Healthy snacks for gannet children

[Notmycircusnotmyotter]

My children are always "starving". They eat balanced meals with protein and carbs as well as fruit / veggies and drink a lot of water, but they're hungry again between meals. They're very active and slim so I've no concerns.

If you have similarly hollow legged children, what do you let them eat as snacks? I don't want to fill them full of bread or UPFs or refined sugar. Currently they have fruit, Greek yog with a little honey, occasionally home made cheese straws, brioche, but I want to add more things into the mix and would really appreciate inspiration.

TIA!vhat

Mine like salty pretzels at the moment.
And warm custard with banana in it.

Sometimes they’ll eat savoury muffins when they get home from school, if they’re nice and warm.
There’s no way mine would eat a boiled egg as a snack. Or anything with celery. Where did I go wrong.

You have so many great ideas here! My DS is 16 and comes home ravenous. He's given a banana, dates, handful of nuts, seeds and a glass of water or milk. If he's still hungry after that he's welcome to have a biscuit, cereal, porridge or toast. He's six feet tall and barely nine stones so I like to make sure he's well fed!!

Hard boiled eggs

Bananas

Apples

I make a lot of sort of healthy cakes and bakes: chocolate courgette bread, apple muffins etc

They also eat a ridiculous amount of cheese

Ramen. Bread, Nutella.

14 year old DS who eats anything usually and is not a fan of UPF for dinner. But when it comes to snacks he's a noodle fan

Scrambled eggs or beans on toast, porridge, soup, cheese and oatcakes.

Beans/ eggs on toast
It was easiest to just do a simple light meal when getting in from school than trying to fill bottomless pits with bits and pieces of snacks.

My life has been so much more frustrating in recent years since DS1 went "off" bread/ toast 🙄

A couple of posts wondered about why bread was sometimes cast as the enemy. There are a couple of reasons that I can think of: one harking back to the Atkins Diet, 'carbs are bad' era, and another being that many supermarket breads, even the high fibre / wholemeal / added seeds ones contain additives which can be harmful and irritate the gut and cause inflammation, e.g. emulsifiers. And, unless you live somewhere with a convenient little bakery with a reliable stock of locally-produced, artisan-made sourdough, it can be really difficult to buy bread which is free from anything that might make it UPF.

The yeast typically used when making bread in a domestic machine does contain an emulsifer, but it's present in much, much lower levels than emulsifiers in bread made by the standard industrial (chorleywood) process where they are added as part of the dough, and typically an emulsifier for which there's less evidence of harm. That doesn't necessarily mean it's less harmful than the ones typically used in supermarket loaves, just that it hasn't appeared as a topic of much research interest yet. However, the same emulsifier is typically used in industrial bread also, and at much higher levels.

From a personal perspective, I've noticed since switching to a mostly UPF-free diet that consuming supermarket bread almost invariably leaves me feeling very unpleasantly bloated and gassy. We eat a lot of homemade (bread machine) bread. It's delicious and much, much more filling than chorleywood process bread.

My DS is the same age and even taller and this wouldn’t be enough for him (the first snack you’ve described). He would need some kind of bread item, muffin, bagel, pitta to go with that. Also he just buys his own snacks on his way home from school which is usually chocolate! How do you stop your DS from doing that? There is no way mine would wait until he gets home to be given fruit and nuts. He also has a long journey from school.

Nothing wrong with bread, as long as it’s a healthy bread.

A couple of slices of brown bread can be very filling, especially with a bit of cheese and pickle inside. Add an apple if they are still hungry after that.

My nephew has Warburtons thins (you can get them in bagel form) with peanut butter, Quorn picnic eggs, fruit, dips.