics practice, she sees patients in a healthy weight clinic where she focuses on nutrition and physical activity, yes, but also sleep, screen time, and stress. She helps families set goals and make changes to improve their health and wellbeing, and she used that experience to write a book for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Family Fit Plan: A 30-Day Wellness Transformation gives families a plan they can use to get healthier, and she hopes have fun together and build really strong family bonds at the same time. Family meal plans are one of the steps in the plan, and here's why they matter.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
As teenagers, they're less likely to get into trouble with risk-taking type behaviors. They do better in school. They're overall just better adjusted, happier kids, and the benefits extend to the adults as well. It may not be possible in everybody's life with so many different schedules to balance and activities going on and everything else to eat together 100% of the time, but even just three days a week of having a meal together can give families and children these benefits, and ideally it's not just sitting together in front of the TV and watching something or everybody on their phones. It's putting the screens away, trying to minimize the distractions, and just having that time sitting down together and eating a meal. And if it isn't something that's part of everyday life now, even if you can plan it in for once a week to start with, you'll see the pretty notable changes and benefits that come to just the quality of the family dynamic, as well as the food intake, from just eating meals together.

Stephanie Conner:
That sounds great. Sign me up.

Stephanie Conner:
Welcome to Kiddos in the Kitchen, a podcast about helping busy adults find the inspiration and information they need to teach the kids in their lives how to cook. I'm your host, Stephanie Conner, and today we're going to talk about healthier family meals.

Stephanie Conner:
Dr. Muth approaches family health from a place of experience. She's a mother, and she had dealt with her own health issues as a child as well.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
Growing up, I had a lot of challenges with my nutrition and health and struggled with childhood obesity back in the '80s, before it was such a huge problem that it has become today and really worked through a process and a journey that, with the support of my family and help from my family, really helped me to learn more about being healthy and what that means and really developed a passion to help others do the same.

Stephanie Conner:
As part of her own health journey, when Dr. Muth was a teenager, she and her mom vowed to get in better shape together and build a stronger mother-daughter bond. So they set a really ambitious goal. They were going to hike the Grand Canyon together.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
We'd never so much as slept in a tent. We weren't very active necessarily at that time and didn't necessarily know what we were getting ourselves into, but it was an ambitious goal that we set for ourselves, and we mapped out a plan and got help from people who did know what they were doing. We were fortunate enough that my mom was able to help us by getting a trainer who had hiked the Grand Canyon a bunch of times, and we trained together and got ready for this adventure, and we did it. And it was really, really hard.

Stephanie Conner:
Dr. Muth has a plan to create healthier family meals. But first I wanted to know, how do you as a parent know you need a mealtime makeover in the first place?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
I think that a couple of ways to see if you need a nutrition makeover is, one, if you're finding that mealtimes are really stressful and not fun and you kind of dread them, rather than looking forward to them, there may be an opportunity to flip that around a little bit. This comes up a lot with families that are struggling with children who maybe are picky eaters, and mealtimes are a battle. If you feel like you're wanting to eat healthier, you have the great intentions of eating together more and adding more fruits and vegetables to your day and eating out less, but have a really hard time taking that intention and turning it into what you hope that it would be of actually doing those things. So are there small changes that we could make that would make it easier and more fun? And if you answer yes to that, then maybe you're in the market for a little bit of a nutrition mealtime makeover.

Stephanie Conner:
You outline these five steps, and so I was hoping to go through them in a bit more detail. First, you talk about the importance of cleaning out the fridge and the pantry and the countertops, too. Can you talk about what does that involve for this makeover?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
If you're ready to kind of make a change, you want the environment to be healthier for your family, you kind of want to set it up so that your kids are choosing healthier things without you necessarily having to say anything about it. The way to do that is to change the environment, and that means cleaning stuff out. The fridge can start to accumulate things that maybe are outdated or half-open jars that you're never going to eat anything out of again, so really clearing all of that out.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
And also, it's an opportunity to remove things from the home that you would rather your kids and yourself aren't eating. If you have a lot of processed foods, snacky things, maybe desserts and junk foods and you're really wanting everyone to eat less of those things, remove them from the house. A lot of people feel weird about doing this, or they think it's going to cause a big problem for the family. But we know that when that stuff is around, we're just much more likely to eat it. And with it eye-level or easily accessible, you can't rely on willpower, really, for a lot of this stuff. It's better if the home supports the healthier options.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
The cleaning out the countertop idea has a couple of purposes. One is, it just makes everything more appealing if you don't have a lot of stuff on the counters. So if you can remove some of the things you don't use every day, it just makes the kitchen a more inspiring place to be in for most people. But then also you can replace some of that with things like maybe a windowsill herb garden or some flowers or a bowl of fresh fruit, things that you want people to eat more of that you can keep on the counter. It's a trigger to see them, and as they're more familiar and more accessible, then people are going to choose to eat them more often without you having to actually say anything about it.

