March is National Nutrition Month. It was created in the 1970’s by the American Dietetic Association as a means of raising awareness of nutritious eating and promoting the role of registered dietitians in helping us stay lean and healthy.

The ADA website has a special section dedicated to “NNM”. In it, some  interesting features, including an interactive history of fad diets and a rather lame interactive quiz. Plus a ton of educational materials and suggestions.

What you need to know:

Unfortunately, despite the ADA’s efforts, obesity rates have skyrocketed in the last decades. There are many reasons for this, including gargantuan budgets for marketing by the food industry, versus very tiny budgets of health and diet groups. When was the last time you saw a 30 second commercial for healthy eating? But you mostly likely saw 50 fast food and junk food spots just in the last week.

Additionally, human nature is such that it’s easier to buy cheap and tasty junk food  rather than prepare your own healthy food at home.

Visiting a dietitian for a consultation is so expensive ($100-200 an hour), that most people can’t afford it. Only if you become diabetic or your kidneys fail does your health insurance kick in and allow you to see an RD.

Should the ADA be much more aggressive in its activities and position on diet related issues? Take a look at how PETA manages to create awareness to their cause through creative marketing and absolutely no limitations imposed by industry sponsorships. Unfortunately, the ADA receives donations from corporate sponsors, that may have an effect on the types of messages sent out to the public, and if not that, at least their tone.

Here’s an example:

If you consult with a dietitian wanting to lose weight, one of the first and easiest suggestions is to switch from soft drinks and juices to plain water. However, as a collective, it is hard for the ADA to come out with such a message because the organization is sponsored by Coca Cola and Pepsi. That’s why you’ll get a watered-down message (reverse pun intended) talking about “consuming in moderation”.

What do you think the ADA can do to really make an impact on America’s waistline?

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

New! Choose a better breakfast with CerealScan™ by Fooducate

You’re trying to shield your children from junk food advertising. Limiting TV exposure, explaining why it’s important to eat real food, teaching them to prepare simple dishes. But then you take your kids to the movies. And interwoven into the narrative are all those products and fast food establishments you’re trying so hard to stay away from. Sound familiar?

According to a new study published in Pediatrics, product placement has become a prevalent advertising form in movies and TV shows. Study author, Dr. Lisa A. Sutherland, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, decided to research this subject after a night at the movies with her son a few years ago. Here’s what her team learned:

Sutherland and her colleagues analyzed the top 20 films at the box office in each year from 1996 to 2005. Researchers watched each film and noted brand-name references to food and beverage products plus retail food establishments, such as fast-food restaurants.

Of the 200 movies, 69 percent — 138 — featured at least one food, beverage or retail establishment…

Candy products (26 percent) and salty snacks (21 percent) were the most common foods seen in the movies, and sugary soft drinks made up three-quarters of the beverages mentioned. Fast-food restaurants, meanwhile, accounted for two-thirds of the retail establishment mentions.

McDonald’s topped the references to food establishments with 13.1 percent of them, while Pepsi and Coca-Cola were nearly equal (at about 35 percent each) at the top of the list of beverage companies whose products appeared in the movies. Pepsi food products also topped the list of brand-name food references.

A few comments:

1. Where can one sign up to analyze the next batch of movies? Seems like a great job, watching movies all day.

2. But seriously, as someone who worked in the consumer electronics industry in the past, I can tell you that from a manufacturer perspective, placement in a motion picture is considered the Oscar of product promotion. It’s a win-win for Hollywood and for the brands. Unfortunately the largest advertising budgets will always be for the Mc-junk foods of the world.

3. There is hope though. Since you are watching the movie together with your children, use the drive back home as

an opportunity to teach them how to think critically about the images they see.

What to do at the supermarket:

If your child asks for a product as seen on TV or in a movie, you needn’t automatically say no. The 80/20 rule should work here. If most of the time they eat OK, then a rainbow colored snack here and there isn’t going to bring on Armageddon.  If your children are old enough to understand, review the nutrition facts panel and ingredient list together, have them look for alternatives that are more healthful, and empower them by letting them choose something they found and is healthy enough. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

New! Choose a better breakfast with CerealScan™ by Fooducate

Think of a healthy fast food chain. Which one comes to mind?

If you chose Subway, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey by market research firm Decision Analyst, Subway is the fast food franchise consumers trust the most for nutrition information.

