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

Yes, you can do it! You can give up your beloved french fries and celebrate their exit from your life.

Seriously.

Before you start arguing with me about how you simply will never leave them – have you met “homemade sweet potato fries”? Get out of that BAD relationship and move into a healthier and more loving space, and you will NEVER go back. I promise.

Baked sweet potato fries have the crunchy outside, and the soft inside and they pack a nutritional wallop with 219% of your daily allowance of Vitamin A in one serving. And that is just ONE of the benefits of eating them.

Half a potato is going to set you back 111 calories (with the olive oil), but that is nothing compared to buying and eating fast food fries (560 calories for a large fries). You could eat the entire recipe below and still have calories to spare!

What I really like about making my own fries is that I can customize the flavor. Some great additions to sweet potatoes are:

• brown sugar
• cajun spice
• cinnamon
• cayenne pepper
• minced garlic
• taco seasoning

Grab your favorite flavors and just toss them in. They become so flavorful and seriously addictive (like those other french fries – but you have forgotten them and moved on because these are SO much better).

After you make these, just pop them in your fridge. Eat them as a snack or add them to your salad. Mush them in your yogurt or eat them for breakfast After they are refrigerated, they aren’t as crunchy but they still taste really good.

What do you put in your sweet potato fries?

Sweet Potato Fries Recipe

(serves 4)
aluminum foil for pan
2 medium sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 450 F. Half the sweet potatoes lengthwise. Place on flat slide and slice 5-6 spears (thick and long strips) of sweet potato. Place them on the aluminum foil and toss with olive oil and your favorite flavorings.

Spread them in one layer. It is important that they have space around them and aren’t piled up on each other. Bake for 15 minutes and turn with tongs or a spatula. Bake for another 5 to 10 minutes, until lightly browned. Add optional salt and pepper. Serve hot, room temperature, or cold.

For one serving: 111 calories, 6.8 g fat, 11.8 g carbohydrates, 1.1 g protein, 1.9 g fiber, 21 mg sodium, 4 PointsPlus

Lisa Cain, Ph.D. writes about healthy snacks on Snack-Girl.com. She is a published author, mother of two, and avid snacker.

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photo by JohnMacdonald

Interesting writeup in the New York Times this week about the shrinking package sizes of processed foods. Turns out that the recession, along with rising costs of commodities, have brought about a sneaky habit by many manufacturers. Instead of raising the price of products, brands are selling less of the product per package:

A can of Chicken of the Sea albacore tuna is now packed at 5 ounces, instead of the 6-ounce version still on some shelves, and in some cases, the 5-ounce can costs more than the larger one. Bags of Doritos, Tostitos and Fritos now hold 20 percent fewer chips than in 2009… read more…

When asked about this, most companies turn on their spin machine and describe new eco-friendly packaging. Or some other excuse.

So, isn’t this great news for dieters struggling with portion control issues? After all, less food means less calories…

Of course not. It’s just another example that goes to show you how easily we are manipulated by clever packages and marketing tactics. Buyer beware.

What to do at the supermarket:

Prices are going up, and it’s getting more expensive. But if you lay out a strategy for buying real, unprocessed foods, you can actually reduce your weekly food budget. Start with the beverage aisle. Simply ignore it. Boom – $500 savings annually for a family of 4. Buy produce in season, or buy it frozen. Here are our top ten tips for nutritious shopping in a recession.

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If you’re a foodie, you probably procure at least some of your groceries from non-supermarket sources. Whether the farmers market, a local deli, or even an artisan neighbor, you discover that food lovingly made by the person you are paying is not just delicious, it has a story.

That’s the idea behind Abe’s Market, a relatively new online store for “natural and eco-friendly” products.

We recently spoke with Richard Demb, who co-founded Abe’s Market with his buddy Jon Polin. Both are accomplished entrepreneurs who, after becoming parents, started paying more attention to what their kids eat, bath in, or wear. Similar to the Fooducate story, by the way.

