30 Healthy And Tooth-Friendly After-School Snacks

30 Corinna Dental-Approved Tooth-Friendly After-School Snacks

30-CDG-approved-snacks
It can be really difficult to know what to give hungry kids to eat after school. We know that they need something nourishing, and something that will keep them going until dinner time. But we’ve got another criterion that we think is really important, and it’s probably something that’s frequently overlooked by many of us.

We think it’s important to choose after-school snacks that are tooth-friendly as well.

Our Research

We needed some inspiration to generate a list of delicious, nourishing and tooth-friendly recipes, so we did a bit of online research: you can read about it here.

We discovered, to our horror, that of the nearly 300 snack ideas that we found on page one of the google search ‘healthy after school snacks’, only 44% of them achieved our criteria. The others all had significant quantities of sugar, honey, dried fruits, fruit purees and juice: all added sugars which the World Health Organisation are encouraging us to minimise in our daily intake.

Of the snacks that didn’t have added sugar, we selected 30 of them (the ones that sounded delicious and were nourishing as well as being tooth-friendly) for this list.

 

Our Selection Of Tooth-Friendly After-School Snacks

The first thing we’d like to say is that we don’t think it’s necessary to be too fancy with after-school snacks. If you haven’t got time to bake or prepare some of these recipes, a good fall-back any day of the week is vegetables with dip (hummus or avocado dip are our favourites), cheese and vegetables served with a few crackers, and fresh fruit (served whole or cut up).

We also like sushi (prepared at home or store-bought), popcorn (not big on the nutrients, but reasonably kind to teeth) and good-old sandwiches with a nice protein filling and lashings of salad.

The best beverage to accompany them is water.

Here’s the list: follow the links to the recipes.

  1. Healthy Spinach and Feta Dip 
  2. Chicken Kabobs With Peanut Sauce (omit the honey in the sauce)
  3. Homemade Hummus and Pita Chips (use veggies for dipping as well)
  4. Black Bean and Corn Quesadillas
  5. Spinach and pinenut mini quiches 
  6. Turkey Pinwheels (like turkey sandwiches, but cooler)
  7. Ham and Apple Wraps with Dip
  8. Frozen Fruit Salad–
  9. Devilled Eggs –
  10. Rice cake owls 
  11. Crunchy Roasted Chickpeas
  12. Tiny Tuna Melts
  13. Quick mini quiches – made with corn
  14. Mini Ham and Zucchini Quiches 
  15. Cheesy potato cakes 
  16. Spiced Carrot Spread
  17. Creamy Zucchini and Ricotta Spread 
  18. Homemade apple chips – just baked apple rings, sprinkled with cinnamon
  19. Mountain bread wrap with meat, cheese and salad (really just a variation on a sandwich)
  20. Black or white bean hummus – (#23-25)
  21. Cauliflower tots 
  22. Artichoke Pesto Bites –  (#30)
  23. Easy egg pikelets, served with steamed veggies 
  24. Tortellini Kebabs –  (#35)
  25. Fruity sticks 
  26. Tuxedo Olives –  (#44)
  27. Cucumber sandwiches (the cucumber slices are the ‘bread’) –
  28. Avocado boats – serve with fresh veggie sticks
  29. Watermelon popsicles – watermelon wedges on popsicle sticks
  30. Fun sushi balls 

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