Subway is the leader in consumer trust with almost one-quarter (24.2%) of consumers saying they “completely trust” its nutritional claims…42% of Subway customers choose this restaurant because it “has a good selection of healthy items,” compared with only 3% of Taco Bell consumers who select this restaurant for its healthy menu.

“Subway owns the nutritional claim relative to its competition, as there is a significant gap between Subway and these other popular fast food/quick-service restaurants.” read more…

Sorry to rain on this parade folks. Subway has taken pains to portray itself as a healthy fast food, and if you look at the nutrition information on their menus and website, it is quite impressive.

Until you read the fine print. Read more…

Here’s a variation on a theme we’ve long known. Calorie counts on fast food menu items shortchange us, with a twist. In a study recently published in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers found that calories stated on fast food menu items tended to be inaccurate, averaging 18% MORE CALORIES per item than listed in the menu. Example: Wendy’s grilled chicken wrap listed 260 calories, but was found to have 344 (a 32% overage).

It’s not surprising that calorie counts are inaccurate. A precise measurement in a lab is very expensive, so most companies turn to software programs that calculate calories based on the product’s ingredients. But the software is unable to take into account the various preparation methods and variances in quantities of each ingredient (half a tablespoon of mayo added or subtracted is 65 calories!).

But to err consistently higher than what’s stated on the menu, and by a whopping 18 percent, seems a bit fishy don’t you think? Granted, a few items did err for the better, but they were a minority.

It’s important to mention that the research was focused on reduced energy meals, the items people most interested in weight loss tend to look at.

If you’re scoffing and thinking that people wanting to lose weight shouldn’t be in a fast food joint to begin with, we’ve got more bad news. The researchers also checked 10 popular frozen meals and found an average 8% discrepancy, again skewing to a lower calorie count than was actually present. Lean Cuisine’s shrimp and angel-hair pasta claims 220 calories, but clocked in at 319 (45% more!).

Let’s have some back-of-an-envelope math fun, shall we?

If a supposedly 2000 calories-a-day diet is actually 18% higher in calories, that means 2360 calories or an extra 360 calories a day consumed. Since every 3500 calories are equivalent a pound to our body weight, approximately every ten days we’d gain one pound of body weight. In one month, we’d be up 3 lbs. In one year, a whopping 36 pounds!

Fooducate readers know not to trust health claims, and know that front of pack nutrition labels are more about marketing than anything else. Should we now assume that the calorie count on the nutrition facts panel is wrong too?

The FDA gives manufacturers 20% leeway when labeling their products’ nutritional values. That doesn’t mean manufacturers automatically skim 20% off  the real number to seem attractive to shoppers. But just like your cellphone / internet / [insert here]  providers tend to err NOT in your favor, so do food manufacturers. And most of them know that the FDA has bigger issues to handle and thus won’t come running after them.

What to do at the supermarket:
One way to reduce calorie miscounts is to buy more products that don’t have calories listed on them – fresh fruits and vegetables, for example. Another is to automatically add a “TAX” of 10-20% when you read the calorie label, just as you would when calculating a sales tax.

You should also note that a far greater problem is serving size misrepresentation. Many products specify a toddler size portion, when in fact people consume twice the amount. That raises the calorie count by 100%, not a measly 18%. So make sure you read the calorie count together with the serving size to get a better picture of what you’ll be ingesting.

But enough math for today.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

Respect.

Not the first word that comes to mind when we think about food. Hunger, guilt, diet, and calories are more common thoughts that pass our collective American mind when we contemplate what goes through our mouth three or more times a day.

But respect for food, meals, and mealtimes is crucially missing from our modern and instant culture. A fast food culture. Fast preparation, fast consumption, always on the go.  Eating has become a quick, and often times guilty pleasure, met almost immediately post consumption with feelings of remorse – from the heartburn 30 minutes after a combo-burger meal, to the needle on the scale in the bathroom the next morning. Not to mention a warning from the doctor during periodic checkups.

Now think about the holiday season that is ending. The festivity, the family get together, the joint breaking of bread at the dining room table. Culinary delights. Laughter. Joy. Togetherness. Yes, you’ve worked hard in the kitchen. But the pleasure of eating real food, perhaps with a good glass of wine or two, and the flow of conversation with real friends is … well … priceless.

Too bad this happens just a handful of times every year. Once upon a time, every evening culminated in a family dinner shared by the entire crew. Not all dinners were fancy, far from it, but they were usually fresh cooked. Parents talked with their children, and with each other. Life lessons were learned, values forged.

