Why Homemade is Better Than Supermarket Foods for a Healthy Vegan Lunch Box for your Vegan Kids

welcome to this week's podcast. So this week I'm talking about lunchboxes again, and I'm talking about why homemade snacks and food for lunch boxes are far better than supermarket fruits. Now, I know that you're busy and so the idea of having to make lunchbox snacks and foods from scratch might feel a bit overwhelming. But these days, I tend to spend about an hour a week putting together lunchbox foods for my kids. I, I don't my kids now homeschool, but I still actually pack lunch boxes for them. Because it just makes things a lot easier. But yeah, so I spend about an hour each week making the food for lunch boxes. And then that's basically it for the week. So when I sit here saying that homemade is better, I am not talking about having to spend hours in the kitchen. But the hour or so that you can spend each week doing it is really really worth it for your kids for their nutrition and just generally giving them better options for their lunchboxes. So one of the biggest things is when you can make your own lunchbox foods for your kids. It gives them so many more options. When you're really just dealing with supermarket foods, especially if your kids also go to a school where they need to be nut free. There really aren't a lot of options available for them. I think that the majority of things, I think these days, there's maybe one or two sorts of muesli bars, you've got pretzels sort of rice crackers, fight awaits with some dips. There's some things like chocolate chickpeas are one of my kids favorite treats. I think one of the bluey snacks is now vegan, which is very exciting for them to be able to do that. And I mean, you do have some things, but they certainly there are a lot of foods that they don't get to have. And they miss out because because they're vegan. And well because kids are vegan, sorry. And a lot of snacks aren't. A lot of snacks also aren't nut free, which can make things hard. So if you can make them your kids snacks at home, then there are so many more options, you can make them all sorts of things like muffins are definitely a favorite. And you can do so many different flavors. Lots of things like chocolate muffins, fruit muffins. I also have my kids love muesli bars and things as well that we can kind of make work for us and make flavors that my kids like, and protein balls to. And then with our lunches as well. My kids love things like pizzas and kiss ideas that we put all different flavors in, and sausage rolls and spinach rolls and things like that. So they really have a lot more options when I actually make things at home. Now, as well as general flavors, you actually have a lot of flexibility in the foods that you're making as a parent. So if you want to make sure your vegan kids are having less sugar in their foods, well, you can just make muffins or cookies or whatever with less sugar. It's really quite simple. If you want your kids to be having wholemeal foods and stuff, well then you can do that as well. If you're wanting sort of more or less of some other ingredient. Well, you've got the flexibility when you're making your own. Whereas especially for vegans, where there really aren't a lot of options in the supermarkets, you don't have a lot of options when it comes to things like that either. Now, in addition to sort of flexibility in flavors and things like that, homemade food is always far more nutritious than supermarket foods. So vegan kids, it's really important that they're getting enough iron and zinc in their food. Also calcium which is a little bit harder with some lunchbox foods, but it's really important that our kids are getting enough of those. And when you're actually making your own recipes and food at home, then you can easily tweak the recipes to make sure that your kids are getting enough of enough of those nutrients in their food. Supermarket foods. Obviously you can't make any changes like that to make them healthier. So things What am I what do i I mean by adding things in so you can easily make foods whole meals. So use wholemeal flour or whole wheat flour when you're baking, which instantly gives you recipes a ion boost for your kids. You can also add ground pumpkin seeds in, which is something that I love to do into basically any of your baking. And that also gives them a huge iron and a huge zinc boost as well. You can use wholemeal bread, wholemeal flour when you're making any of your savory food as well, which is a really good way of boosting iron. Whole grains are really good for boosting iron. And so it's just things like that, that you can easily do and tweaks that you can make that you can make the homemade food a lot healthier for your kids. Now, when we look at supermarket foods, although supermarket foods often say that they have a lot of superfood ingredients in them, they don't tend to actually have very much of them. I've often seen different foods where they might say that they're made with pumpkin seeds and oats or quinoa. And then you actually look at the ingredients on the back. And you'll see that that food is actually a long way down the list. And there's generally less than about 2% of that ingredient. Supermarket foods are often packed full of filler ingredients like rice is a really, really common one or rice flour, even rice protein sometimes, which doesn't actually have very much iron or zinc. They also have a lot of dough, they may say that they have whole grains in them, they could they're often packed full of just