As the synapses connect throughout childhood, kids brains are growing and learning how to memorise, organise and categorise. They are also learning how to retrieve their stored information, reshape it and apply it in a useful way (unless it has anything to do with making a bed once in a while).

As psychiatrist Drew Ramsey, the co-author of The Happiness Diet says, “These years are critical for brain development, and what they eat affects focus and cognitive skills.”

Food is a very important factor affecting brain development (along with stimulation, exercise, hydration, and a supportive and mindful upbringing).

So here are five foods that help kids stay sharp, and which have positive long-term effects on brain development.

 Fish, Seeds and Nuts

These foods contain essential Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids that actively promote mental health by keeping our kids’ brains healthy.

The best sources of Omega-3 are from wild or organically farmed salmon, sustainable tuna (though be mindful of mercury levels), sardines, herring & mackerel, whole anchovies, flax, hemp, pumpkins and chia seeds, and eggs.

Try these Sweet Potato, Corn and Wild Salmon Fritters.

The best sources of Omega-6 come from seeds (sunflower, sesame) and walnuts.

Try this Muesli Slice recipe, a great one for lunchboxes

Tip: Measure one part each of sesame, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, along with three measures of flaxseeds into a sealed jar and store in the fridge. Freshly grind one heaped tablespoon of these seeds and add to your child’s smoothie or porridge in the morning.

Eggs

Eggs contain choline, which is vital for the creation of the memory stem cells formed deep within our brains. Choline also helps our kids to concentrate

Pastured eggs ensure your child is eating the best quality fats. Your child can safely have one egg per day.

Find out my favourite brands of eggs in this post All Eggs Are Not Created Equal and here’s a simple family-friendly recipe for Potato, Feta and Spinach Frittata 

Protein

Amino acids are life’s building blocks, and protein is where you get them. Amino acids build the neurotransmitters that affect your child’s mood, memory and mental alertness.

Ensure that your child has a 1-2 servings of protein-rich food daily in order to keep their brain humming, and them feeling positive, motivated and energised.

Favourites: Meat, eggs, fish, dairy, lentils, beans, seeds, nuts, quinoa.

Lentils and Rice (Mjadra) makes a cheap, easy and extremely tasty dish the whole family will enjoy.

Fruits and vegetables (especially greens!)

Vitamins and minerals may play a support role in the development and function of your child’s brain. The most important are the Vitamin Bs, Vitamin C, folic acid, magnesium and manganese. They are also full of antioxidants & minerals.

Greens are my favourite because they are full of folate and help ward off dementia later in life.

Tip: Overcome the challenge of getting kids to eat their greens with this Crunchy Kale Chip recipe or by adding finely chopped kale or spinach to omelettes or stir fries.

 Wholegrains

Complex Carbohydrates come from wholegrains like brown rice, buckwheat, oats or quinoa, as well as the foods mentioned above.

They are low GI and provide the most important food for your child’s brain – glucose – the brain’s major fuel.

Tip: Studies show that fueling the brain with breakfast is important for thinking, acting and learning. Try a slower-releasing breakfast in the form of bircher muesli.

There is no second best when it comes to looking after your kids’ grey matter. As the long term control centre of the body, it really is no surprise that our brains need nourishment just like our bodies do . By focusing on a varied diet rich in fish, seeds and nuts, eggs, protein, fruits and and wholegrains, will ensure that you’re giving your kid’s brain all the nourishment it needs.

Bren x

Source: 
http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/childhood-adhd/features/brain-foods-kids http://www.eatingwell.com/nutrition_health/healthy_aging/foods_that_boost_brain_power?page
Optimum Nutrition for your Childs Mind – Patrick Holfod and Deborah Colson

Here’s the article from Choice.

Before I show and tell, a bit of background understanding about eggs is important.

Egg Definitions

Free Range – hens have some access to the outdoors, though this can vary greatly. For eggs to be labelled free range, the Model Code of Practice says there should be a maximum of 1500 hens per hectare. But many brands keep 10,000 chooks per hectare and are still charging you free range prices.

Open Range – hens are roaming around in pasture

Cage free or Barn Laid – hens aren’t kept in cages but are allowed to roam around in barns

Factory Farmed– higher stocked densities of hens kept in battery cages, unable to move or engage in normal activity like lie down, stand up, groom themselves, or flap their wings.

In an ideal world we’d all be eating eggs from healthy chickens who scratch and forage for fresh bugs and insects and grubs, and whose diet is supplemented only with natural, organic feed. 

Eggs from these types of  open range/free range chooks are much richer in Vitamin D, Vitamin A, Vitamin E, Omega 3’s and betacarotene than eggs from their caged counterparts.