Stephanie Conner:
I think the clearing of the clutter is such a good reminder because that is something that I personally deal with. Things just keep accumulating, and then it's like, I don't really feel like cooking because first I have to clean.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
Exactly.

Stephanie Conner:
Your next step is planning, and I feel like meal and snack planning, we could probably talk about that all by itself for an hour. But what is maybe the number one thing that we should be doing to plan well?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
The number one thing to do to plan well is just plan at all. If you can think about what you want the meals to look like for the next week or even the next few days, if you've thought about it ahead of time, then you're more likely to follow through and actually have that be what you eat. If you haven't thought about it, days are busy for everyone. We run out of time. The most natural thing to do a lot of the time is just to run through someplace, fast food, or get something quick to eat because it's getting late and everybody has to eat and we don't really have anything ready or haven't thought about it.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
I'd say just the number one thing with planning is just to have any kind of plan, have thought about it at all. And then even if you don't follow through with what you had thought you would for the whole week or for several days, if you do it for a couple of days, it's probably an improvement from what happens if we don't plan at all and we're just kind of scrambling at the end of each day to try to figure out something to put on the table.

Stephanie Conner:
Absolutely. I know the weeks I plan are healthier and better for everybody.

Stephanie Conner:
Next is grocery shopping. Let's say we've made our plan and we have our list. What should we be keeping in mind when we're grocery shopping?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
The shopping is a couple of things. One is to get what you need. If you have a plan, if you've thought out easy ways to throw meals together, of course you want to make sure that you have the ingredients on hand; but you also, when you go to the grocery store, be thinking about, well, one, you've probably heard this before, but if you go to the store super hungry, you're probably going to buy stuff that you wouldn't otherwise buy. So speaking of planning, if you kind of plan ahead for when you're going to the store, you don't have to necessarily stick to your list if you have a list, but trying to, for the most part, stick to the list. And then maybe if there are seasonal things like fruits and vegetables that your family will enjoy, picking those up, but trying to minimize how much you buy that's the food you wish you wouldn't eat as much of or you didn't want family members to eat as much of.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
If you can, and this isn't every week necessarily, but sometimes, if you can bring the kids along when you go grocery shopping, especially if you have kids who are maybe more reluctant to eat fruits and vegetables, or maybe a little bit pickier eaters, if you bring them along and ask them to help by picking out a fruit or vegetable to eat for the week or helping you to get what you need for the meal plans that you've put together, kids are much more likely to eat what they help to pick out. So it can be a way of helping kids who are a little resistant to vegetables, for example, to actually come around to being willing to try them.

Stephanie Conner:
Yeah. I know when we go to Trader Joe's, my son likes to have his own little cart, and if he's picked out the grapes or if he's picked out the strawberries and put them in his cart, he's definitely excited when we get home. We haven't gotten there with the vegetables, but with the fruit, we're there.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
The vegetables, even if it's just like, we're willing to pick out one, that is a step in the right direction. So it is a process for sure, but involving them in the process can help to get them to come around.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
Now, of course it can also work in the opposite way. A lot of parents don't like bringing their kids to the grocery store, because they're going to start throwing cookies or whatever else in their little cart. But if you help the kids know ahead of time, this is what we're going for and you get to pick out these couple of things only, we're not going to buy the other stuff, and you actually stick to that, they can learn well, and it can be not so stressful.

Stephanie Conner:
The next thing that you talk about is cooking. And so, as part of that, you're talking about the health benefits of cooking at home, as well as this idea that if we're all helping cook together, there's some family togetherness. Is that right?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
There's several benefits to preparing your own food, and you don't have to be a great chef to do it. You don't even have to be really a good cook. You can learn, and it can be very basic and straightforward, but we know that families that eat home, the food is healthier. You don't know what's going into the food when you're eating out, and there's usually a lot of added salts and lots of added sugars and things like that and the portion sizes are much bigger if you're eating out. So eating home, whatever it is you're eating, it's going to be healthier, most likely, than if you had eaten out, and less expensive.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
Kids who help to cook or helping to put meals together, and there's lots of age-appropriate ways you can do this, we know that those kids end up eating better. They're much more likely to try the food that's being made, that they're helping to cook, and they're also getting the benefit of the modeling from their parents or whoever they're working with in cooking, learning some of the skills and also really seeing adult role models and wanting to be like them than if you're not having any of that time together, or if you're not cooking any meals at home.

