This is a guest post by Melissa Marek, RD LD

Fiber is an extremely important part of your daily diet. Its best known benefit is its ability to help keep our bowels moving. Eating enough fiber will help prevent constipation. The added benefit is that it also plays a role in protecting against diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. If that isn’t enough reason to get a daily dose of fiber, it also helps with weight management by helping to keep you fuller longer.

In order to make sure you are getting enough fiber, it helps to understand where it comes from and where you can find it. Fiber comes mainly from plant cell walls, the parts that cannot be digested by the enzymes of the GI tract. For that reason, fiber can be found in plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, and grains.

To best benefit from fiber, the recommended daily amount is 21-25 grams per day for women and 30-38 grams per day for men. This is not a difficult goal to meet, but remember that when adding fiber to your diet, you will need to increase your fiber intake slowly and more importantly, increase your fluids. If you don’t drink enough fluids you may suffer from constipation, the very thing that fiber helps alleviate.

To better comprehend the benefits of fiber and how to best meet daily requirements, it helps to understand that there are different types of fiber. They come from different sources and, accordingly, help with different things.

SOLUBLE FIBER may help lower blood cholesterol, especially LDL (bad) cholesterol. It also helps control blood sugar in people with diabetes. You can get soluble fiber from oats, oat bran, dried beans and peas, nuts, barley, flax seed, oranges, apples, carrots, and psyllium husk.

INSOLUBLE FIBER moves bulk through the intestines, which helps prevent constipation. It also controls and balances the pH in your intestines. Insoluble fiber can be found in fruit skins, root vegetable skins, dark green leafy vegetables, whole wheat products, corn bran, seeds and nuts.

Soluble fiber, as it name alludes, becomes a jelly-like mass when mixed with water and ferments in the intestinal tract, but insoluble fiber just absorbs the water and bulks up stool.

The term DIETARY FIBER, which appears on nutrition facts labels is merely a sum of the soluble and insoluble fiber content in a product, per serving.

A common source of fiber is whole grain. Whole grain refers to the entire grain seed (bran, germ, & endosperm).  Whole grain foods are an important source of not only fiber, but also of vitamins, minerals and other health-promoting compounds that you won’t find in a refined grain.

HOW MUCH SHOULD I BE EATING?

According to the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 3 or more ounce-equivalents of whole grain products per day is ideal. You can meet this requirement by adding barley, buckwheat, bulgur, corn, millet, rice, rye, oats, sorghum, wheat and wild rice to your daily diet.

What does a one-ounce equivalent of whole grains look like?

• 1 slice 100% whole grain bread
• 1/2 of a 100% whole grain English muffin or bagel
• ½ cup hot cooked oatmeal (Rolled oats or quick oats)
• 2 cups popped popcorn
• 1 ounce baked tortilla chips (About 15 chips)
• 1/3 cup cooked whole wheat pasta
• 1/3 cup cooked brown rice, bulgur, sorghum, or barley

TIPS TO INCREASE YOUR FIBER INTAKE:

• Sprinkle flax meal, wheat germ,  or nuts/seeds onto your cereal, cottage cheese, yogurt, or even frozen yogurt
• Add fresh or dried fruits to your cereal or yogurt
• Substitute whole wheat flour for at least 1/3 of the all purpose flour in baked goods
• Add frozen vegetables to soups or casseroles
• Add beans into a salad, soup, or stew
• Cut prunes into pieces and mix them into yogurt, cereal, or pancake mix

What to do at the supermarket:

Packaging for fiber rich foods now often contain a label promoting its fiber content. These labels make finding fiber-rich foods easy so shoppers don’t have to go through the hassle of checking out the food label or searching for the fiber content. But what do these regulated fiber claims mean exactly?

• 100% Whole Grain or 100% Whole Wheat: The product doesn’t have any refined white flour
• Good source of fiber:  There are at least 3g per serving
• Excellent source of fiber:  There are at least 5g per serving
• When reading the ingredient statement, a whole grain should be listed FIRST!

Here’s a handy list of fiber rich products:

• Oats
• Oat bran
• Grains (Barley, bulgur, Kasha, Amaranth, Quinoa, Couscous)
• Polenta
• Brown rice
• Whole wheat breads and pastas
• Fresh fruits (Oranges, pears, dried figs, apples, berries, raisins)
  —> Choose whole fruits (fresh, frozen, or dried) over juices, which have most of the fiber removed
• Fresh vegetables (Winter squash, peas, eggplant, beets, cabbage, broccoli, artichoke hearts, corn)
• Potatoes & sweet potatoes
• Dried beans
• Nuts

Melissa Marek is a graduate of Texas A&M University with degrees in both Nutritional Sciences and Food Science & Technology.  She has experience with recipe analysis for magazines and restaurants as well as with nutrition facts labeling for large corporations and private label companies. She is a registered dietitian at Axxya Systems, makers of Diet Analysis and Food Labeling software products. Contact her at mmarek [at] axxya [dot] com.