I do understand that these type of eggs will set you back anywhere between $8-$11 a dozen, which obviously isn’t achievable for everyone, but the way I like to look at it is that for a dozen high quality, highly nutritious eggs, you’re paying less than for a single cafe brekky. Given the free range market is growing, it suggests there is much more interest and awareness around healthier eggs, and consumers continue to be duped with false labelling. So be careful, and make sure you get what you’re paying for.

Here is a list of free -range egg brands which meet the Model Code and are eggs I have been enjoying for many years.

Eggs I purchase from my local health food stores:

These can also be found in Woolworths.

Holbrook Paddock Free Range Eggs

Brigadoon Harvest Free Range Eggs

Egganic Eggs

Fraser Coast Organic

Eggs I purchase from Harris Farm:

Mulloon Creek Eggs

Eggs I purchase from my local supermarket:

Woolworths:

Macro Free Range eggs

Sunny Queen Organic Free Range Eggs

Southern Highlands Organic Eggs

Coles:

Sunny Queen Free Range Eggs

Have you heard of the CluckAr App? You just point your phone which will inform you on stocking density, amongst other things. 

BENEFITS OF EGGS

Good quality eggs provide a delicious high quality form of protein, and are a true superfood in my book, reducing the risk of many diseases, protecting our skin and eyes from UV damage, and improving our liver and brain function. Just make sure you know what you are paying for.

SOME OF MY FAMILIES FAVOURITE EGG RECIPES

Potato, Feta and Spinach Frittata

Egg Muffins

Oat, Seed and Date Bars

Cardamom Spice Cake

Please share in the comments which brands of eggs are your favourites and local to you as this will help others in different states.

Bren x

I do my best to keep 80-90% of the food healthy, or what they know to be everyday food. We don’t keep any ‘sometimes’ food at home, which is reserved for parties, grandparents, friends houses and other events. The food I provide my kids aims to provide them with energy and nutrition so that they can feel happy and healthy each day and in the future.

So I have provided a list of regular foods my kids will eat in the hope this well help you…

Breakfast

• Spelt and buckwheat pancakes (or they are loving my latest banana pancake recipe, which I will try to blog soon)
• Smoothies – they love the Banana Nut-butter Protein Shake by Quirky Cooking from my free breakfast e-book 
• Anti-oxidant smoothie
• Eggs and soldiers – 2 eggs and soldiers made out of Sonoma Spelt sourdough bread with grass fed butter and cut up veges on the side
• Scrambled eggs made with Barambah cheese and milk with baby spinach and a side of  raw vegetables and avocado sourdough toast
  Egg Muffins
• Fried egg and bacon with cut up raw vegetables
• Bircher Muesli or Mamacino’s Feel Good Buckwheat Bircher Muesli from my free breakfast e-book 
• Golden Ricotta Wraps – from my free breakfast ebook
• Natural yoghurt mixed with lots of cinnamon, vanilla powder, frozen berries or seasonal fruit and a mix of chopped nuts and seeds
• Coco- nutty Granola by Sarah Wilson
• Grass fed sausages with homemade baked beans and a side of raw chopped vegetables
• French toast using sourdough bread
• Brenda’s Brekky Ball with a green smoothie
• Notella on spelt sourdough

Morning Tea/Snacks/After school snacks

• Chopped fruit with nuts and yoghurt
• Healthy treats like Chewy Choc-Banana Biscuits, Brownie Cake,  or Date and Cinnamon Muffin
• Home popped organic popcorn (non-GMO corn) with lots of grass fed butter and sea salt (or cinnamon)
• Leftover homemade pizza
• Plate with nuts/seeds, a Medjool date and natural yoghurt
• Kale Chips
• Frozen blueberries or rasberries with cashews
• Mango sorbet
• Home made ice block
• Super Smoothie
• Dips like hummus, pesto and guacomole with vegetable sticks and a small amount of Eat Rite brown rice crackers
• Mix n match muffins
• Cheese on top of cucumber slices
• Lots of water
• Coconut water from fresh baby coconut
• Muesli slice

School Lunch

• Often these are Mountain bread wraps (spelt, rye or rice) with the following fillings (butter and baby spinach are always on the base):
• Goats cheese and olive
• Ham and cheese
• Eggs and bacon
• Leftover chicken and brie
• Egg muffins or leftover quiche
• Home made sausage rolls
• Cheese and spinach Mountain Bread toasties
• Leftovers like homemade pizza, spanokopita (when mum cooks)
• Lately my son is loving taking a “picky plate” which he prepares himself with ham, swiss cheese, olives (Loving Earth), cut up veges and some buttered buckwheat cruskits
• Za’atar (a big favourite!)
• Savoury muffins
• Vegetable sticks, sliced mushroom, cherry tomatoes

