Healthy Eating During The Summer

ZANESVILLE, Oh – With summertime comes no school, long days spent at the pool, and vacations. 

It also provides the perfect opportunity for nutrition and healthy eating habits to take a vacation as well.

However, making healthy choices, no matter the season or where you are, especially for kids is vital to well-being.

WIC project coordinator Jody Shriver says this is especially difficult without the normal supervision they typically get while at school.

“When kids aren’t being supervised, it does make it difficult to make sure they’re making good choices in terms of eating well and getting a variety of fruits and vegetables and not just picking junk food. The biggest thing to do is make sure you have those healthy snacks available,” she explained.

Shriver recommends individual serving sizes; pre-sliced, ready to go fruits, veggies, and snacks, such as apple slices or nuts as well as fruit cups. For fruit cups, she recommends avoiding the syrupy cups and opt for the one with juice in them instead.

She also says moderation is key and encourages you to be creative with snacks! 

“Moderation is always key. So, having maybe and 80/20 rule where 80 percent of the time you’re having healthy foods and 20 percent of the time you’re not. Adding in fruits and vegetables or nuts to yogurt or ice cream, even like freezing fruit juices and making them into a popsicle or a slushie is fun and easy in the summertime and better than like a soda or even a sweetened drink.”

Shriver says hydration is also extremely important in the summer months and suggests swapping out sugary or caffeinated drinks like sodas and sports drinks, which she says are just extra sugar and sodium and don’t provide much nutritional value, with fruit juices and water.

Farmers markets, loaded with fresh produce are also an option, as well as WIC and SNAP (Food Stamp) programs which offer vouchers and options to use benefits towards the purchase of fresh produce. Shriver also recommends utilizing the free lunch programs offered by schools over the summer if they’re available to you.

For more information and resources, visit http://www.zmchd.org/wic