Nancy Flanders keeps busy monitoring the quality of the food her kids eat. In this post, she shares healthy eating tips for kids with special needs to keep them and the whole family eating healthy all day long!

4 Healthy Eating Tips for Kids with Special Needs

Most people with cystic fibrosis, like my daughter Maggie, need to eat a lot. Their calorie intake needs to be at least 120% of the daily recommended amount for the average person in their age group. We were told by the CF clinic staff to feed her, feed her, feed her. Add olive oil to her baby food, add butter to her veggies, give her a high fat diet. And that’s what we’ve done and she’s done pretty well. She hovers around the 50th percentile which is the minimum to be considered of good weight for a child with CF. But in the effort to keep her weight up and therefore her lungs healthy, we were feeding her anything she would eat – including processed foods that contain MSG, TBHQ, and Dimethylpolysiloxane.

When it sank in that we were feeding our chronically-ill child food that contained tumor-causing industrial chemicals we were the ones that felt sick. It amazes me what the FDA passes as food. Even though most of the chemicals are found in trace amounts, it all adds up over time. If it’s causing tumors in the lab animal, it will cause tumors in us. So, we came up with a simple new rule for grocery shopping and eating – READ.

Ingredient Label Count

We count the ingredients in our food. If there’s more than five, we try to steer clear.

Type of Ingredient Check

Regardless of the amount of ingredients, we read what the ingredients are. If there are any words in there that we don’t understand, we don’t buy it.

Buy Local

We stick to buying local and organic meat, veggies and fruit as much as possible. If it’s free of pesticides, hormones and antibiotics, than it’s on our plates. If not, it stays at the store. This can be costly, but if you educate yourself on the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15, you will find it’s not too expensive to buy organic.

Know Your Restaurants

We have always eaten at fast food joints and restaurants in moderation, but now we will probably be avoiding fast food altogether as we recently learned that Maggie’s favorite chicken nuggets have an anti-foaming agentin their recipe. Yum.

Overall, it’s easier than you think to get on the path to healthier, toxin free eating. Even just making one of these changes to your eating habits can help you live longer and healthier.

So What Do You Think?

What do you think of Nancy’s healthy eating tips for kids with special needs? What ideas can you add to the list? Leave a comment so we can eat better, too.

Nancy Flanders is a wife and mother of two girls, one with cystic fibrosis. After her daughter’s diagnosis at just 6 days old, she altered her career path to focus on writing about raising a child with a special health need. She spends any free moment she can find fundraising for a cure for her daughter and volunteering for her hospital’s cystic fibrosis advisory group. Visit Nancy at www.chronicadmissions.blogspot.com and www.parentingsquad.com.

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