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DON'T LET THEM EAT CAKE! Sports snacks can be easy and nutritious

BY NARA SCHOENBERG

BY NARA SCHOENBERG

Chicago Tribune

You don't want to be known as the Twinkie Mom who supplied all the members of the soccer team with snack cakes and Diet Coke.

On the other hand, bringing spinach juice and organic mushrooms when it's your turn to deliver the all-important post-game refreshment could set up your kid for decades of therapy.

We asked dietitian Amy Jamieson-Petonic, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, for some tips on selecting healthy, easy-to-prepare-and-deliver snacks that kids will actually eat.

Perhaps her biggest crowd-pleaser is in the drinks category: "A really great post-event hydration drink is low-fat chocolate milk because it has carbohydrates. They're getting fluids and they like it, so they're going to drink it."

But she also has a stealth weapon in the unlikely fruit and vegetables arena. Frozen grapes are frosty, fun and easy to package. Just take grapes off the stem, put them in a plastic bag and freeze. If you've already succumbed to peer pressure and gotten a cooler, you can keep the grapes fully frozen until the end of the game. If not, they'll still be frosty and fun.

Other tips fall into three major groups: fruits and vegetables, whole grain snacks and sensible drinks.

"Dried fruit is a really quick, easy thing that you can do: dried apricots, dried cranberries, dried raisins," Jamieson-Petonic says. Cranberries now come in little kid-friendly boxes, just like raisins.

On the fresh fruit front, Jamieson-Petonic endorses just about everything. Apples (particularly when they're small, red, hard and unblemished), watermelon, orange slices, clementines and grapes go over well.

Rather than buying bags of low-fiber chips or snacks, Jamieson-Petonic prefers carbs such as whole-grain graham crackers or whole grain Goldfish crackers.

On the drink front, water is the healthiest choice, followed by lower-calorie sports drinks such as Propel. Jamieson-Petonic says 100 percent fruit juices come in third.