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New! Choose a better breakfast with CerealScan™ by Fooducate (It’s Free)

Are you a loyal fan of a specific cereal brand? Is it the flavor? The nutritional value you once took the time to look up? The only thing your kids will eat? Well here’s some bad news. Manufacturers can, and often do, change product formulations, and you don’t even know about it. Sometimes the changes are not necessarily in the consumers best interest.

Thanks to Marion Nestle’s Food Politics blog for pointing out a falling out between loyal customers and Cascadian Farms, an organic food manufacturer that was acquired by General Mills in 1999. (To be precise, it was actually acquired by Small Planet Foods earlier in the 1990’s. General Mills acquired Small Planet in 1999)

The issue at hand – Cascadian Farm Purely O’s Cereal and a recent reformulation that TRIPLED the sugar count without notifying consumers. The company’s website is abuzz with rants by (ex)-loyal customers:

As a mother of three, and devoted Cascadian Farm consumer, I can’t imagine why more sugar was added to previously excellent product. We consumed about 2,3 boxes of Purely O’s per week until my children all the sudden told med how they tasted differently. Naively, I thought it would be marked on the box if any changes of the products had taken place…then I noticed the increased sugar content. This made us lose faith in your entire brand.

OR

How you can call this cereal “Purely O’s” is beyond me. SUGAR!!??? Really???? CORN?? Really?? Why do we need another corn based,sugary cereal in the grocery aisles? And it is very sneaky to not announce a change on the box.

What you need to know:

In the past, Purely O’s had a front of pack label claiming “No added sugar”. This label disappeared a while ago. Then in October, the company changed its product formulation, without informing consumers.

To be fair, the increase in sugar is from 1 gram to 3 gram, which still leaves these O’s a better choice than virtually all other sweetened cereals.

The company lowered the sodium content from 280 to 200mg, which is commendable, but still too high for a breakfast cereal.

Other changes include removing whole grain barley flour and instead using corn meal. To compensate for the fiber loss, they’ve added oat fiber. The total fiber count hasn’t changed and is 3 grams per serving, the minimum you should be getting from a breakfast cereal.

So why hide the change? It’s not like people won’t notice – the ingredient list and nutrition panel are on the box, for crying out loud. Why the need for all this sneakiness? Didn’t General Mills know it would lose its loyal base of Cascadian Farms fans? Most likely, a focus group showed that the loss of a few loyal fans would be compensated for by an influx of new consumers for whom 3 grams of sugar is a 60-70% reduction.

We’ve updated the CerealScan database to reflect these changes. Cascadian Farm Purely O’s is still a top scorer, but for a group of (no longer) loyal customers, that doesn’t matter anymore.

What to do at the supermarket:

When buying a breakfast cereal, look for low sugar (6 or less grams. 3 grams is considered very low), high fiber (3 or more grams), and less than 150mg sodium per serving. Obviously, artificial colors are a big No No. These factors are much more important factors for your heath than whether the cereal is organic or not.

And just to reiterate, despite the changes, Purely O’s are still a better choice than most other cereals out there.

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New! Choose a better breakfast with CerealScan™ by Fooducate (it’s Free!)

Cereal has become, in just over a century, the quintessential American breakfast. Tens of millions of people start their day with a bowl of flakes, puffs, or crisps poured from a cardboard box .

There are over 1000 different cold cereal products one can choose from, and any given supermarket dedicates an entire aisle to these. Last year, Americans bought over Ten Billion dollars worth of breakfast cereal. This is a big business, with lots at stake for manufacturers, big and small, who fight for every sliver of market share.

Let’s remind ourselves that cereal is not the only option for breakfast. Whole wheat toast, banana, yogurt, cheese, fruit salad, a glass of milk, and eggs are a great start to a day, and don’t require much effort.  For many households, though, cereal is a morning tradition not easily broken. But can it be nutritionally improved?