We’re not trying to over-romanticize here, and certainly don’t think the world needs to go back to the days where the mothers/wives “slaved away” for hours in the kitchen.

But we’ve come to the other extreme today. For many people, the kitchen is the place you visit to take the frozen food out of the freezer, unwrap it, microwave it and then consume it while watching TV or at playing at the computer. The dining room? That’s a museum. Or an “inverse” museum. Closed all year, open on Christmas Day.

There’s got to be a better balance. And that’s what we’d like to propose for 2010 and the coming decade. Let’s give food a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

If we pay a little more respect to food, we can reclaim the pleasures of dining, of family-time, and even cooking. It’s not such a drag to cook when the entire family is working together. And with all the amenities of the modern kitchen, combined with awesome ingredients one can get from any supermarket, millions of simple recipes are at everyone’s fingertips.

If we respect food, we’ll begin to identify lots of impostors, or as Michal Pollan calls them, food-like substances. The absence of these non-foods from our lives – no longer brought into our pantry and refrigerator, no more wolved down at quick service establishments, no longer associated with us – will surely have a positive impact on our health.

Have a happy, tasty, and healthy new year.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

This has got to be either a joke or a bad dream. Taco Bell is running a campaign called the Drive Thru Diet with a pretty gal named Christine who claims to have lost 54 pounds of weight by eating the lower calorie options at Taco Bell. Photos and videos of before and after leave the viewer scratching her head – did she really lose all that weight while munching on tacos?

What you need to know:

Eating at fast food establishments is detrimental to your weight. Period.

Even if they shave off a few calories, the products at Taco Bell and others are still made from the cheapest ingredients that fast food chains can procure. That means lots of oil, salt, and sugar on top of additives, preservatives, and artificial flavorings.

On its site, Taco Bell admits that the results of sweet Christine are not typical. And that the lower calorie foods are NOT LOW CALORIE food:

For a healthier lifestyle, pay attention to total calorie and fat intake and regular exercise. Fresco can help with calorie reductions of 20 to 100 per item compared to corresponding products on our regular menu. Not a low calorie food.

So you eat crappy food, save only 20-100 calories per item and you’re gonna lose weight?

That’s a taco-ful of baloney.

Seems like YUM Brands, the owner of Taco Bell and Burger King, seeing its sales plummet this year, decided to copy a page from Subway’s playbook.

What to do:

If you are serious about weight loss, invest in a few meetings with a registered dietitian and together build a practical work plan that you can live with for a lifetime.

Cutting visits to fast food chains down to zero or thereabouts, along with switching from soft drinks to tap water, you will see changes rather soon.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

Have you noticed the slough of  “quick glance” nutrition information we’ve been bombarded with this year? Whether it’s the calorie count on menu items at fast food chains, or on products or shelves at the supermarket, many new nutrition graphics, icons, and slogans have entered our vocabulary in 2009. NuVal, Smart Choices, Traffic Lights, and a host of other front of pack labels stormed into shoppers’ lives this year (some earlier).

But did they help us improve our choices?

That’s the billion dollar question, which unfortunately does not have a simple answer. Hannaford, a grocery retailer that introduced Guiding Stars several years ago, claims that products marked with at least one “star” showed an uptick in sales. The system provides a score of zero, one, two, or three stars to each an every product sold in Hannaford supermarkets, based on its nutritional value.

NuVal, on the other hand, scores products from 0-100, and is currently offering nutrition information in less than 1000 supermarkets, mostly in the midwest. Anecdotal evidence shows that people are slightly improving choices.

In New York, where calorie labeling in fast food chains such as McDonald’s and Pizza Hut went into effect last year, no changes in people’s habits were recorded so far. And in the UK, where the Traffic Light System has been in use for several years on packaged foods, the verdict is mixed. One study, published by the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the British equivalent of the FDA, showed an improvement in people’s choices. But a recent study by Oxford University researchers showed no correlation between the traffic light symbols and people’s choice of a ready to eat sandwich.

What you need to know:

While the quick glance label may give you quick info, the “information” may not always be in your best nutritional interest. You need to understand that many times the front of pack (FOP) nutrition info is just another marketing tool used by food manufacturers and retailers to get you to think that a product is healthy, when in fact it’s not. The best example is Froot Loops, which received a “Smart Choice” accolade by a consortium of manufacturers and fig-leafs scientists from top universities. This for a cereal with 40% sugar by weight, controversial artificial colors, and trans-fat. Luckily the Smart Choices program was nixed several months after it launched.

