Kids and Sugar

Getting used to a diet with little to no sugar can be quite an adjustment...especially for kids.  When I adopted this lifestyle, my eyes were really opened to exactly how much sugar we are feeding to our children.  It is in their peanut butter, their cereal, their snacks, their granola bars, their juice boxes, and much more.  When one starts to read labels, one can really see how damaging the cumulative effect of all of that sugar can be! It really is disturbing when you realize how much better you feel without sugar that we have changed the pallets of our children by making them crave more and more of it.  For a long time, my daughters turned their noses up to any keto snacks that I made....largely because they looked good, but when they bit into them, they were not sweet enough.  The funny thing is, they were sweetened....but with low-glycemic index sweeteners that just were not sweet enough for my children.

Today, after months and months of working on lowering my kids' sugar intake, they came home from school very excited to eat the keto peanut butter blossoms that I had made the night before.  These cookies would not be good to the average kid who eats sugary treats all the time. The fact that they like them so much now tells me that I am succeeding in slowly changing their pallets.

Low-Carb Peanut Butter Blossoms
Ingredients:
1 cup organic peanut butter (or nut butter of your choice)
1/2 cup granulated Monk Fruit Sweetener (found on Amazon)
1 Egg
6-8 small chunks of unsweetened 100% chocolate

Directions:
1) In a small mixing bowl, mix the peanut butter and monk fruit sweetener.  Combine well.
2) Add the egg to the bowl and mix all ingredients well.
3) Line a baking tray with parchment paper.  Make little cookie-sized dough balls and put onto the parchment paper.  Push a chunk of chocolate into each one.
4) Bake at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown

One of the biggest things that you can do to help your children eat less sugar is to read the labels of the food that they are eating.  Let them see you reading the labels.  Tell them the important components of the label that you are looking at.  My 10 and 8 year old daughters actually look at labels on their own now.  When we have something in the house that we shouldn't....they tell me about it.  All of this came step-by step, little-by-little.  I know that, by changing their pallets, to make them desire less sugary foods, I am giving them a chance at a healthier future.  These Keto Peanut Butter Blossom cookies are a step in the right direction.