This is a guest blog post by Elizabeth Ward, MS, RD

Getting your fruits and vegetables may be the last thing on your mind on Superbowl Sunday. Don’t give it another thought. These winning munchies are so delicious that your family and friends may forget they’re good for you, too. Serve the dips with baked snack chips or toasted whole wheat sandwich wraps broken into chips.

All recipes appear in MyPlate for Moms, How to Feed Yourself & Your Family Better, by Elizabeth M Ward, MS, RD

Snack #1: Salsamole

Makes 2 cups.

Simple, nutritious, and delicious. Use as a dip or sandwich spread.

1 cup fresh tomato salsa

1 cup fresh guacamole

2 tablespoons lime juice

2 tablespoons chopped cilantro

Instructions: Combine all ingredients in medium serving bowl.

Per serving (1/4 cup): 94 calories; 6 grams carbohydrate; 3 grams fiber; 8 grams; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams protein; 229 milligrams sodium; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 20 milligrams calcium.

Snack #2: Mango and Black Bean Salsa

Makes 2 1/2 cups.

High in fiber, and pretty to look at, this salsa tastes even better the next day.

2 cups diced fresh mango

2 cups black beans, rinsed and drained, if canned

1/2 cup diced red onion

1 to 2 tablespoons finely chopped, seeded jalapeno pepper

2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

2 tablespoons lime juice

1/2 teaspoon salt

Instructions: In a medium bowl, combine all ingredients.

Per serving (1/4 cup): 69 calories; 14 grams carbohydrate; 4 grams fiber; 0 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 3 grams protein; 199 milligrams sodium; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 10 milligrams calcium.

Snack #3 Crispy Chickpeas

Makes 4 servings.

Beans are the vegetable with the most protein and fiber, which makes them a perfect snack.

1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained and rinsed

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon ground cumin

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 400°F.

2. In a medium bowl, combine all ingredients, tossing to coat beans completely.

3. Spread beans in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet.

4. Bake for 20 minutes. Stir beans, and cook for another 20 minutes. Allow beans to cool before eating.

Per serving: 185 calories; 24 grams carbohydrate; 5 grams fiber; 8 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 5 grams protein; 314 milligrams sodium; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 30 milligrams calcium.

Elizabeth M. Ward, M.S., R.D. is an award-winning author of several books, including her latest, MyPlate for Moms, How to Feed Yourself & Your Family Better. She writes about nutrition and health for WebMD.com, USATODAY.com, and Men’s Fitness.

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

If you combine whole grains, eggs, yogurt, milk, and fruit what do you get? Breakfast!

Anyone else missing the bacon in this description?

Last week, I wrote Mix Pancakes With Oatmeal And You Get A Super Breakfast and a dear reader told me about “baked oatmeal”. That sounded pretty good to me so I started researching recipes.

Turns out lots of people bake oatmeal! Who knew? And, there is so much to love about it.

It is:

• ridiculously easy to make
• convenient for the AM rush
• comforting and satisfying

It’s like a little bit of love in a bowl. (or a lot of love if you are my 5 year old son who seems to eat all 49 pounds of his weight every day)

And, baked oatmeal is customizable. You can add any fruit you may have lying around the kitchen. I used some frozen mango and blueberries because I am too lazy to slice anything. You could use apples, peaches, strawberries, pears, etc.

All you do is mix it up, bake it, and store it in the fridge until you are ready to eat it.

This recipe has 1/2 the sugar of most other baked oatmeal recipes. I changed it because if it isn’t sweet enough for you – it is easy to just add some sweetener to the finished product.

My son liked a little milk and maple syrup added to his “warmed in the microwave” baked oatmeal.

This recipe can be made gluten free if you use gluten free certified oats. Many oats are processed on the same machines as wheat so you have to be vigilant when purchasing them.

Here are two other great oatmeal recipes:

Make Winter Warmer With Apple and Peanut Butter Oatmeal 
Better and Faster than A Bowl of Cold Cereal

On Thursday afternoon, Congress passed the “Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act”. This happens once every 5 years, when the government reviews and re-approves the Child Nutrition Act. The law provides federal funding for feeding millions of schoolchildren lunch and sometimes breakfast for free or greatly reduced prices.