Dinner

• • Always includes lots of vegetables
  • Slow cooker meals are their favourite, particularly lamb shoulder
  • Roast chicken with roasted sweet potato, potato, garlic and onion and steamed broccoli with lots of butter
  • Cauliflower and potato soup
  • Pumpkin soup
  • Lamb shank soup
  • Spelt pasta with home made pesto, sustainable tuna and Loving Earth olives
  • Roast chicken with potato, sweet potato, onion, garlic and salad
  • Frittatas
  • Scrambled eggs and bacon with sourdough toast and chopped up vegetables
  • Pan fried fish with peas and salad
  • Stuffed baked potato
  • Chicken burrito (let them build it themselves)

As you can see they eat mainly a whole foods diet aiming for a good mix of protein, fat and carbs (mainly vegetables and some fruit) at each meal, without relying heavily on just one food group (eg. wheat or dairy).

I would love to hear what your kids favourite meals are in the comments below.

Bren x

Once I posted a photo of my healthy breakfast on Facebook, and very promptly received this message from a follower:

“I’m trying extremely hard to lose the baby weight after my fourth bubba. Right now I am 10 days in, eating clean, but I find I’m fighting it everyday. I am feeling better in my body but I always feel starving and that it will only be a matter of time before my mental strength fails me. I was drooling over your eggs and bacon this morning and I basically would love to know how you eat that everyday and look amazing.  Do you eat like a sparrow the rest of the day to counteract this? I’m curious and starving.”

I know exactly where this mum is at. What’s more, I receive similar messages like this regularly. As a health coach, I offered her a complimentary half hour chat to find out more. During that conversation, I learned that what she really wanted was to be able to lose weight, but not to starve herself in doing so. The thing is, most people think that deprivation is the only way to make this happen (possibly because that’s how diets are designed) and because they have set up goals based on an archaic goal-setting method, and not in a way that gives them purpose and joy (but that’s a story for another time).

But how long can this be sustained for? Sure, you will most likely lose weight on any diet you try, but only over a specific period (usually very short!). It’s unnatural, and hardly sustainable. The research shows that you will end up putting the weight back on , and then some.

During dieting we are often depriving the body of wholesome and nutritious food (your body’s fuel), which it then craves, causing binging post-diet. It’s madness, and it’s unhealthy. Placing stress on the body is the route to immune-system dysfunction and susceptibility to disease. Although in jest , this mum said herself, the hunger was making her feel a little aggressive.

What she needed was permission to let go of her clean-eating superfood diet and feed her hunger by enjoying the type of breakfast our ancestors would have eaten. Yes, the very same type of breakfast she was droolng over on my Facebook page. A delicious breakfast full of wonderful fats and protein sourced from healthy animals and farms, with carbohydrates in the form of lots of vegetables.

The point is that our diets need to be natural, nutritious and sustainable for our health to respond similarly.

The next morning after we spoke she messaged me,  and sent me these photographs:

And after less than an hour of coaching this is how she is feeling today…

“Happy, content, satisfied, calm, nourished, relaxed and peace. These are all the feelings I have this week, which are total opposites to last week. I had to share with you what life changing tools you have given me. I’m a very satisfied Mumma. I haven’t weighed myself all week and part of me is still a little scared too. But I haven’t had any cravings for 2 days and can’t believe how amazing I already feel. So thank you”

If you are struggling to lose weight, or reverse your  health issues, or simply want to know how to feed yourself in the most nutritious manner, then please take a look at my 28 day cleanse program, Break Through! To Feeling Fantastic in a Body You Love and learn which foods enrich and which foods to ditch, understand how your thinking plays a big role in your success, learn how to forgive yourself when you don’t make the best choice, stay motivated to keep on track, set yourself up for success, love yourself and your body, enjoy eating delicious, healthy foods and find all the support in the world with with this new amazing lifestyle.

Please share this blog post with anyone who you know who may be struggling with dieting and is ready to move to achieving their weight and health goals through a natural diet or are interested in moving their family to a nutritious and delicious real food way of life.

Bren x

Perhaps he is just more cunning than I give him credit for, but he really is as useless as a chocolate teapot!

On the other hand, my little helpers, Mr 9 and Miss 7, are more than happy to help out with the cooking. True, it’s a far easier sell when there’s a cake bowl to lick,  but Mr 9 is on board whether it’s a savoury or sweet concoction. I call him ‘my little chef’, which prompts him to ask if he can go get a job in a restaurant and start making ‘real’ money. Mmm, child labour … kids have rights too! You have no idea how it warms my heart to see him collecting chicken bones (unprompted) so I can use them for stock.

