Children Who Watch Cooking Shows Make Healthier Choices

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Too much TV is bad, but a little can actually do some good.

If you thought you would never live long enough to see evidence of television being good for your health, its time to extend your life insurance terms. In fact, recent studies have shown that allowing your kids to watch cooking shows on television can help your children make much healthier choices of food.

The Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior conducted a study recently on children who watch cooking shows featuring healthy foods. They found that kids who do so are twice as likely to choose foods that are healthier for them compared to kids who watched a cooking show that featured unhealthy foods. The food clips which showed healthy foods featured fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, brussels sprouts, and onions to name a few. Unhealthy foods included burgers, fries, and other fast-food type dishes.

So what does this tell us? If you guessed ‘watch more television,’ then you might want to consider reading this article again at a much slower pace. However, if you said to reinforce the idea of eating healthy by way of example and also by other visuals, like cooking shows for kids featuring healthy meals, then you are on your way to becoming a member of a family of healthy eaters.

As children age, they tend to develop more responsible and positive attitudes toward healthy food choices, but it is also very important for you, as the parent, to foster that developmental process. For example, cooking with them, being involved and using only positive language around good and healthy foods. Remember, children model their own behaviors from the behaviors of their parents. So what they see their parents cook, they are more likely to cook similarly later on in life.