It’s not easy to get kids to choose healthy snacking options. Busy schedules and rushed mornings lead to convenience snacks, usually containing unhealthy ingredients. Your child may also be a picky eater and refuse to try new foods. This situation can be frustrating, but people often resort to popular healthy snacks like lunch combo packs and vegetable chips that appear to be healthy but are in fact quite the opposite.
Many of these snacks hide added sugars and other ingredients that provide poor nutrition to your child. Let’s look at some typical snacks and why they’re not the right choice:

1. Lunch combo packs
These combo packs may seem like a healthy choice, given that some of them contain things like turkey and cheese. However, upon closer inspection, the nutritional facts will show you everything you need to know. High in fat, calories, and sodium, these combo packs also include several preservatives that don’t provide kids with adequate nutrients.

2. Veggie chips
With the word “Veggie” in the title, it must be suitable for children to snack on, right? Unfortunately, these contain nearly the same number of calories found in regular potato chip snack bags. High in sodium, this product doesn’t include the amount you would expect of fiber, vitamins, and minerals.

3. Yogurt tubes
Yogurt can be very healthy, but not the kind advertised for kids. Yogurt tubes often have popular animated characters decorating the wrapper, which further entices children to seek them out as a snack. But the amount of sugar included cancels out anything else that might be good for your child. After one of these snacks, you’ll notice your child full of fitful energy, and that’s the sugar at work.

4. Juice boxes
Another popular snack that may appear healthy at first is juice boxes. Many labels try their best to convince parents that it’s nothing but wholesome fruit. The truth is that many of these juices don’t even contain real fruit juice and instead include artificial flavors with sugar.

5. Energy bars
Advertisers have cleverly worked to conceal that many of their popular energy bars contain around the same amount of nutrients as the average candy bar. One such energy bar on the market claims it promotes lean muscle and packs over 400 calories!

What healthy snacks should replace the above items? Instead of purchasing a pre-packaged lunch combo pack, create your own for healthy kids snacks. Replace the veggie chips with unbuttered popcorn for a low-calorie snack. Ditch the yogurt tube snack to serve plain Greek yogurt with some fresh fruit topping. Be careful with juice and only choose options that contain 100% real fruit juice. You can find an energy bar that provides adequate nutrition, but you need to check the label because not all options are healthy.