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Healthy Snacks for Kids #1 – Icy Pole delight

The other day while I was out shopping with my son, he asked if we could buy some ice lollies. As we hadn’t had any frozen treats in our house for quite some time, I said OK, as long as we could find some healthy ones! We had a look at a few healthy looking icy poles with labels on the front that tempted us with ‘made with real fruit’...‘no added colourings’.....’99% fat free’. They sounded OK, but as I’ve recently learnt, we should never judge a package by the words on the front. I turned the box over to have a look at the ‘real’ ingredients and checked off the additives on my GLO handy shopping guide (based on the additive to avoid list put together by Julie Eady, author of

Additive Alert

). Sure, they had some ‘real’ fruit in them, but the next highest ingredient was typically sugar (no great surprise there), some had added fructose, and all of them had at least one additive from the ‘additives to avoid’ list. Some of these ‘bad’ additives included food colouring. Now that makes me MAD! Why, in a natural frozen fruit treat, do they have to add food colouring! And WHY add sugar?? Surely there is enough natural sweetener in the fruit itself? (Don’t get me started on additives – the fact that Australia allows around 50 additives that have been banned in other parts of the world due to toxic or carcinogenic ingredients makes me really MAD!). So, I said to my son, ‘I’m very sorry, but we just can’t buy these’. He looked a bit sad, so I said ‘why don’t we make our own instead? You can help me chose the fruit’. So we bought some frozen mangos and strawberries (no added ingredients, just fruit), some fresh rock melon, water melon, apples and peaches.

Back home, we cut up the fruit then blended in two batches – one orange batch (mango, orange melon and apple) and one red batch (water melon, strawberries and peach), then poured the first batch into icy pole moulds (only filling half way), then poured the second batch on top. Next time I will try adding a serving of the

Juice Plus complete powder and Juice Plus veggi capsule

for even more nutritional value.

icey pole delight

We made layered smoothies with the excess, for

Icey Pole delight

immediate consumption, then placed the moulds into the freezer. My kids thought that they were delicious, and we had heaps of fun making them! They didn’t miss out at all and ended up with a very healthy and tasty snack. nbsp; nbsp; If you missed our previous blog on the Power of Fruit and Veg and the importance of having your 5 and 2 every day, you can read it

here

. If you would like to find out another great solution for getting your kids to eat even more fruit and veg, then click

here.

For a copy of Julie Eadys Additive Alert click

here

. nbsp;


Comments (1)

Reply

Toya R

05-05-2013 12:42 PM G5T

summer is going to be wonderful thanks to all these great ideas

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