Miss 7’s ears prick when ‘baking’ is mentioned. She is also very concerned about her memory and requests I feed her more fish (and now chia seeds!).

They even know the ingredients and proportions that go into making a healthy smoothie, muffin, or biscuit. It has now reached the point where they are actually schooling my husband on kitchen basics.

The other day I was greeted with the look of a (more than usually) stunned mullet after asking hubby to separate the egg whites and yolks. The look on his face suggested this was not one of his underhanded excuses, but was a look of genuine bewilderment. He couldn’t have looked more confused if I had asked him to recall something I said two minutes ago.

Now, hubby is no stranger to egg-related incident and controversy, so while this was not a surprise (in a kind of surprising way), it did add an element of humour to the situation.

One person who I knew could help was Mr 9 – “Stand aside, Dad, let me show you how it’s done”. He may have said “Muppet”, but I can’t be sure …

“Make sure you ….”, hubby couldn’t help himself, before Mr 9 interjected with the talk to the hand movement.

“Ah … ah … watch and learn.”

I am so proud of my little chefs. I love knowing that they are well on the way to looking after themselves. And, loving it!

So here’s my tip: resist the temptation to shoo them out of the kitchen in the interest of time. After all, time with your kids is a precious experience, particularly when you are imparting life skills such as cooking, sharing, creating, measuring, and how to best nourish themselves.

You can be sure they’ll never forget it.

If  you want to read more about the benefits of having your kids in the kitchen check out my blog “What’s Cooking Kids”

Bren x

Believe me, I know what it’s like in this time-poor existence, rushing to get the kids to school so that we can get to work on time, and we reach for what is convenient (or what we’re told by marketing is convenient). But with a bit of preparation and the right ingredients in your kitchen, the family could be enjoying highly nutritious morning meals, and still get out the door on time.

So many breakfast cereals are marketed as health foods. Little wonder it’s the main form of breakfast for most families. We’re far too trusting, assuming it must be good because that is what the advertisements say. According to NY Times best selling author, Dr Mercola, “The unfortunate reality is that the cereals aggressively marketed to kids have the worst nutritional quality of all cereals. An analysis, published in the Journal of American Dietetic Association found that children’s cereals have more sugar, sodium, carbohydrates, and calories per gram than cereals not marketed to kids. They also have less protein and fiber.”

Here are 5 things to think about before you reach for the boxed cereal in the supermarket. Cereal is:

1. Highly processed – to make the flakes, shapes and puffs, the grains have  to be heated up to very high temperatures and extruded at high pressures. The shapes are then sprayed with synthetic vitamins and food colours

2. Nutrient deficient – the processing destroys many valuable nutrients in grains, causes the oils to become rancid and renders certain proteins toxic

3. Difficult to digest – cereal grains contain phytic acid, a substance that binds up nutrients and makes it difficult for you body to absorb and therefore difficult to digest

4. High in sugar and carbohydrates – most of the cereals marketed to kids have 30-50% sugar content which raises blood sugar levels very quickly

5. Health issues –  all of the above points can cause bloating, constipation, IBS, allergies, infections, concentration issues and contribute to weight gain, obesity and more

Breakfast is important fuel after fasting during sleep so that our bodies can rejuvenate each night. So it’s a prime time to feed our bodies real foods, whole unprocessed foods that contain protein, fat and carbohydrates, and come from plants and animals, to give us the best start to the day.

If you want to achieve vibrant health for your whole family, try these 5 quick healthy breakfast ideas instead of boxed cereal:-

1. Bircher muesli – rolled oats mixed with nuts, seeds, coconut, soaked in milk or coconut water and yoghurt overnight. It can be made and stored in the fridge for several days

2. Smoothies – simple combinations include milk, raspberries, bananas, raw honey and yoghurt, can be whizzed up in 5 minutes

3. Eggs – scrambled/poached/fried eggs on sourdough or sprouted toast with a spread of avocado

4. French toast – sourdough bread soaked in a mix of eggs, milk and cinnamon, lightly fried in butter, served with a drizzle of Canadian maple syrup and topped with fresh fruit

5. Fruit and yoghurt parfait – create layers of yoghurt, nuts, seeds, fruit, coconut or homemade granola for a delectable breakfast treat

So why not prepare your fridge and pantry with some of these staples, to make preparing a nutritious and delicious breakfast a breeze? Download my FREE BREAKFAST EBOOK with 10 delicious recipes to make your morning’s shine. 

If you need some guidance and inspiration to change your kitchen into a real food haven, check out my programs here

Bren x