This is a guest post by Lisa Cain, PhD, a.k.a Snack-Girl

Do you have a food fight with your child after school?

Is he starving because he tossed out his uneaten lunch? Was he  having too much fun in the school cafeteria and simply forgot to eat?

You’re not the only family where this happens. That’s why the after school snacks are tricky – kids are uptight, you haven’t prepared anything special, and the temptation to open up a bag of processed junk is just too high. As a result, afternoon snacks tend to fall into the treat category more than parents would like to admit. Cookies, candy, chips, along with “healthy” packaged snacks like fruit snacks are very common.

A recent study has shown that kids are eating 27% of their daily calories from snacks.  If a third of daily calories are coming from non-meals, parents need to be vigilant about the composition of those snacks.

We all want to ensure our kids don’t get too cranky before dinnertime. But, we should try to feed them something that will feed their brains (homework time!). What can we feed them without a war? Here are 5 afternoon snacks that have promise as peaceful substitutes for unhealthy treats. Replace brownies, potato chips, candy, pizza bites, and ice-cream with these suggestions:
Replace brownies with No bake brownie balls
Replace chips with Ants on a log
Replace candy with Chocolate covered raisins
Replace frozen pizza snacks with the Tiniest and Yummiest Pizzas on the Planet
Replace ice cream with DIY yogurt

Lisa Cain, Ph.D., is an avid snacker, foodie, published author, and mother of 2. An evolutionary biologist by training, she has become obsessed with how food contributes to our overall health. Check out snack girl for other healthy snack ideas.

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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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Are Lucky Charms Better for You Than Granola?

In a recent Newsweek piece, reporter Tina Peng compared 2 breakfast options and came up with a surprising result -

“Compared with Kellogg’s Low-Fat Granola cereal with raisins, one cup of General Mills’ Lucky Charms is actually healthier, with less fat and sugar and fewer calories and carbs.”

Seems counter intuitive, so Treehugger Blog dug a bit deeper:

If you didn’t read the introduction and your eyes went straight for the chart, you’d probably assume that Newsweek tarred all granola products for their criminally high calorie count and fat and sugar content. The magazine makes its comparison using one particular brand of low-fat granola, however: Kellogg’s, which isn’t particularly representative of the healthier granola options on the market…

Read more…

What you need to know:

When comparing products, make sure the serving sizes match. Newsweek compared a cup of granola to a cup of Lucky Charms, but the the granola serving size is only two thirds of a cup. Shorter ingredient lists without artificial coloring and additives are very important, in this case both products comapred do not excel. Many granolas include dried fruits such as raisins, which are rich in natural sugar (fructose). While still packing calories, raisins are definitely more nutritious than refined sugar or HFCS that is added to Lucky Charms.

What to do at the supermarket:

Look for a short ingredient list. Look out for artifical coloring. Examine the nutrition label. Choose a sugar count of less than 12 grams per serving.

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