Without a doubt one of the most difficult aspects of raising children is the battle to get them to eat healthily.
It may not seem like rocket science but trying to keep tabs on how balanced your childrens diets are when you have a busy lifestyle and multiple children can be tough.
Toddler Sized have pulled together all the evidence-based guidance on the different types of foods we should be feeding toddlers, how often we should be feeding them and in what portion sizes.
And now, they're asking parents to design a new tool (be it an app, plate, or anything really!) to help people when it comes to implementing these guidelines - and if you can come up with a winning design, you could win a £1000 prize! (there are are some amazing runner up and spot prizes, too!) Of course, I had to have a go myself!
Personally the aspect of my kids diet I struggle with most is keeping tabs of how much of which food groups they've all eaten and keeping it varied - I find this difficult even with my own diet and I find using apps such as My Fitness Pal can really help me to get an understanding of how many carbs I'm eating, how much protein and so on which enables me to see where I need to improve.
So I came up with the idea of an app that could help parents to decide what to food their children, help them get out of the rut of constantly choosing the same foods by giving handy suggestions AND help with meal planning too.
The app will allow users to register their childrens ages and food preferences to begin with - allowing them to state if their child is vegetarian or has any dietary requirments or anything specific that they will simply not eat, and will then present them with an empty plate. Around the screen there are boxes with symbols to show which food group/area they represent - Protein, Carbs, etc. When you tap each of these box, the app will present a list of suitable foods in each of these groups - taking into account the previously stated preferences, and the time of day. When you select an item from the list, it appears on the plate - the plate then pings up suggested additions such as "Add more carbs, add some protein" etc so that the parent can go to the relevant button and look for ideas on what foods they can use to do this. When you have finished you save your plate, and the app will remember the information and use this throughout the day when making suggestions for lunch and dinner - it will remember how much protein etc the child has already eaten. You can also return to the app to amend the submitted plate if your child didn't eat the food you gave to them, so that you can fix this by adding more of that sort of food in to a later meal. The plate works on a traffic light system which shows it as red when there is not adequate nutrition selected, amber when the meal is acceptable but some improvements could be made, and green when optimum choices are made. The idea is that the plate can be used either on an as-you-go basis, or can be used when meal planning so that you can plan a plate for each meal of the week and then select an "add to shopping list" option at the end - this could even be linked to major supermarkets such as Tesco so that the app sends the items directly to the customers basket. So what's YOUR idea? If you can come up with an idea to help parents understand:
- Which types of food in the right balance – carbs, protein, dairy and fruit/vegetables
- How often different types of food should be offered every day
- How much should be on the plate – think toddler portions
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