Healthy Food Choices for Kids at Walt Disney World - Where Sugar Isn't the Only Choice

It's time for your Walt Disney World vacation and your kids are ready to go! It'll be late nights, early mornings, screaming thills and sugar, sugar, sugar! Ice cream for breakfast, hot dogs and French fries for lunch and cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets or pizza for dinner. Fruit? Vegetables? Not until you get home. No leafy, healthy choices for your kids at Disney, right?

Wrong!

In the last few years, Walt Disney World has been making a push towards healthier food choices, not just for children, but for all guests. Trans fats are being eliminated and fresh fruits and vegetables are cropping up everywhere. Your kid's deep fried dinner of yesterday is being offered sans trans fats and next to some new neighbors. Choices like yogurt and fruit, grilled chicken or fish, steamed vegetables or salads and more are suddenly everywhere. And the choices are not limited to table service dinners. Counter service "fast" food also serves up meals with healthy choices and fruit carts and sugar free treat options are available in every park.

Each restaurant at Disney caters to its own theme. And the children's menus follow suit. At the popular Le Cellier Steakhouse in Epcot's Canadian Pavilion, steak is on the menu for kids too. At Tony's Town Square in the Magic Kingdom, where Italian food rules, spaghetti and meatballs are available. In addition to the themed choices, however, table service for children offer either pre set three course food pyramid balanced healthy meals, or the child's choice of an appetizer, entrée and dessert. One example of a pre set menus is: Pizza with diced chicken and mozzarella cheese served with brown sugar sprinkled apples and steamed veggies. A yogurt parfait and rice pilaf are also part of a menu that may include grilled fish or chicken. The courses children can choose from, a la carte, have starter choices like carrots and celery with ranch dressing, garden salads, or a cup of soup. Entrees include the themed meal choice, but also often offer macaroni and cheese, beef and macaroni, or grilled chicken. A fruit cup is generally on the menu as a dessert choice.

Counter service restaurants follow the same general guides. There are a few choices for the main portion of the meal and then the sides can be any two of: grapes, sugar free Jell-O, carrot sticks, chocolate pudding, applesauce or a chocolate chip cookie. Included beverages are 1% milk, juice, or a small bottled water.

"But what about French fries? Hot dogs? Cheeseburgers? What if my child wants to eat something found somewhere other than the produce aisle or low fat meat counter?" you may cry. Well, this is Disney, of course, and while the menu options have expanded to include easy healthy choices, fries and soda are definitely available for substitutions. Fruit is a choice for dessert, but so is an ice cream sundae. Chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese are available and your child can have thick cut steak fries with that lean sirloin at Le Cellier instead of the steamed green beans. And don't forget the buffet restaurants where your child can have a plate consisting solely of cornbread, French fries, desserts and olives if that is what they want. Disney is looking more towards balance nowadays and kids can still be kids.

So you can still have those late nights and early mornings. You can still give them the screaming thrills. And yes, you can definitely still fill them up on sugar, sugar, sugar! But at the end of the day, you know they did ingest some pretty darn healthy food for any time of the year, much less on vacation.

And at the beginning of the day? Well...you can still feed them ice cream!