Disclaimer – this is not a commercial product; just something we made up to solve a nutritional problem with our twins!

Ever since my son discovered the Breyers Pure Fruit All Natural frozen bars in the store, he just doesn’t want to give it up. “Ice cream cold! Ice cream cold!”, as he calls them, is all he wants to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For a while, we didn’t think it was that big a problem; after all, the Breyer’s product claimed to be “pure fruit”. And it had vitamin C, no added sugar and only 40 calories. After a few attempts, we gave in to his demands because we noticed that he would eat the rest of his otherwise healthy dinner if he had a frozen fruit bar in his other hand.

Except that he was eating 3 of these frozen bars throughout the day. So the “empty” calories just continued to add up. He was not getting any other nutritional value from these frozen bars. And to make it worse, his twin sister also joined in the fun and started demanding the same at each meal. So, we decided that something needed to be done about this problem.

I should admit that we got real lucky because this idea happen to come to us purely by chance.

Our twins like to eat a lot of yogurt. One day, as I was about to throw the empty yogurt cup in the trash bin, I wondered if we could just freeze some orange juice in it to offer it to my son instead of the “pure fruit” bars. The OJ we buy is packed with vitamins, calcium, folic acid, magnesium and potassium. It is low in sugar and calories. As it turns out, the yogurt cup holds about the same amount as one of the frozen pure fruit bars, so the nutritional comparison is easy:

%Daily value based on 2000 cal diet

It was, as you can imagine, very easy to make. Even if my son eats 3 or 4 of these in a day, it is like drinking a cup of healthy, nutritious OJ. And judging by these photos, both my son and daughter can’t tell a difference!

We are thinking of trying cranberry juice (my daughter’s favorite) and frozen yogurt too.

What do you think? Have you had a similar problem? How did you solve it? Do you have other ideas to try?