Family health tips

Keeping your family healthy is important for all women with a partner and/or children at home. Sometimes it's an uphill struggle trying to get them to adopt new, healthier eating and lifestyle habits in place of the old, ingrained ways that are less good for them. Here's some top tips to help increase your success rate.

Make exercise fun: suggest everyone goes out after Sunday lunch, or in the evenings, rather than lounging indoors watching TV. If cycling or a brisk walk are met with howls of 'boring' suggest ten-pin bowling, ice-skating, roller-blading, horse-riding or go-karting instead. And take your partner to a club to dance away the night, rather than just sitting in a pub - this gives him more exercise than just lifting a beer glass.

Keep plugging away: Very young children often eat anything, but by the age of two they're more reluctant to eat foods they haven't tasted before. Three out of four kids aged two to seven years old will refuse to taste something spontaneously if they are not familiar with it. This trait - known as food neophobia - is nature's way of protecting them from harm. Keep introducing your little ones to healthy foods such as fish, fruit and vegetables, so they get used to seeing them. Don't give up if they initially turn up their nose.

Dump the junk: Introduce children to different aspects of food, such as animal welfare, environmental issues, and how to grow strawberries or even carrot tops themselves. Children can be very concerned about treating animals properly. One mum successfully put her two girls off chicken nuggets by saying 'You wouldn't want those, they're made from chickens' bottoms and chickens' faces'. They never asked for them again.

Let them get stuck in: Involve children in shopping, and be enthusiastic about healthy foods on sale. Say, for example, 'Just smell this lovely ripe melon - that's the one to buy'; or 'Let's get the free-range eggs as the hens are properly looked after.' Ask them to read lists of food label ingredients out loud - if it's full of unpronounceable additives, they may not want to eat it! Let them help with preparing and serving food, too. Even children as young as two eat better if they help themselves than if someone else puts food on their plate.

Ditch the car: Be kind to the environment as well as yourself and walk where-ever possible. Is it feasible (and safe) to walk the children to school, or round to a friends rather than automatically taking the car? Walk to the shops to get everyday items such as milk, newspapers, fruit or bread.

Who can spit furthest? Give your children fruit snacks in the garden and encourage games such as eating giant watermelon or apple slices and seeing who can spit pips the furthest.

Use a pedometer: Buy everyone in the family a pedometer, fit them in the morning and see who has walked the most steps each day. Adults should aim for 10,000 steps!

Bento lunchboxes: It's easier to pack a healthy lunch box if you use small compartments with lids (eg from www.laptoplunches.co.uk). You can easily put dips with raw vegetable sticks (carrot, celery and red pepper sticks, baby tomatoes), chopped fruit, grapes or even a hardboiled egg in these without squishing - and without the need for additional wrapping. This makes it environmentally friendly, as well as easy to clean when juice cartons and dripping yoghurt tubes are put back in at the end of lunch.

Eat seasonally: Eating healthily can sometimes seem expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Fresh fruit and vegetables are always cheaper if they are in season, so look for bargains and consider preparing and freezing your own fruit and veg when they are particularly good value. Buying home-grown produce from road-side stalls and farm shops is usually cheaper, too, and some co-operatives organise box schemes that deliver produce (usually organic) to your door more cheaply than you can buy in shops.

Hide the salt: Table salt (sodium chloride) increases the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease. Don't add salt during cooking and don't put a salt cellar on the meal table. As most of the sodium we eat comes from processed foods (including canned products, ready-prepared meals, biscuits, cakes and breakfast cereals) check labels and select brands with the lowest sodium content. A good rule of thumb is that, per 100g food (or per serving if a serving is less than 100g):

0.5g sodium or more is a lot of sodium
0.1g sodium or less is a little sodium

Similarly, check labels for sugar content. A good rule of thumb is that, per 100g food (or per serving):

2g of sugars or less is a little sugar
10g of sugars or more is a lot of sugar.

These simple tricks should help you keep your families diet and lifestyle on the right track - you only need to make small changes for big gains.