Mock Yogurt Parfait

I think I’m going to have a breakdown if I see another sugary breakfast cereal being marketed to children.  Canadian Supermarkets, along with the tv ads, are very keen on promoting the unhealthy ones and do so at a greater rate than healthier options too. (1)  What are we to expect children to desire when that is all they see is fun characters promoting Shreddies, Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks, Captain Crunch, Trix and others.  And the supposed healthy ones are really no better.   Consider:  Cheerios contain 17 grams of carbohydrates per serving.  That’s about 4 teaspoons of sugar.  Granola, another “healthier” choice often has even more than that at 40 grams of sugar.  That means a whopping 10 teaspoons of sugar.  Hmmm, facetiously I say, “isn’t that nourishing.” Now, can you imagine pouring 4 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee in the morning let alone 10.  I really hope you can’t.  Anyway, I know that as adults we’re painfully and woefully aware of the importance of keeping our sugar intake low so we need to extend that to our kids too.  Really, they’re just little mini-mes and yous and it’s far better to set them up for a life of health now rather than to let them deal with the diabetes scare later on.

Oh my, am I on my soapbox or what today!  What I really want to get at is that there are plenty of other high protein, fat and fiber options out there that will fuel our children and feed their brains so they have sustained energy throughout the day with no dangerous sugar spikes and plummets.  A disaster is waiting to happen if we continually let them begin their day with a bowl of cereal.  So what are the options?

I am very big on starting the day with a filling shake.  For my 8 year old it usually contains about 10 grams of vegan protein powder, a greens mix (I use chocolate Macrogreens from MacroLife), some fat like almond butter and fiber from a bit of flaxseed or chia seed.  In our house a shake is like a breakfast appetizer.  For the “real” breakfast there are a wide range of options but I try to keep the sugar content of anything I give her pretty low.  Sometimes we’ll make a pancake made of sunflowerseed butter, an egg and a banana.  I mix those three ingredients up in a blender and if you flip them awfully carefully they do in fact look and taste like a pancake.  We also have bacon a few mornings a week and on special days I like to make my Mock Yogurt Parfait.  This nummy and beautiful breakfast treat has no dairy and if you use a grain-free granola (which has less sugar than some granolas) then you and your kids will be laughing all the way to the energy bank.

This amazingly beautiful breakfast parfait was adapted from Breakfast Parfection from The Undiet Cookbook by Meghan Telpner.(2)

1.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5684751/
2. Telpner, Meghan, Maya Visnyei, and Catherine Farquharson. The Undiet Cookbook: 130 Gluten-free Recipes for a Healthy and Awesome Life. , Canada: Appetite by Random House, 2015. page 64.