Stephanie Conner:
You said you don't have to be a good cook. I think that holds a lot of us back. How can we get over that self-doubt that we have where it's like, "Oh, I'm just not a good cook," or "I don't have time to pull out my Bon Appetit magazine and pull out 20 herbs and spices and make these elaborate meals"? How do we get over that?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
The meals do not need to be elaborate, and you don't have to have lots of ingredients. It doesn't need to be perfect. But how I like to think about it, and this kind of goes along with the planning piece of it as well, when I'm putting together a meal, I'm trying to just make sure that I have some kind of protein source, whether that's an animal protein or a vegetarian protein. I want to have some type of a whole grain, whether it's whole grain bread or brown rice or something like that. And then I want to have mostly fruits and vegetables on the plate. So you can imagine that half of the plate has vegetables and/or fruits, about a quarter of the plate is some type of a whole grain, and about a quarter of their plate is some type of a protein.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
A lot of the time, foods don't need to be elaborately prepared. You can have raw veggies out. You can cut up an orange. If you can make a baked chicken breast or make some rice or even go to the store and get the stuff that's frozen and you can just put it in the microwave. It really doesn't have to be a big production, but just by getting started, you can make a huge impact and start to learn little pieces and tips and tricks that will help make it easier. And there's always recipes, and there's lots of easy recipes that don't have a hundred ingredients in them.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
If you read through the recipe first and then follow the instructions, it may not turn out perfectly because there's always little mistakes we make or changes we make in following a recipe, but it'll turn out good enough, and good enough is okay.

Stephanie Conner:
I think I need to put that on a poster.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
We sometimes hold ourselves to just way too high of a bar. Good enough is okay. And really at the end of the day, a hungry child is going to eat, and a hungry spouse is going to eat, and a hungry mom is going to eat, too. So if we're hungry and there's food there and we don't have other options, we're going to eat what's there. Sometimes it will be delicious, and sometimes maybe it's a work in progress, and it's okay.

Stephanie Conner:
Dr. Muth knows that family meal times can be tough on parents, that mealtime can feel like a battle, trying to force kids to eat their veggies, for example. But ultimately, the focus is on being together, not necessarily the food itself.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
I really like to remind parents and just encourage them, we want this to be a fun, enjoyable experience, so parents have the home environment to support the kind of eating you'd like your kids to have, so that's kind of where the makeover part comes in. Then as a parent, you decide what foods are offered, when, where, trying to help kids to sit at the table and have structure. But then once you're there, just let the kids decide, of what you've offered them, what they're going to eat and how much of it. Try to not say anything about it. Try to take some of the attention off of who's eating what and how much and all of that and just really trying to connect with each other, and it'll all work itself out. If the pressure's off, kids are much more willing to try things. If they're hungry when they come to the table, they're going to be more likely to eat something, especially if you don't give them an alternative option.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
And then just to not sweat it so much because it's a process, and eventually over time, the kids are watching what their parents are doing or who they're sitting and eating with. That modeling is really impactful, and the point of the time together is really just to enjoy each other and have that connection as a family.

Stephanie Conner:
Now it's time for Kitchen Questions, where I ask my guests a few quick questions to understand her kitchen a little better.

Child:
It's time for Kitchen Questions. I have a question. What would happen if you put a little bit of the wrong ingredient inside a cookie? Why are cupcakes squishy? How often do you burn things on accident? Do you like cake? What is the difference between baking and roasting? What is your favorite recipe?

Stephanie Conner:
What is one ingredient you always have on hand in your kitchen?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
I always have on hand rosemary because I have a great rosemary bush outside that I can grab from at any time. So if I need to add an herb to anything or spice up the flavor to anything, I can go outside to my little herb garden and grab that. Everything else, I can't guarantee if it's going to be there or not, but I know the rosemary is always going to be there.