As consumers are becoming more educated about health and nutrition, the cereal category is in flux, with each brand trying to convince us that its line of products is the nutritional Olympus. Despite small improvements here and there, most of the achievements are in marketing claims. Shoppers are now more confused than ever – with an overload of conflicting information – and no true means to decipher it all to make a good decision.

No more.

Today, we are happy to announce CerealScan™, an iPhone application that will help you choose a better, more nutritious breakfast cereal at the supermarket.

It’s dead simple to use: You launch the CerealScan application on your iPhone. It automatically scans a cereal box’s barcode (UPC).   You then see a product dashboard with concise, graphic information that helps you decide in 3 seconds if the cereal is healthy enough for you. If not, CerealScan shows 5 better choices.

Here is an example (see image). The scanned cereal scores only 2 out of 5. It is high in sugar and medium in sodium. It contains trans fats and controversial artificial colorings. Not good. Swipe your finger across the alternatives to view all 5 better options. Tap on an alternative’s image to see its nutrition dashboard.

How it works: We’ve culled over 2000 cereal boxes into the CerealScan database. The analysis and recommendations are fully automated. They are modeled on answering a simple question – “What would a dietitian recommend if she was standing there with you at the cereal aisle?” The implementation of that answer is by no means trivial. Thankfully a dedicated group of dietitians and programmers at Fooducate have been working on this project for quite some time. I think they’ve done a great job.

If you want to to learn more, there’s more information at the Cereal Scan Website. To get it on Apple’s iTunes click here.

What to do at the supermarket:

When it comes to cereal, the basics we’ve been writing about for the past 18 months have not changed. More fiber, Less sugar. No artificial colors and funny preservatives.

Now you have another option – you don’t need to remember anything, just bring your iPhone along with you to the supermarket and use CerealScan.

Try it out, we’d love to hear how CerealScan has helped you make a better choice. Comment below or email us: cerealscan at fooducate dot com.

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Sara Lee Corporation announced late last week that it plans a sodium reduction in many of its products over the course of the next five years. The reduction is in “key categories” of fresh bread, hot dogs, lunchmeat, breakfast foods and cooked sausage. Brands included in the initiative are  Jimmy Dean, Ball Park, Hillshire Farm, and Sara Lee.

What you need to know:

This is good news. Sort of.

It would have been better if the reduction would become effective immediately and not planned for such a long term. Right now the press release is more about marketing than nutrition. Sara Lee would gain much more credibility if it announced the reductions as they were being executed, not in advance.

We Americans are consuming way too much salt in our diet.While the daily maximum is 2300 mg of sodium (5 grams of salt, the equivalent of a teaspoon) the average consumption is over 3,500 mg. Excess salt intake results in high blood pressure, hypertension and additional health risks.

over 70% of the salt we consume comes from processed foods. In many cases, the sodium comes in surprising places. Bread products, Cereals, and even sweet snacks contain high levels of salt.

Take Sara Lee’s Plain Bagel. It contains 590 mg of sodium – more than 25% of the recommended daily maximum. And this is before the lox, eggs, or cheeses!

What to do at the supermarket:

We could all do with less sodium. Look at products’ nutrition facts panel where sodium content is mandated both in milligrams and percent of daily value. Grains will always contain some levels of salt but choose those with lower numbers. Many manufacturers are reformulating their products to reduce sodium levels, so it makes sense to compare similar products and choose the one with the lowest count.

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Last week, General Mills made a dramatic splash in nutrition circles when it announced it would reduce the amount of sugar in its cereals for kids to “single digit” levels. While sugar reduction is commendable, it still does not make the cereals a good choice for breakfast. And the decrease is not substantial enough. Some cereals have already seen their sugar content lessen by 1 gram or 2 (8%-15% decrease), but cereals are still at the 3-teaspoon-of-sugar per serving level.

Take Lucky Charms as an example. “Magically delicious Lucky Charms cereal features frosted oats and colored marshmallows.” Why should kids be getting marshmallows for breakfast every morning? Aren’t these treats reserved as occasional treats for roasting over a fire at summer camp or a family outing?

We took a deeper look inside Lucky Charms to find out just how good they are for our children. Read more…

The only special treatment my young children get when we walk into a restaurant are the crayons and kiddie menu to doodle on. Why in the world would we punish them with chicken nuggets, hot dog, a reheated pizza, or whatnot, when they can be enjoying the fine Italian/Thai/French/Vietnamese/Californian cuisine that the adults are having?

Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t.

