Planning your family’s meals and snacks is an important step in making positive changes to the foods you eat. The benefits of planning your meals include:

• Less food waste
• Helps with food shopping
• You can involve other family members
• Saves money
• Makes preparing meals less stressful
• Can save time
• Helps reduce unhealthy snacking
• Reduces consumption of ready-meals, which are often high in fats, sugars and salt.
• More nutritious and balanced diet, by ensuring a variety of foods

We should aim for 3 regular meals a day – breakfast, lunch and dinner, with 2 healthy snacks. If we don’t eat 3 meals a day, we may be more likely to eat fast food and unhealthy snacks instead – which can lead to too much fat in our bodies, and increases the risk of developing diseases like cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes in later life. It’s also important, especially for children, to eat meals at roughly the same time each day. This helps train their bodies to know when food is next coming so they don’t get so hungry between meals.