[Fooducate] What do you sell on Abe’s Market?

[Richard Demb] We’ve got food products galore – teas, coffees, spices, jams, snacks, meal mixes, chocolates, and more. We have baby products, bath and beauty, pet care, and stuff for home. And everything is lovingly made by artisan sellers who pride themselves on the quality of the input ingredients as well as the end result.

[Fooducate] Who is Abe’s Market for?

[RD] If you’re interested in natural, eco-friendly products, we’re the place for you.  We connect buyers seeking amazing natural products with the people who make them. Our customers really want to learn the story behind their purchase, and we allow them to do so,  directly from the creators.  Who makes the product? What’s in it? Where is it made? How? We want our customers to trust and be comfortable with the products they bring into their home.

[Fooducate] Who sells products in your marketplace?

[RD] Small companies that have no time, budget or expertise to market themselves and create a physical presence in supermarkets. Sometimes it’s a mom working out of her kitchen.

[Fooducate] How are you different than a farmer’s market?

[RD] We actually see ourselves as a complement to farmers’ market. Some of our sellers have stands on farmers’ markets as well. We don’t sell perishables. We’re open 24/7. We ship anywhere, even to places where there is no farmers’ market nearby.

[Fooducate] Tell us about the interactive show you’ve started

[RD] We’re doing a live, weekly, online show where we introduce you to the faces and stories behind Abe’s Market. Each show, several Abe’s Market sellers and natural lifestyle experts talk about their passion for green living, and share their tips, secrets and stories. Abe’s Live invites you to be part of the show, as well. Chat with other viewers, and send your questions directly to the on-air guests!

What you need to know:

Today at 2pm EST, Abe’s Market will be hosting another live show. Aside from food sellers, guess who else is going to be online?

That’s right, Fooducate.

No, we haven’t become a food company, but we are going to pull some interesting products out of a grocery bag and scan them with the Fooducate iPhone App.

Check out the show, 2pm today, it should be fun…

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The FDA is convening an advisory panel later this week for a two day “colorthon” to discuss mounting evidence that artificial food dyes are causing hyperactivity in kids.

This is huge folks.

What you need to know:

The FDA long ago granted GRAS (generally regarded as safe) status to several artificial dyes including red #40, yellow #5, and others, that have been linked in studies to hyperactivity in kids as well as cancer. These studies have been disputed though, usually by industry funded experts. This blog is not the place to go into the details of study design and methodology, but just take a look at what our neighbors across the Atlantic have done.

The British government has found the studies disturbing enough to warrant warning labels on products using artificial colors. Guess what happened almost instantly?

Companies figured out a way to use natural colors instead. Yes, the strawberry filling may be a bit less fluorescent than it used to be, but none of the food companies have gone out of business so far.

So why don’t US companies follow suit? Why doesn’t Kellogg’s change the red #40 dye on its Nutri-grain bars in the US like it did for the same exact product in the UK?

Because the greedy corporate number crunchers couldn’t care less about your children’s health. If they can save half a cent per package of bars, and get away with it, that’s what will happen.

We’ve written many times about this matter, and we’ll keeping hammering down until all artificial food dyes are removed from our food supply.

Thankfully, some companies are beginning to mend their ways (if only partially):

Frito-Lay is promoting its decision to get rid of artificial colors and flavors in more than 60 of its snack products, substituting ingredients such as beet juice and carrots for Red No. 40, one of the artificial dyes.

“We’re always looking for new ways to give consumers what they’re looking for, which includes providing a wider range of products made with natural ingredients,” said Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for Pepsico, which owns Frito-Lay. But the company said it has no plans to mess with the chemically enhanced orange of its Doritos or Cheetos, two of its top-selling brands. Read more from the Washington Post…

“Giving consumers what they are looking for” is not really the story, that’s just PR speak. The removal of problematic ingredients happens only when we consumers unite and vote with our pocketbooks.

Or when the FDA intervenes on our behalf, something that rarely happens, unfortunately.