There’s this belief that children can’t eat grown-up food. They won’t like it. They don’t eat veggies. They can’t handle complex tastes, yadda yadda…

Same thing happens when grocery shopping at the supermarket. Entire aisles, product lines, and companies are devoted to that beloved niche market – our kids. Granted, there are some products for babies that make sense – a jar of Gerber to keep in a diaper bag for those cases when baby’s hungry and you’re not near the kitchen. But have you had a look at your pantry and fridge to count up all the things you bought because they’re for kids?

Whether it’s Danimals, a sugary cereal, or glow in the dark Mac ‘n Cheese – think about the real reason you bought these items. Is it because your children really need them? Or because of the clever packaging that has led you to believe these are better choice for your little ones?

What you’ll discover in many cases is that you’ve gotten something with more sugar and in some cases artificial colorings. Blue is a fun color to paint with. Not to eat.

If your children are still very young and not subject to too much outside influence other than parents and close family, it should be very easy to refrain from kid branded products. Problems usually arise when a child starts preschool or learns from older friends in the surrounding social circle.

Viewing TV commercials is a contributing factor, too. It would be great if manufacturers would refrain from using kid pop icons on their packaging. But the deal is just too sweet for both Hollywood and the brand manufacturers. Unfortunately, the industry self regulation is very lax, and the government does not and cannot effectively intervene.

So it’s up to parents to figure out a game plan that works for their family. There’s no one right solution.

Whatever you decide, try  not to be too extreme. The 80 / 20 rule seems to be effective with many of our readers – if your children eat 80% of their food as healthful as you can muster, but the other 20% more leniently (including junk food and post-modern snacks), then you’re off to a good start. If you deny your children any of the treats that they see their friends consuming, you’ll be in for quite the rebellion once they hit the teenage years.

What food strategies are you implementing with your children?

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One of the interesting sessions here at the annual Food and Nutrition Conference in Denver hosted a panel of 3 experts who presented their views on what the rating systems are, why and how they were created, and how they will improve nutrition.

First up was  Susan Crockett, PhD, RD, FADA, who for the last 10 years has been with General Mills. She presented the Smart Choices program of Fruit Loop infamy, and addressed the specific backlash against pre-sweetened cereal. In her attempt to justify the benchmark that allows such a culinary and nutrition horror to be considered a smart choice, Dr. Crocket first provided a background on how General Mills is committed to health and nutrition. She then showed that the Smart Choice panel was composed of both industry and academic experts, and lastly dug deep into the numbers to show how the benchmark for cereals was chosen.

Let us say that we commend General Mills that contribute 5% of pretax profit to nutrition and wellness programs. That was about $80M last year. But let’s not forget that this is a huge profit driven enterprise. The company and its peers has seen consumer confusion regarding nutrition labels and decided to handle it as a business opportunity. Working with “non-industry” experts is a way to lend credibility to the program. However, many experts are affiliated in some way or another with the industry.

As to sugar in cereal – the Smart Choices panel took a recommendation for 10% of daily calories from added sugar. In a 2000 calorie a day diet, that means 200 calories. They divided the 200 calories into 4 eating events of 50 calories. 12 grams of sugar, which is what you’ll find in Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, and others, add up to 48 calories per serving. And that, by their book is a Smart Choice. Wonderful, no?

We were left with some hope, as Dr. Crocket said that Smart Choices is continually evolving, and that with time benchmarks will be adapted to feedback from the field.

Next speaker was Annette Maggi, MS, RD, LD, FADA from NuVal. Maggi is the director of the business arm of NuVal, which licenses its 1-100 rating system to supermarkets for display on shelf tags. The NuVal system was not funded by the industry, rather by a group of scientists with a stated goal of becoming a nutrition GPS at the supermarket. The idea is to tag every single product in the supermarket with a score. That way, in the supermarket, people can compare products within a category.

So far 33,000 products have been scored. In an earlier talk we had with Prof. Keith Ayoob, of the Nuval Scientific board, he said that the group was working on rating over 100,000 items in supermarkets. The Nuval algorithm is quite complex when compared to Smart Choices, with hundreds of factors taken into consideration for each product.

Without referring specifically to Smart Choices, Maggi stated that one of the clear advantages of NuVal was its independence. A Kraft PR spokesperson tried to refute that statement in the ensuing Q&A by mentioning that the wife of one of the NuVal board members has a conflict of interest.

Last to present was Susan Moores, MS, RD who does not represent any rating system, but has been working with grocers on a variety of health and nutrition issues over the years. She provided an interesting viewpoint whose main message was stop looking for the numbers and the stickers, focus on the food: “A number will not put a meal on the table”.