plain flowers, as well. And they often have a lot of oils in them too in order to pack the energy in were oils. Although they are high in energy, they don't contain any nutrients that kids need, like iron, or zinc or calcium as well. So it can be really hard when you're dependent on supermarket foods, it can be really hard to find foods that are actually high in the nutrients that your kids need. Now, having said that, I will say that I have found a couple so when you're if you're getting supermarket foods, really look for ones where the ingredient list contains a lot of things like oats, whole grains and dates and not nut butters. If your kids can have nuts at school, those ones do tend to be very high nutrition and generally equivalent to homemade foods. But unfortunately, they do tend to also be quite expensive because obviously, when they can fill foods with filler ingredients, that's when they can put the price down. So yeah, so that leads me on to my next point, which is that homemade vegan lunchbox snacks are much cheaper than supermarket foods. So I did a bit of research and I did a comparison between the nut free lunch nut free muesli bars that I make that are on my blog, I'll put the recipe in the show notes for you, which are very very nutritious muesli bars, so these not free muesli bars have one and a half milligrams of iron. Your kids need about nine or 10 and one milligram of zinc as well. So they're very high in zinc. And so basically I've put together a shopping list and looked at how much these muesli bars cost versus a packet of vegan muesli bars from the supermarket. And so with the comparison, I worked out that my muesli bars cost about 45 cents each, whereas the supermarket ones cost about 85 cents each. So I know we're only talking about talking 40 cents, but that's basically half the price for muesli bars that are far more nutritious for your kids. And now these muesli bars they only take 10 minutes to cook so it's not like you have to spend ages in the kitchen in order to make healthy homemade snacks for your kids. You can whip these ones up in just 10 minutes and Then let them sit in the freezer. And then you'd have lunch, but sorry, muesli bars for your kids for the week. Now I know that you don't always have time every week to make homemade foods from scratch for your kids lunchboxes, and that's totally fine. One of the things is that if you can try to be making homemade snacks and foods for your kids, lunchboxes most weeks, then it doesn't really matter. If some weeks you just don't get to it, and they have supermarket snacks for those weeks. It's really important what your kids are eating most of the time, not what they're having every now and then when you just need to have something quick and easy from the supermarket for them. T he other really good thing about making your snacks yourself making food yourself is that on the weeks where you don't have a chance to do it, your kids aren't sick of the whatever options you can get from the supermarket. So it will mean that they don't sit there and turn up their nose and go I don't want these muesli bars again, which I wouldn't have kids who do that no. So yeah, so it does mean then that your kids aren't bored of what they can get from the supermarket so that you can use those as a backup option on the weeks that you need to. S o homemade foods are far better than supermarket foods because firstly, you can have way more nut free options and it is so much easier to make foods not free. When you're making them yourself, then when you're trying to find them from the supermarket. You'll save yourself a lot of time sitting there reading the backs of packets of supermarket foods. If you think about it, you probably spend 10 minutes I'm trying to find nut free muesli bars at the supermarket so you might as well just get the ingredients and use those 10 minutes making your own at home. Supermarket foods also have a lot of filler ingredients in them. And homemade foods are a lot more nutritious for your kids as well. You can also customize and tweak your recipes to give them the nutrients that your kids need or to lower the sugar or whatever you want to do like that. Supermarket foods are also a lot more expensive than home homemade snacks. And so obviously you can save a lot of money if you make your own at home. Now, if you would like help in making your own lunchbox foods at home yourself, then I have everything you need inside my vegan lunchbox volt. It has 20 weeks of lunchbox plans which are all fully customizable, where they give you recipes for the week, prep ahead and freeze ahead instructions and are full nutrition breakdown for the lunch boxes as well. So you know exactly how much nutrition your kids are getting from their lunch boxes. You also get over 200 recipes that you can swap into the plans if the plans themselves don't suit your kids. And all of the recipes are not free and vegan as well. So if you're interested in that, then I will put the link in the show notes and you can check it out. On the other hand, if you're just looking for recipes on their own, then I have my vegan recipe revolution, which is a membership where you sign up and you get access to all of my vegan recipes that I have. So that's over 500 vegan recipes in there for all meals, lunch, breakfast, dinner, lunch boxes, snacks, everything is in there. So I'll also put the link down there for that one as well if you want to sign up and just get the recipes themselves. Already, that's all I've got for this week. I will talk to you again next week.