The one thing that health, diet, and nutrition experts seem to agree on is that you must have breakfast, and it must be a healthy breakfast. This Mom also agrees.
There was a time in my household when breakfast was grab and go, and I hate to admit it – not always healthy. There was the phase where I filled the refrigerator with boxes of store-bought chocolate covered doughnuts and gave them to the kids for breakfast. Then there was a phase where I was sending the kids off to school, each with a sugar-coated toaster tart in their hands. When I look at the nutritional labels of those products now, I realize that I was loading my family up on sugar and carbs – and lots of empty calories. These foods certainly weren’t good for their minds or their hearts.
Today, healthy breakfast means not only balanced and nutritious, but also allergen-free. When you can’t eat wheat, eggs, or milk, breakfast can be the most difficult meal of the day. A traditional breakfast of eggs and toast or cereal with milk is simply out of the question. We struggled for a few years after the food allergy diagnosis, and my son often went off to school with just a banana for breakfast.
But we persevered and we found some great new foods!
Eating allergen-free gives us the opportunity to discover healthy new foods that we might not have tried otherwise. Cereals made from grains like quinoa, amaranth, rice, millet, and oats can be very tasty, and are usually more nutritious than sugar-coated wheat cereals.
A healthy breakfast can also be simple.
Breakfast in my house today starts with a low-fat, high-fiber cereal that doesn’t contain wheat. Peace Cereal’s Wild Berry Crisp is one of our favorites; its low-fat formula is based on corn and oats. My non-dairy milk preference for cereal is vanilla hemp milk. The vanilla flavor adds just a bit of sweetness to the nutty taste of hemp, and blends really well with breakfast cereals. Rice milk and coconut milk are also great options. Add a fresh fruit and you’ve got a great nutritious and balanced start to your day!