There is one very important effect that front of pack nutrition labeling has had though. It has caused food manufacturers to take a look at their products and reformulate them to some extent in order to qualify as many as possible as nutritious. Even Froot Loops lost a bit of sugar and gained a bit of fiber. Granted, these are baby steps, but at least they are in the right direction.

What to do at the supermarket:

Since the front of pack labels have not been approved by the FDA and are not really regulated, there is a lot of wiggle room for manufacturers to sell you a “healthy story” rather than a healthy product.

We recommend that you read the nutrition label itself, along with the ingredient list. It will take another moment of your time, but you will know exactly what you’re getting. And if you need advice or help in choosing a product, Fooducate is always here to help.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

Here’s an interesting story. Cardiologists from the US decided to check 3500 year old mummies for heart disease. They headed off to Cairo, Egypt and what they found was quite surprising. Although no fast food or trans-fat were peddled in ancient Egypt, the majority of the mummies showed evidence of clogged arteries and heart disease. One may even have died of a heart attack.

Does this mean we’re all going to get sick hearts, regardless of our diet?

Don’t rush out to McDonald’s just yet.

According to the researcher, those mummified…

… were of high social status, and many served in the court of the Pharaoh or as priests or priestesses.

Rich people ate meat, and they did salt meat, so maybe they had hypertension (high blood pressure)…

With modern diets, “we all sort of live in the Pharaoh’s court,” said another of the researchers…

read more from Seattle PI…

What to do at the supermarket:

Please don’t let this amusing piece cause you to adopt a more tolerant approach to fast foods and over consumption of saturated fats. The average prehistoric Egyptian barely reached 45 years of age. Enjoy the abundance of our modern “court of Pharaoh” a.k.a supermarket to focus on plenty of fresh produce, lean dairy and meat products and 100% whole grains.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

Men’s Health Magazine, milking the success of its “Eat this, not that” line of books, provides a grotesquely entertaining list of the 30 worst foods in the country. Most, as you can imagine, are from fast food establishments.

For each food, there’s also a suggested alternative that is more healthful, but, as Albert Einstein once said, everything is relative. For example:

Not exactly a perfectly healthy alternative. But sure beats 9 grams of trans fat and a days worth of sodium in one dish.

The list counts down from #30 to the #1 worst food in the US. Itching to die which food came in at #1? We’ve saved you 29 clicks.

Read more…

Image via Wikipedia

Happy 4th of July everyone. We’d rather it be called Independence Day, because that is what we have been celebrating for the past 200 years, not a date 7/04.

As we head to cookouts, picnics, bar-b-ques and other food related festivities, we should consider ourselves the luckiest people in the world. Democracy is not the default state of rule in many places around the world. Many countries are art war, some with neighbors, some with themselves. Our nation’s wealth has enabled many of us to lead very comfortable lives, beyond comprehension to many of the world’s denizens, who survive on but a few dollars a day.

Is it any wonder that the number one country people dream of immigrating to is the United States of America?

But we shouldn’t rest on our laurels. Our country isn’t perfect, and neither are we. Although we live in a free country, our choices are often limited. Without even thinking about it, we are steered in ways that are hard for us to resist. Say What?

We’ll take food as an example (surprising, heh?)

1. If you want to eat healthfully at a rest stop along an interstate highway, you can’t, because it’s all fast food. How much of a difference is there between Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut? They’re all different flavors of obesity-to-arrive-soon and heart-disease-right-after. And they all serve either Coke or Pepsi.

2. How free are families to choose the food they put on the table? With supermarkets stocking 45,000 items, most people would say very free. But a close look reveals that in each aisle there are a few dominant companies, or a few dominant types of food. In breakfast cereals, most of the 400+ boxes are manufactured by just a handful of corporations (General Mills, Quaker, Kellogg’s). Sure, you could buy that healthier brand but

a) it costs 30% more,

b) your kids won’t eat it because there’s no superhero endorsement on the package.

3. You’re at the ballpark, 4th inning, getting hungry. What about some food and drinks? No problem. That is if food=hot dogs, drinks=Coke or Pepsi. If you want to choose freshly squeezed juice, you can’t. A salad? Who are you kidding.

OK, these are just a few example of the limited choices we have.

Limited, unless we decide to swim against the current. We urge you to try, just so you can feel what it’s like to be truly independent. And if enough of us swim against the current, soon the current will follow us. (And that’s what makes this country great).

God bless America!

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com