Stephanie Conner:
What healthy meal do you make that your kids love?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
My kids' favorite meal is when I make basil pesto pasta. It's super easy to make with a little bit of basil and some pine nuts and olive oil and some quattro formaggio cheese from Trader Joe's and blend it all up with the pasta and they love it. I always plan meals by that plate I was discussing, where it's half vegetables and fruits, and then the quarter whole grains, although I have to say I do regular pasta for the pesto pasta, but then a quarter of the leaner meats, so we always do this chicken sausage with the pesto pasta, and then we have a Caesar salad, and we have some kind of a fruit salad with it as well.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
My kids love it, and their friends love it, so kids want to come over and have the pesto pasta. So we actually make it quite a lot. My mom makes fun of me when she comes over because she's like, "What are we having for dinner tonight? Basil pasta?" I was like, "Well, actually, yes! That is what we're having." So she doesn't love it as much as the kids, but it's pretty good.

Stephanie Conner:
What do you make when your family is maybe splurging?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
We definitely like to splurge on sushi. My kids love sushi, and it's from the exposures, I think, early on, but they actually like it a little too much, so we have to be careful, we don't just spend all of our money on sushi.

Stephanie Conner:
Do you make desserts?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
We have two days a week that are dessert days. Before we started doing that, it was always this every day ... Is it dessert today? Can we have dessert? When are we ... And talking about all of these sweets, like all the time. So we just made a plan. Most kids do really well with structure, routines, a plan. So our plan is twice a week we have desserts. My daughter's actually taken to really liking to cook a lot, and she likes to bake, too, so she often will make the desserts.

Dr. Natalie Muth:
I'm not much of a baker. I don't really like baking desserts too much. You have a lot left over, and I just don't do that often, but she's gotten to doing it more, so she does it sometimes, or we'll go out to get the dessert if we're going to have a dessert day and it stays out, so it helps to make it so you don't have the desserty sweets in the house all the time, where you're either tempted by them or kids are asking for them all the time. It's just if they aren't there, then you don't have to worry about it.

Stephanie Conner:
Yeah, so when you guys do make desserts, what's your favorite?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
My daughter has gotten to making these little fruit tartlets that are really delicious. I love those. But I also like, I'm a dark chocolate person, so I like anything that has some type of dark chocolate in it.

Stephanie Conner:
What kitchen skill are you working on right now?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
There's so many things. The list is so long. I'm like a recipe follower, except for a couple of things that I just make that I've always made. So what I'm really wanting to get better at is being able to be more instinctively mixing different flavors together to create really good food. So I'm experimenting with that a little bit and trying out using more herbs that I've used in the past, but it doesn't always turn out that good, so it's a work in progress for sure. I also have an Instant Pot that has been awesome, and I'm working on learning different uses for my Instant Pot and helping to incorporate some of the stuff we make in there, like staples to freeze and have in the fridge and make it easier to do things on the run and to be quick about meals.

Stephanie Conner:
What is your favorite question or conversation starter at the dinner table?

Dr. Natalie Muth:
I like simple, “What was the best part of your day?” It starts off a lot of our meals at home. If you ask, "How was your day?" then you're going to get, "Fine," most of the time, depending on how old the child is, whereas an open question and really focusing on the positive really tends to help start the conversation. And then it can lead to really learning more about everybody's day in general, and then also some of the stuff that comes up that wasn't so great, but that you want your kids to always feel comfortable being able to talk about and kind of work through. I've found that starting with the positive often will lead also to the challenges that can often end on a positive or kind of having a plan for managing it if it's something that needs to be addressed later or someone in the family's really having a hard time working through. We're able to get to that point through the start with the open question.

Stephanie Conner:
Thank you to Dr. Muth for sharing so much great insight today. You can find her at drnataliemuth.com, and she's Dr. Natalie Muth. That's M-U-T-H on Twitter, and Dr.NatalieMuth on Instagram.

Stephanie Conner:
My next guest is Allison Rinehart. Allison calls herself a mealtime matchmaker for picky eaters. And I'll tell you now that she'll be back because we covered a lot of ground in our conversation. You can find her at lilpinkiesup.com. That's L-I-L-P-I-N-K-I-E-S-U-P.com. And she's @lilpinkiesup on Instagram, too. She helps teach parents and kids to cook together, and I asked her for some thoughts on kids and vegetables. And, well, she had lots of ideas.

