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When asked “What is your greatest fear?” by The Hindu in one of their interviews, actor Madhavan replied, “That I will become dependent in my old age.”

Isn’t that the fear all of us have? Don’t we all feel health and fitness is of paramount importance to our family?

Leading a healthy life begins with healthy eating habits and it is the responsibility of the parents and teachers to ensure that our children understand the value of eating food with nutrition and how it helps them when they grow up. But often discussing health and eating habits is a boring subject to many, especially children. If you are one of those in teaching the value of nutrition to children in a fun-filled way, then go to Nourish Interactive, a portal that offers resources such as fun nutrition games for kids, interactive nutrition tips and tools for parents to promote healthy living for the whole family.

Today’s parents are busier than ever especially juggling home, work and family. So to make it simple for parents, the site offers tips from dietitians who are also parents. These tips in general are focused on ways to improve your family’s eating and activity habits. There tips are further categorized for different needs such as

• Lunch Box Ideas
• Family Mealtime tips
• Eating out tips
• Grocery shopping tips
• Healthy Snack Tips
• Kids and exercise tips
• Healthy breakfast tips
• Fiber and Healthy Proteins

To help you talk with children about nutrition and to make it more interesting to them, the site offers some imaginative and fun ways (free printable for kids) to get kids thinking and talking about healthy foods and exercise. For example, you may use the Food Groups and Healthy eating learning sheets to help children learn about the five food groups. This includes learning sheets, worksheets, and fun activity pages that promote healthy messages about balanced meal made of foods from all five groups.

You can also use the Color Your Plate activity sheets, to remind your children that the best way to eat healthy food is to color your plate with all the colors from rainbow. The foods with the most colors are fruits and vegetables. Remember, the more they color their plate, the more nutritious their meal is.

The site also offers Nutrition and Fitness tools for parents that are action oriented and designed to help you make good decisions about the right nutrition and exercise your child needs.

To begin with you can use some of their interactive tools such as

• Calculate the right BMI (Body Mass Index) for your child
• Check out the recommended intake of nutrient vitamins and minerals for different age groups and their sources
• Use the Interactive Meal Planner for ensuring nutritious food for your child based on age, gender and activity level of your child

BTW, don’t forget to help your children play online at Solusville where they not only can have lots of adventures exploring different parts of Solusville but also learn about healthy foods and being active. For example, the food pyramid jigsaw puzzle, Grocery Store with a contest to see who can find the right food by reading the food labels, Activity Games such as basket ball and Soccer, Fun Farm games such as Harvest Maze and Yummy Drops Flying Game where healthy food are delivered to families from farm using fruit fortified airplane, Word games such as Nutrition Crossword puzzle and Tony’s Food Gadget that tells you about the invisible stuff inside food.

Leading healthy life begins with taking nutritious food and Nourish Interactive makes it a fun filled exercise for parents and teachers to help children learn to take nutritious food.

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