Inside: Best Gluten-Free Snack Ideas For Your Kids. Collaborative post.
Kids love snacks, but the prepackaged goodies on store shelves often contain wheat and gluten ingredients and are high glycemic. Gluten binds ingredients together just like glue, and it’s a convenient part of most snacks, from graham crackers to cookies.
Sometimes it’s tough to find gluten-free snacks for kids. Many prepackaged ingredients in gluten-free foods are fillers with no nutritional value. Manufacturers also use hidden wheat-based ingredients like “barley malt,” a sweetener made of wheat.
However, finding delicious gluten-free snacks for the kids is not impossible. Whether fresh or boxed, providing nutrition and variety is easy when you know what ingredients to avoid.
Offer Fruits & Vegetables First
The best snacking foods are fruits and vegetables, and most are easy to prepare and serve.
Slicing an apple, peeling a banana, or washing grapes takes just a second, which means fruit helps parents and caregivers deliver snacks quickly and in a healthy way.
Vegetables, too, are an excellent snack, and it’s easy to slice vegetables in advance for afternoon snacking. In addition to the classic carrot, other super healthy options include avocados, butternut squash, cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes.
If you want to add a store-bought dip for the vegetables, make sure to select one that is labeled gluten-free or is free from common gluten-based ingredients. Avoid dips with modified food starch, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, glucose syrup, malt flavoring, and malt extract.
Prepackaged Versus Homemade Snacks
Many snack food manufacturers have recognized the need for gluten-free products and started making popular foods in gluten-free versions. The classic Oreo, for example, is sold in gluten-free form. You can also get the knock-off version from gluten-free manufacturer Glutino.
Blue Diamond makes quite a few varieties of gluten-free crackers made from almonds and rice flour. Fritos, an item no one would consider a health food, is decent in a pinch if you’re at a convenience store, need something quick, and have a crabby kindergartener in the backseat.
However, with minimal prep, you can also make comfort snacks for your little ones at the house. You can make fresh sweet potato fries by cutting up sweet potatoes, drizzling them with some olive oil, and baking them at 425 degrees for 20 minutes.
You can also choose protein-based snacks, which are ideal right before sports practice or an afternoon at the park. You can roll up sliced turkey and cheese for a quick snack, as well as prepare hard-boiled eggs in advance.
Surprise the Kids with Gluten-Free Cake
Focusing on healthy foods with the highest possible nutritional value is a laudable goal, but sometimes the best afternoons with the kids are spent curled up on the couch with a movie and some treats or comfort food.
For parents of children who must eat gluten-free, a treat that’s not so common is cake or cupcakes. Home-made gluten-free chocolate cake is music to any child’s ears, and it’s something you can make as a group activity or offer as a surprise after a tough day at school.
Some companies manufacture gluten-free cake mix, but you can also employ just about any traditional recipe and just substitute a gluten-free flour blend in place of the wheat flour. If your recipe calls for vanilla extract and baking powder, make sure you use gluten-free versions of those ingredients, too. We particularly recommend this gluten-free cake recipe.
You can also introduce a few healthy raspberries on the side when you serve the gluten-free cake. Chocolate cake and raspberries are delightful.
Find Naturally Gluten-Free Snacks
You may remember the infamous low-fat and fat-free cakes and cookies from Snackwell’s, which were all the rage in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, the snacks often had more calories and sugar than regular snacks. Dieters gobbled up the fat-free treats thinking they could maintain or lose weight.
In some ways, modern gluten-free foods suffer from the same trade-offs. Manufacturers eliminate one harmful ingredient (gluten) but include several others that reduce the nutritional value of the food. Or they might use substitutes that act more like fillers than anything else.
For example, gluten-free foods often come loaded with added sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, which are terrible ingredients whether someone needs to eat gluten-free or not. Some snacks are filled with corn and rice, which aren’t as nutritionally valuable as other grains like quinoa and buckwheat (despite its name, buckwheat is a seed and is not made of wheat).
Some children on gluten-free diets may also have trouble with snacks that contain corn because of a corn protein called zein. This protein may cause a celiac flare-up or make it difficult for gluten-intolerant children to digest the food thoroughly.
Sometimes, the best way to find easy and delicious gluten-free snacks for the kids is to select products that are already and have always been gluten-free. At the very least, try to ensure that the sugar content on a gluten-free version isn’t higher than the wheat-containing version. If you see high sugar content, the manufacturer is using sugar as a filler.