Many cultures use sweet foods as rewards for kids or as part of celebrations, like birthday parties. Unfortunately, we are putting our children’s health at risk by providing them with so many sweet foods and drinks. This presentation will show you how to make sweet treats your kids will enjoy with just half as much sugar, but have a lot more vitamins and minerals.
But first some background. Children are born with a preference for sweet tastes, that Nature offers in breast milk and ripe fruit. Humans evolved in a natural world where foods with very high sugar content, such as honey and dried dates, were rarely available.
While pure sugar has been with us for over a thousand years, until recently it was too expensive to be commonly used. But as we learned industrial techniques for extracting and concentrating sugar from sugarcane, sugar beets, and corn the cost of sugar plunged. In 1700 children were getting less than 1% of their calories from added sugar. Now, in many countries, they get 16% from added sugars. A modest amount of added sugar usually doesn’t cause problems, nor do the naturally occurring sugars in fruit or milk.
But the average child in much of the world is consuming 2 to 3 times or more than the recommended maximum. The American Heart Association recommends that kids 2-18 years old have less than 25 grams, or 6 teaspoons of sugar a day. (Bear in mind that a single can of soda contains 39 grams or 9 teaspoons of sugar.)
This much added sugar puts kids at much greater risk for developing lifelong problems with obesity, tooth decay, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, kidney stones, some types of cancer, and liver disease. This is a high price to pay for sweets.
In addition to being directly linked to many health problems, the “empty calories” in sugar (calories without fiber, vitamins, and minerals), can crowd healthier foods from a child’s diet. This is the primary cause of the growing “double burden” of malnutrition, where children become overweight but are still lacking essential vitamins and minerals.
Leaf for Life is addressing this “double burden” with a “double strategy” of developing sweets for kids with half the sugar and far more vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Both halves of this double strategy make use of green leaves that you can grow in a home garden.
We use the dried leaves of the stevia plant to replace half the sugar in baked treats. Stevia is a perennial herb native to South America. Its leaves are about 30 times sweeter than sugar, but have no calories, don’t raise blood sugar, and have a relatively mild aftertaste. Stevia has been used for centuries to sweeten foods and teas in tropical America and is recognized as safe for general use by the US Food and Drug Administration. You can replace all of the sugar in drinks with stevia, but with baked foods, like cookies and cake, it is better to keep half of the usual sugar because it is important for good texture.
Stevia can be grown outdoors in warm climates or grown in a container that can be brought inside during freezing weather. It is usually propagated from stem cuttings. There are several commercial stevia products on the market but home-grown stevia is the most economical and doesn’t have any added chemicals.
So, using stevia leaves can cut the sugar content of sweet treats in half. To increase the vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants that are usually missing from sweets we substitute the dried powdered leaves of some mild-flavored, high nutrition leaves for some of the flour.
Some of the best leaf crops for this combination of mild flavor and high nutritional value are: barley, katuk, cowpeas, sweet potato, aibika, jute, beet greens, parsley, longevity spinach, Okinawa spinach, Malabar spinach, and amaranth.
There is a short video on How to Make Leaf Powder with a Solar Dryer on this website.
So, now it’s time to make some high nutrition low-sugar cakes and cookies. Remember these recipes are just guides. You will probably want to play with the ingredients a bit to get the results you are looking for. Having kids help you prepare them will increase the odds that they enjoy eating them.
We’ll start with cakes and cupcakes then move on to cookies. Cakes are often used for celebrations. Cecilia is showing off a graduation cake. We will make cupcakes but the recipe is the same as for this graduation cake.
Begin by grating some orange peel. Then, set it aside. Next, mix together the dry ingredients. The flour, leaf powder, baking powder and soda. Set it aside as well.
Now in a large bowl beat butter, sugar and stevia together. Next add the egg and the orange peel. Mix it in -and then add the milk -and mix again. Now add the flour mixture and mix well with a big spoon or an electric beater.
Grease a standard size cake pan - or a cupcake pan. If you prefer you can use paper cupcake liners instead of grease. Fill them about two-thirds full.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (180 Celsius).
Bake the cupcakes for 20-25 minutes and a cake for about 30 to 40 minutes.
Let them cool completely before icing. Cakes can be decorated with a sweet frosting for birthdays and special events, but a healthier version can be made by replacing the frosting with chopped fruit that has been well drained. For another healthy alternative, try replacing half the butter in the recipe with applesauce.
Cakes are great for birthdays and celebrations but cookies have a big advantage in that they are more portable. This makes them very easy to use for school snacks or other social programs. These women in El Salvador made cookies enriched with cowpea leaves baked in an old-fashioned wood oven for a mid-day snack at their rural primary school. These Honduran university students are making leaf enriched cookies for a local school program.
Here is a basic recipe for making leaf enriched cookies.
Start by grating the lime and set it aside.
Next in a small bowl combine flour, leaf powder and salt and set it aside.
Now In a large bowl beat the butter, sugar and stevia until smooth. Add the egg and lime peel and mix again, then add the flour mixture and mix well
For easy cookies, just drop the dough by teaspoons onto a cookie sheet.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit or (160 Celsius).
Bake the cookies for about 10-12 minutes. Try to not let the tops brown.
After the cookies have cooled you can dip them in a simple glazing for an easy frosting. This glazing is just sugar and lime juice mixed together.
Our experience has been that kids really like green cookies in the shape of dinosaurs or frogs or Christmas trees. It is a bit more complicated and you need a refrigerator.
You can use the same ingredients as for the drop cookies.
Prepare ingredients as in the drop cookies recipe.
Once all the ingredients are mixed well, form the dough into a ball. Flatten it and then wrap it up in a piece of plastic or wax paper.
Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Then take it out of the refrigerator and while the dough is still cold, apply a little flour to a cutting board to prevent sticking and roll the dough until about 1 centimeter (¼ inch) thick
Cut the dough into shapes. Try cookies shaped like frogs, turtles, alligators, clover, or Christmas trees — anything that makes a recognizable shape that is normally green.
After the shapes are cut you can add candy stars and eyes if you like.
These cookies are a great way to introduce children to eating leafy green vegetables. Kids who refuse to eat a serving of turnip greens will fight over a stegosaurus shaped cookie with a yellow eye. You can get cookie cutters on the Internet or at cook shops.
As with the drop cookies, preheat the oven to 325 F or 160 C and bake about 12 minutes. Try to not let the tops of cookies get brown. After the cookies cool you can frost the cookies or add more decorations.
Both versions of this cookie recipe will make about 30 cookies.
It is often difficult to get kids to eat green leafy vegetables. Introducing new green foods with a party and a birthday cake or dinosaur shaped cookies is a great way to introduce children to leaf-enriched foods. And it can help parents close the gap between fun food and good nutrition.
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