PROGRAMS

Nutrition

“A healthy outside starts from the inside.”
— Robert Urich

NUTRITION IS A MAJOR FOCUS AT BRIGHT DAYS. We serve lunch, and two snacks to your child each day. As your child receives approximately 50% of their daily intake of food while in our care, it’s our job to ensure that they receive all of the nutrients required to promote growth and healthy development. How your child eats today will have a significant impact on their health throughout adolescence and adulthood. Consuming nutritious foods helps children grow, develop, do well academically, and feel good about themselves.

CREATING A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD is an important focus at our centre. Not only do we provide your children with nutritious meals and snacks, but we also focus on helping them prevent future issues such as picky eating, eating disorders, obesity, dental cavities, and iron-deficiency anemia.

This is done in a variety of ways, including set meal and snack times, well balanced and tasty meals, teaching the children to eat mindfully using all of their senses, and listening to their intuitive hunger cues. Healthy eating habits that start in early childhood are more likely to continue through to adulthood.

OUR CUSTOM MEAL PLAN was created specifically for Bright Days by pediatric dietician and nutritionist, Sarah Remmer RD — Canada’s child and family nutrition expert. The meals are prepared from scratch by a Red Seal Chef and his team at Origin at Spring Creek and are catered to the centre daily where the Educators serve them to the children. In addition to ensuring that all meals and snacks are “kid-approved”, the meal plan includes the following features:

• Only milk or water served at meals and snacks (no juice)
• Whole grains served 100% of the time
• 4–6 servings of vegetables/fruit per day
• 2–3 servings of protein-rich foods per day
• 1–2 servings of milk or dairy alternatives per day
• Minimum of 2 servings of oily fish per week
• No processed foods containing trans fatty acids

About Sarah Remmer, BSc. RD

Sarah Remmer is a Registered Dietitian, freelance writer and owner of Sarah Remmer Nutrition Consulting, a Calgary-based pediatric and family nutrition consulting and communications company. She’s also also a Mom of three!

Sarah obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Alberta, where she then went on to complete a year-long dietetics internship in Calgary. Sarah’s dietetics and counselling experience spans across many areas, including infant and child nutrition, pre-natal and post-natal nutrition, healthy weight management and eating disorders.

Sarah’s true passion lies in teaching parents not only what to feed their kids, but how. She does this by giving them invaluable tools that help them to nurture their children’s relationship with food for life. Sarah shares her passion not only with parents and kids in a one-on-one counseling setting, but also as a freelance nutrition writer who contributes regularly to many well known parenting resources. A few of these include Canadian Parenting magazine, Today’s Parent, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine Magazine, Glow, Flare, and was also a guest speaker at the 2017 National Dietitians of Canada Conference.

You may recognize Sarah from the media as well, as she has partnered with CBC Parents to host a videos series on picky eating, and helped create a CBC Kids cartoon TV show called “Ollie the Boy Who Became What He Ate”. She has also appeared on City TV’s Breakfast Television Calgary, Global News, CTV Morning Live Calgary as well as CBC Radio National news.