Smart Bites for Baby: Promoting Healthy Eating

Encouraging your children to eat nutrient rich foods at an early age is essential in helping them develop healthy eating habits. After all, the phrase “old habits die hard” wasn’t coined without reason. Growth during the first two years of your baby's life occurs at an exponential pace. Never again in your children's lives will their bodies - and brains - go through such rapid change. So why not give them a head start by feeding them the best foods possible - ones that engage their palates, their bodies and their minds?

Mika Shino is a mother who developed a book and a blog, Smart Bites for Baby, which inspires readers with new and original recipes that integrate superfoods. These foods, such as salmon, flax seeds, walnuts and soy help promote brain development and provide babies with the vitamins and minerals for overall healthy growth and development. They also engage children's senses by drawing on a world flavors using ingredients that are easy to find and thus encourage kids to maintain smart eating habits.

Smart Bites for Baby was created four years ago with the birth of Mika’s son, Magnus. When Magnus was born, he was initially diagnosed with a debilitating liver disease. As a mother, Mika was motivated to do whatever she could to make her son as healthy as possible, and so she began to research foods that could enhance growth and stimulation for her newborn.

What she discovered was an array of superfoods that can enhance growth and development of a growing body and brain. However, she soon realized that very little had been written or explored in this area: how to cook whole, organic and fresh foods that can nurture both the body and the brain of a child.

With this information, Mika began to cook for new mothers, kids of her neighbors and friends, and she also started to exchange recipes with parents and chefs. Mika discovered fun and stimulating ways to encourage interest and excitement in children about food, and she also learned that much of the superfoods that nourished the brain were found in her native cuisine, Japanese food. All of this led to the creation of her blog Smart Bites for Baby, and her book, “Smart Bites for Baby: 300 Easy to Make, Easy to Love Meals that Boost Your Baby and Toddler's Brain".

"Smart Bites for Baby is about learning and cooking with the most enriching ingredients for both the body and the brain, paying attention to color, texture, temperature and presentation. It is about looking at food as a developmental tool that can stimulate babies and toddlers as well as thinking about what we feed our babies and how we do it,” states Mika in her blog.

She encourages parents to choose fresh, organic, locally-produced and seasonal foods that integrate superfoods, and to explore world flavors that ensures a diversity in flavors, textures, temperature and colors as a means to stimulate all of the senses, and hence, a child’s brain development.

“It is my hope that as a parent, as a family, and as a community, we can encourage healthy eating habits for our children, provide a way to understand food as a developmental tool, and give the same respect to feeding our children that we give to our most important dinner guests,” states Mika.

Information and Images Courtesy: Smart Bites for Baby Blog