Moores said that the nutrition labels have had an effect on industry. Food manufactures have reformulated products to get better scores. For example, the notorious Froot Loops lowered sugar by one gram and upped fiber by one gram. Supermarkets who adopt one system or other are able to differentiate themselves.

Mostly though, these programs have created controversy and chaos. And wherever there is a mess, there’s an opportunity for dietitians to help their clients  with guidance and sound advice.

The session was very informative, but did not provide any substantially new information. Our position is that any industry funded rating system is inherently flawed because of the direct conflict of interest between companies’ need to sell more processed food to make more money, and consumers’ need to get away from these types of foods.

What to do at the supermarket:

Skip the health claims, benchmarks, and other marketing tricks. Learn to read a nutrition panel and familiarize yourself with ingredients to watch out for in the ingredient list. When sugar is the first ingredient in a cereal, that is not a smart choice, no matter how many PhDs in the room will tell you it is.

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After months of hype and buildup, General Mills finally launched its new Wheaties product last week. After 85 years of a single formulation and recently staggering sales, the General Mills marketing team decided it’s time to invigorate the Wheaties Brand. The new product is aimed squarely at the male demographic, and to that effect has been carefully designed and formulated to be a manly start to the day.

The product is still unavailable in supermarkets, so we could not examine the ingredient list nor the nutrition facts panel to learn what makes this product a breakfast of male champions. However, their website provides some hints:

1. Whole grain. That’s not new, the old formulation is also whole grain.

2. Excellent Source of Fiber. This means it has to have at least 5 grams worth, up from the current 3 grams. This is good.

3. 100% of the daily value of Five B vitamins. All added through fortification. While this is a nice, most Americans are not deficient in B vitamins.

Here’s what the website does not tell the male consumer about where the fuel comes from:

1. More sugar – If you’ve tasted Wheaties, you know they’re facing stiff competition from sugary cereal on the taste front. Many people complain that Wheaties taste like shredded cardboard. The solution is, of course, more sugar. How much more?

We’re not clear on exactly how much because the info is unavailable on the website (Men don’t read nutrition info right?). The older formulation has 4 grams per serving, about 1 teaspoon. The new formula will be 25% sugar by weight!

2. More calories – 200 calories per serving instead of the current 100. That’s twice as many calories. While some of the extra 100 calories come from the sugar increase, the rest may possibly be the result of a larger serving size.

3. No Folic Acid – not that it matters much, but the new formulation has removed folic acid (another B vitamin) from the list of fortifications, because it is associated with girly nutrition and pregnancy. Indeed, not a manly vitamin.

We emailed General Mills for more nutritional information and will share with you if and when we get it. In the meantime, if any of our readers spot this product in the wild, shoot us an email with the details.

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1. Folate is a water-soluble B vitamin that occurs naturally in food such as spinach, asparagus, and lentils.

2. Folic acid (vitamin B9) is a synthetic form of folate. It is found in supplements and added to fortified foods such as breads and cereals.

3. Folic acid is also called folicin.

4. Folate helps produce and maintain new cells, therefore its importance during infancy and pregnancy.

5. Folic acid is is actually better absorbed by the body than natural folate, almost twice as efficiently.

6. The daily requirement for folate is 400 micrograms (mcg). Pregnant and lactating women – 600 mcg.

7. A safe upper limit to folate consumptions is 1000 mcg a day.

8. Folate deficient women who become pregnant are at greater risk of giving birth to low birth weight, premature, and/or infants with neural tube defects.

9. Beginning in 1998, the FDA has required the addition of folic acid to enriched breads, cereals, flours, corn meals, pastas, rice, and other grain products. The stated goal was reduction in rates of neural tube defects in newborns.

10. Despite the fortification, many women planning to become pregnant add a folic acid supplement to their daily routine.

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The “Smart Choices” front of package food labeling scheme officially launches this week. 500 Packaged foods from ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kraft, PepsiCo, Sun-Maid, Tyson and Unilever are already approved.

The program hopes to take nutrition confusion out of your life by presenting a simple green check mark on the front of packaged foods that have passed a nutrition benchmark.

While we applaud the initiative to simplify food nutrition information, Smart Choices has substantial drawbacks, which we outlined in the past.

Granted, there are several advantages, such as simplicity, uniformity across brands, and the front-and-center calorie information provided on some labels. However, we think that this industry backed initiative, along with fifteen others was born in a vacuum created by the lack of initiative of the FDA.

Here are six reasons why Smart Choices won’t really help shoppers. Read more…