Your child's gut cares more about variety than amount.
A one page rainbow tracker for the fridge. Six colours, twenty different plants a week, and a scoring system most kids will fill in without being asked twice.
Where should we send it?
One page, free, print it today.
- Herbs, spices, frozen and tinned all count
- One page, straight onto the fridge
- Works with however your family already eats
What is on the page
One sheet, six colours, twenty circles to fill. Print a fresh one each Monday.
Six colours, each with a job
- Red for heart and memory, orange for eyes and skin, yellow for tummy and energy, green for bones and bodies, blue and purple for the brain, white and brown for the good bugs
- Twelve to seventeen suggestions under every colour, so there is always something already in your fridge
- One circle per new plant. Each plant counts once a week, which is what makes them reach for something different
- Four badges to unlock: all six colours, a new plant, a fresh herb, and twenty reached
Let them own it
- Put it at their height on the fridge and hand over the pen. The chart does the asking so you do not have to
- A handful of mixed seeds is several plants in one go, and herbs stirred through dinner count the same as a bowl of broccoli
- Photograph the finished sheet each week, so you can see the range widening over a term rather than a day
- Twenty is the target, not the pass mark. Eleven this week and fourteen next week is the direction that matters
We eat vegetables every day. It is the same five vegetables.
Most of us are counting servings. The gut is counting species. Every different plant brings its own fibres and polyphenols, and different bacteria feed on different ones, so a narrow range of plants supports a narrow range of bacteria no matter how many serves are on the plate.
The American Gut Project, a large observational study of more than ten thousand people, found that those eating more than thirty different plant types a week had noticeably more diverse gut bacteria than those eating ten or fewer. It is observational rather than a trial, so it shows an association rather than proving cause. It is also the clearest picture we have of why variety keeps coming up.
Thirty is an adult number. Twenty is a realistic weekly target for a child, and for most families it is closer than it sounds once herbs, seeds, tinned beans and frozen vegetables are counted.
Why we made it
Diversity is one of the stronger markers of a resilient microbiome, and it is one of the few things a family can work on at home without a test, a supplement or a practitioner. Widening the range of plants a child eats is slow, unglamorous and genuinely effective.
The reason it is a chart rather than a list is behaviour. Plenty of children will try a new food to fill in a circle who would not try it because a parent asked. The grown-up keeps the reasoning, the child keeps the pen.
If your child has ongoing gut symptoms, constipation, bloating or pain that has not settled, this sits alongside proper investigation rather than in place of it. Diversity helps. It does not fix a driver that nobody has identified yet.
Send me the tracker
Free, one page, print it today.
General education for parents and carers. It does not replace individual assessment, diagnosis or treatment. If your child has a diagnosed food allergy, speak with your own practitioner before introducing anything new. © The Family Naturopath, The KAN Clinic.