What to do at the supermarket:

Try to avoid any product that has artificial colors. If enough of us do so, we’ll be sending a clear message to the industry – enough is enough.

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Fooducate community member Amorette sent us this glowing review of a pita bread she recently discovered.

I’m an avid reader of your blog and greatly enjoy the product reviews of new items. I came across this item that I greatly enjoy and seems nutritionally sound.

It’s called Pitettes pita bread, made by Toufayan Bakeries Inc. in Ridgefield, NJ. They are whole wheat and have zero, yes zero sodium. I was skeptical that this would taste like cardboard, but bought it anyway.

For what it is, pita bread, it tastes great. It’s chewy, not overly hard or cardboard-esque. The first ingredient on the label is stone ground whole wheat flour which made me jump for joy and only has 6 ingredients total.

We decided to take a look and see if this is an example of a store brought bread product that we would actually like.

What you need to know:

We took a look at the nutrition info and the ingredients, and it does look quite good. 150 calories per serving of 2 little pita loaves, 3 grams of fiber, and indeed zero sodium.

The ingredient list consists of:

Stone ground whole wheat flour, water, wheat gluten, yeast, malted barley flour, calcium propionate (added to retard spoilage).

The added gluten makes the bread more chewy, and the calcium propionate is a safe preservative that helps increase the shelf life of the product. Overall , no comment.

We like this bread. Now we just need to hear from more readers – how does it taste?

What to do at the supermarket:

If you’re going to get these pita breads, why not add some additional Mediterranean flair with a good hummus dip?

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Sorry, the picture has been removed

at the request of the photographer

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We received this picture in an email from a pediatric dentist, after she read our post on the soft drink calorie commercial. Here is the accompanying text:

Hi Fooducate,

Attached is a picture of the mouth of a 4 year old kid !!!!!!!

He used to “love” sodas and juices. As you can see, the dangers of soft drinks are beyond calories! I moved from Italy some years ago to USA, and believe me, it is SHOCKING to see the way many people eat here. Adults can choose, but kids can’t. They depend on the knowledge of their parents, especially their mothers.

This kind of damage – we need to stop it. All the industries making billions of dollars by destroying the health of innocent kids. For me all these drink “products” are not food.. I call them “poisons”….

When I educate the mothers of my patients about the causes of their tooth decay, many of them cry, since they truly believed that the juices and drinks they saw advertised (with supplements of vitamins, minerals, etc) are healthy for their children.

As you can imagine, when a kid has a mouth like this (I cannot imagine the pain), they can’t chew, so the only thing that they can do – tragic solution – is drink to avoid more pain! So they drink more juice. Can you believe how tragic the situation is? For me, it is like you are putting gasoline to the fire, thinking that you will stop it.

Some juices and soft drinks have a pH around 2.30 whereas our pH in balance will be around 7.00. When I explain to parents that the battery acid (for a car) is 1.00, and they are serving their children liquids with a very close percentage of acidity (plus in some cases 12 tsp os sugars in a 12 oz drink) they are without words…

So why we do not turn back to remember what Hippocrates  said: A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings and let our food be our medicine, and our medicine be our food.

I would like to share with you an anecdote from when we just moved to USA from Europe. My youngest daughter said to me “Mom, you should quickly learn English!” When I asked “why?”, she said “Well just look at the paint that you bought thinking that it is yogurt…”

It’s hard to find “normal products” here, like yogurt or bread or cookies without sugars added, corn syrup, trans fats, hydrogenated oils..and who knows how many others “fancy” ingredients that sometimes you need a degree to be able to read and imagine what could it mean?.

Even going to the restaurant to find a salad without sugary dressing is difficult. In Italy, you have olive oil and balsamic vinegar and you are all set.
Arrivederci!

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Since launching the Fooducate iPhone App, we’ve been inundated with requests to make the app available worldwide. Our neighbors to the north in Canada are especially anxious to start using it.