Allison Rinehart:
So many parents are asking me, "How do I get my kids to eat green vegetables?" And I say, meet them where they're at. Find out what they're interested in. Find out something that engages them, that you can make that bridge connection. If your child loves watching Teen Titans Go! talk about how Beast Boy is a vegetarian, and what would Beast Boy want to put in a salad? In fact, one of my favorite things to do, I did this with a child recently, this child was obsessed with The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda, and it worked out perfectly because Baby Yoda floating in a pod is this viral song that this child was loving at the moment. And if you actually open up snap peas or edamame, they are such a sensory fun food play. Start with a “green vegetable,” even though edamame aren't considered vegetables. They're legumes. But something that has an element of fun in it is really the way to go.

Allison Rinehart:
So if you're introducing green vegetables, you can start with edamame and do a shelling contest like, "Oh, look, I could open up my edamame, and look, maybe this is Baby Yoda floating in a pod." This was so fun. Or seeing how many peas they can pop out of those shells. It's a sensory experience with that.

Allison Rinehart:
And then you go from the edamame to then sugar snap peas, which is one of my all-time favorite green vegetables to start kids on because they're sweet, they're crispy, they're crunchy, they're easy to prepare. You just put them in a pan with a little bit of butter. The number one way to serve a green vegetable to kids is heat, fat, and salt. So butter, salt, which in this case, I use soy sauce, and quick pan fry of those, put them in front of your kid, let them even just pop out the peas. There's an element of fun with that.

Allison Rinehart:
And then you graduate to other types of green vegetables. It's called chain linking of eating, and you can link, then, the next food to that. After they've accepted peas, you may then say, okay, well this is long and cylindrical, like a pea, and then you may go to, let's say, a snow pea. And then from a snow pea, you can say, let's go to a broccoli stem. And then all of a sudden your kid's eating broccoli, which is great.

Allison Rinehart:
Another tip I love to use is just finding a unique color or a unique trait in a vegetable, or taking your kid to the grocery store with you to see what they think is fun. For instance, kids that don't eat vegetables love the idea of eating carrots that have the fronds still attached, and if you get carrots that have different colors, kids think that's so fun. They think they're little bunnies. Or even just playing with food versus taking the equation out of eating. Let's just say, let's not even start with vegetables at mealtime, because that might be too scary for some kids. Just start playing with vegetables. I take long green beans, and I do a green bean tic-tac-toe, where I take four green beans to make the crosshatches and then cut up different colored carrots to make the coins. And you'd be surprised if you put a little bowl right next to it with extra coins and extra crosshatches how many of those might get either played with, sensory play, and oftentimes even just eaten because they're right in front of them.

Stephanie Conner:
Thank you again to Dr. Natalie Muth and Allison Rinehart for joining me today. I'll link to their websites and social media pages from KiddosInTheKitchen.com, too.

Stephanie Conner:
Listening to Allison, I couldn't help but think about the adventure that food can be. Letting kids play with food is the precursor to cooking and eating, and part of cooking together is being willing to experiment and try new things together. As an adult, I know what I like and don't like, so it's easy for me to put something on the table that I know I like and ask my son to try it, and then be annoyed when he doesn't like it the way I do.

Stephanie Conner:
But how often have I invited my son to join me in trying something new that's new for both of us. Other than a new cookie recipe, I'm not sure I ever have. And Dr. Natalie Muth reminded us that one key to being healthy as a family is eating together, and then, not worrying about the food itself, instead, just focusing on family. How was the day? What did you learn in school? What has you excited right now? And when we're taking it personally that no one likes the fancy chicken we made, or we can't understand why no one will try the roasted cauliflower, it can bring unnecessary stress into those family meals.

Stephanie Conner:
So this month, I invite you to join me in two challenges. First, let's try new things together, rather than just expecting our kiddos to like our personal tried-and-true favorites. And second, let's make an attempt to not talk about food at dinner. Yes, health and cooking starts with food, but there's so much more to it. We want our kids to grow up thinking positively about cooking together and eating together, so let's use the time together to focus on one another. Because even though food matters, it will never be as important as family.

Stephanie Conner:
Thanks for joining me for Kiddos in the Kitchen. I'm your host, Stephanie Conner, with a reminder from my son.

Conner:
If you like my mom's podcasts as much as I do, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Stephanie Conner:
That's right, Conner. You can also view the show notes, subscribe to our newsletter, and check out all of our other content at kiddosinthekitchen.com, @WhereKiddosCook on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and I'll be back next month with another fresh episode. Until then, I encourage you to get your kiddos in the kitchen.