Dr. Michele Arthurs, a local lifestyle medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente, knows how daunting it can be for families to grocery shop with their young children.
That's why, when her kids were little, Arthurs turned their grocery run into a scavenger hunt adventure.
"If we were going to look for grapes, I would give them clues. 'The next food that we're going to look for might be purple or it might be green, and it's small and it's round like a little ball. What is it that we're looking for?''" she recounted to News4.
Just like that, her kids were learning and having fun.
That's just one of the tips Arthurs and Giant Food nutritionist Leslie Jefferson shared with News4 on ways parents can make grocery shopping with kids easier and - hopefully - healthier.
Arthurs admits there can be a lot of temptations at the grocery store when it comes to sugary snacks, but said "there's also a lot of learning."
She said the aisles of rainbow-colored fruits and vegetables are great for teaching kids where food comes from and why it's good for them.
"When you go to the grocery store, you can make decisions that are healthy. You can make small choices that add up in the end, and with your children, you can also plant seeds and help them learn more about their food choices, so as they grow ... they have a better interest in what's in front of them," she said.
Jefferson, a community health program manager with Giant Food, said stores like hers also make it easier to identify healthier foods by using a program called Guiding Stars -- which has a team of doctors and scientists rate products in the store by their nutritional content.
Guiding Stars gives qualifying foods one to three stars to indicate whether they're considered good, better or best.
"If you walk out of the grocery store and most of your items have stars, you know you're buying nutrient-dense foods," she said.
Jefferson suggests parents use the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "MyPlate" symbol to build their family's dinner plates - with half the plate composed of fruits and vegetables, a quarter of grains and a quarter of protein.
Finally, Arthurs said the shopping cart itself can make it easier to limit how many treats parents buy - if they pretend the top compartment of the shopping cart is like the top of the former food pyramid.
"The top of the food pyramid is the stuff that we shouldn't have too much of, and conveniently, in shopping carts, there's a smaller space," she said. "If it doesn't fit in here, we don't overflow, we stop. We have boundaries for those types of things at the top."
In the end, both experts said small swaps can add up, and that the lessons children learn in the grocery aisles when they're young will stay with them for life.
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