But right now, you can only download the app from the US iTunes Store.

The reason is quite simple – we have no product information for foods outside the US. You see, each country has its own set of product barcodes, different from the ones in the US. Even identical products, such as cereals or snack bars, are packaged slightly differently, and that immediately requires a different UPC.

And so our database of  200,000+ products is of little value to consumers in Canada or Germany. In order for you to reap the benefit of Fooducate’s product rating system, we would need to get a sizable database of your country’s products into our system. We currently are unable to do that (issues of data availability, budget, and our bandwidth).

Additionally, each country has different labeling requirements and nutrition regulations. That means that some of the information we are using to calculate a product grade may not be readily available in your country.

That’s not to say we don’t want to get people Fooducated all over the world. It’s simply a bit more than we can chew on at this time. We do hope to provide the service in additional countries, but doubt it will happen this year.

If you’d like to be notified when Fooducate will be available in your country, please click here.

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Product Update. Yesterday afternoon we launched version 1.2 of the Fooducate iPhone app.

We’ve made changes both on the iPhone side and on the server side to provide you with a better service. Here are the details.

Improved Navigation - You can now move much more intuitively from the “product view” screen back to the history screen or to the “my likes” screen

Next up in our development plans is a search feature. We’ll let you know when that comes out.

A note for ANDROID phone owners – we are working hard to get an Android version of Fooducate out as soon as possible. We are not willing to compromise on the quality of the app, and due to the unique features of Android vs iPhone it’s taking a bit longer than we planned. Please sign up here to be notified when the Fooducate Android Beta will be available.

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Pudding.

Yum.

Everyone loves pudding. You can make it at home from scratch. You can buy a powder mix and prepare at home more easily. Or you can buy a ready-made pudding.

SnackPack is one example of a ready-made pudding. From their website:

Now you can pack the fun into your child’s lunch, without the guilt. Snack Pack offers more than 20 flavors that contains no preservatives or high fructose corn syrup, and are made with real, non-fat milk.

Sounds cool!

Let’s see what the nutrition label and ingredient label say. Just to make sure. OK?

What you need to know:

Unfortunately, Snack Pack’s website offers the talk, but does not walk the walk. Nutrition information is available for some of its products, but no product has an ingredient list available online.

Here is the ingredient list (thanks to Tamar, a fooducate community member, for sending them over to us):

Nonfat Milk, Water, Sugar, Modified Corn Starch, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, less than 2% of: Cocoa (Processed with Alkali), Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Yellow 5, Yellow 6.

WTF? Pardon our French, but how in the world can this company tell parents not to feel guilty when their products use trans fat and artificial dyes?

And what’s this “made with real milk” talk, when the #2 ingredient is water !?! Yep, the product uses real milk, but it uses lots of water as well (to save money?), thickens it using the corn starch, and binds it with the milk and other ingredients using Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, an emulsifier.

What to do at the supermarket:

No reason for a snack to contain trans-fats or artificial dyes. Read the ingredient list and choose something real.

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Have you seen the ridiculous commercial sponsored by the beverage industry? The one where Dr. Pepper, Coke, Pepsi, and SunnyD pat themselves on the back for having stopped deceptive labeling after 20 years?

For years, you’d buy a 20 fl oz bottle from a vending machine and guzzle it down thinking you are consuming only 90 calories. But the 90 calories are for 8 fl oz, a full bottle is over 200 calories. Big difference.

So at the behest of First Lady Michelle Obama, the industry is now providing calorie information for the entire bottle as well. Thanks folks, 20 years after nutrition labeling was instituted you’re finally providing the full calorie picture.

How about some more clarity about your products?

SunnyD – can you tell us about the carcinogenic effects of Yellow #5 you use to artificially color your “juice drink”?

Coke – what about that caramel coloring?

Pepsi – want to tell folks about the calcium leaching properties of phosphoric acid?

What to do at the supermarket:

If you want to truly make the right choice – skip the beverage aisle. Tap water is the way to go.

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