from our friends at New Parent- Toddler Magazine...

30% of toddlers don’t eat enough veggies. Learn how to get your toddler on the right track with these great tips:

 

Ages 1-2 Years Old

At 1 to 2 years old, your child has left baby foods behind and is likely beginning to feed himself. It’s at this stage when your baby needs nutritional guidance more than ever! According to the FITS report, French fries are still the most popular “vegetable” in this age group, while as many as 30 percent of all toddlers don’t eat any vegetables at all! This is unacceptable, pediatric nutrition experts say. “It’s a reflection of how the adults around them eat,” explains pediatric dietitian Ashley B. Hotle. To get your toddler (and you!) on the right diet track, heed these guidelines:

Dish up a fruit and a vegetable at every meal. 
You can go the stealth route by chopping spinach into pasta sauce or pureeing cooked broccoli, carrots or caulifl ower into a dip served with crackers. But you don’t have to! A study in the journal Food Quality and Preference found that you need to serve a spurned vegetable nine to eleven times before a child will accept it. Nine months after the study, the toddlers were still eating the initially disliked veggie. The lesson? Don’t give up after just one or two attempts.

Serve healthy fats.
  The FITS found that 1- to 2-year-olds were not getting enough good fat in their diets. “Toddlers need fat for brain and eye development,” says Hotle. “If the fat content of their diet is too low, it probably means they’re getting too much energy from juice and processed carbs.” Good fats at this age include oily fish, avocados, nut butters, meat and whole milk. Switch your child to 2 percent milk when he is 2 to 3 years old.

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