If you have children, you’re going to feel like a short-order cook at some point. Your child may just have finished breakfast only to announce, “I’m hungry” a half hour later. There are days when you’ll feel you cannot get supper on the table fast enough, and you need to have a selection of easy, fun, and delicious snack foods that you won’t feel too terrible about offering between meals.

While convenience foods are just that – convenient – you trade that ease for high fat, high salt, and high sugar content. How can busy parents keep their little ones full and not feed them a bunch of junk?

Offering your child a plain piece of fruit may meet with resistance, so be sure you make fruit and vegetable snacks appealing. Bite-size fruit pieces and mixed fruit salads take just a little extra time to prepare, but are more likely to be consumed. Sprinkle some cinnamon on fruit, or add in cocoanut or vanilla yoghurt for a quick fruit salad. Offer baby carrots, snow peas, and celery sticks with a low-fat salad dressing dip and watch your child actually enjoy raw foods.

Get creative: put pretzel rods in a pear half for legs and raisins for eyes, center it on a lettuce leaf, and you’re created an edible bug for your child to devour. Cream cheese and raisins inside a celery stalk make “ants on a log” that will be fun to eat and nutritious.

Most children love chips, but not all are created equal. Grocery stores such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s offer delicious alternatives to salty, fatty potato chips and cheese puffs. You can find flaxseed tortilla chips, for instance, and puffed cheese snacks with half the fat of the regular variety, as well as sweet potato chips and vegetable chips.

Take a few minutes to read the labels, and you’ll find you can get the experience of chips with far fewer empty calories.

Pretzels are another low fat alternative to snack foods, and graham crackers can satisfy a sweet tooth on about half the fat and calories as cookies. Search the Internet for low fat cracker recipes, and let your children help you bake them. They’ll get to learn about measurement and chemistry while discovering the benefits of making preservative-free, low fat alternatives to favorite junk foods.

Good old nuts and raisins make a healthy snack mix, provided your child does not have a nut allergy. Add in high fiber cereals, yoghurt-covered and dried fruits, and your child will love the variety and slight sweetness and get protein and the benefits of nut oils.

Rice cakes make a great alternative to snack cakes and cookies, and won’t over-fill a child who needs just a little something to tide him over until you can get supper on the table.

Finally, read the labels of sherbets, sorbets, and frozen yoghurts. They may have lower fat than ice cream, but be full of sugar, so take a few minutes in the frozen food section to see what your best choice is. Ice milk and fruit ices are fun alternatives to ice cream, and you can make your own frozen orange juice pops with simple and easy to find molds.

Finding delicious, fun, and healthy alternatives to junk foods need not be time consuming. It may take an extra few minutes to shop for the best alternatives or think of a creative way to present a healthy snack, but it’s worth it to feed your child something you can both feel good about.