Some of the highlights of the reauthorized law:

• $4.5 Billion dollars added to improve the nutritional value of meals served in schools.
• Improved nutrition criteria – more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less sugars and fats.
• More children – the criteria for eligibility has been expanded to include additional families / schools. The numbers are staggering – 31 million kids participate in the program in some form.
• Farm to fork programs encouraged – Schools to work directly with local farms to provide fresh, local produce.
• USDA to define, within 2 years, guidelines for food sold in schools outside the meal programs (This includes all the crap currently found in vending machines).

What you need to know:

As good as this may sound, here a few reasons why there is a still a long way to go:

• An average school lunch costs $2.72 today. The addition of funds just approved gets translated to a measly 6 cents addition per meal. How much of a difference will that make?
• Much of the food available for such cheap prices is exactly the type of foods kids should not be consuming – sugars and fats. The foods schools can afford are based on surplus agricultural commodities. Unfortunately, that means things like high fructose corn syrup, not heirloom tomatoes.
• At the end of the day, even the most highly motivated kitchen staff needs to work a lot harder to shell out a nutritious meal that is also tasty. This is difficult to do with much higher budgets (College campuses, Google’s Headquarters in Northern California). But how motivated will the kitchen staff be, to work twice as hard, for salaries that will not be raised?
• Some of the added money is actually taken from food stamp funds. For poor kids, that’s less food at home, more at school.

In conclusion, while this law is a step in the right direction, there are still many obstacles to feeding children healthfully.

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Earlier this month Catalina Marketing released a consumer insight report demonstrating how difficult it is for consumers to shake old habits and to start buying and preparing healthy foods. Some of the interesting stats from the report:

1. 4 out of 10 shoppers believe that healthy foods does not taste good. The numbers are worse for fast food aficionados.
2. Over 75% of shoppers believe that healthy food is expensive.
3. 80% would like to see more coupons for healthy foods. (Unfortunately most coupons are for the most heavily processed products like sugar cereals, soft drinks…)
4. Over one third of shoppers said it was hard to shop for healthy meals.
5. Over one third said it was hard to prepare a healthy meal. For families with kids the number shot up to 50%.
6. 69% of shoppers would like their supermarket to stock freshly prepared, healthy meals.
7. 64% of shoppers are interested in programs that recommend healthier options for the products.
8. Half of the shoppers felt that the supermarket helps them make healthful choices.
9. But only 25% believe supermarket employees are knowledgeable about nutrition.
10. Another interesting finding is that for the most part, grocery shopping information is obtained old school style -  Just 15% of shoppers visit their supermarket’s website, but 80% read the print circular.

What you need to know:

Manufacturers would like you to think that if you want to eat healthfully you’ll need to pay more. While this is certainly true for many prepared products, if you do your own cooking you can actually save money by resorting to a few simple tactics. For example:

• Buy bulk – single ingredients such as brown rice, beans, whole grains are much cheaper than when packaged in boxes or as part of a “mix”.
• Cut your own veggies – Why pay 3 times as much for a bag of cut leafy greens when you can do the same in 5 minutes?
• Replace soft drinks with tap water, not expensive vitamin waters – A family of four switching to tap water will save $500 a year!
• Instead of buying expensive single serve frozen meals, why not learn to cook your own meal on the weekend and freeze leftovers for the upcoming week?
• Coupons for junk food will cost you more down the road – cheaper not to use them and not to buy the junky foods they lead you to consume.

Yes, you will need to spend more time in the kitchen, but if you employ your kids, you may actually start to enjoy this as a family activity.

What to do at the supermarket:

For more suggestions, check out out Top 10 tips for nutritious shopping, which was written at the beginning of the most recent recession.

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Father’s day is usually associated with quirky he-gifts, a bar-b-cue, and the start of summer. It’s an overly commercialized holiday, on the heels of  mother’s day. (Ask any retailer about promotions for “moms and proms” / “dads and grads”).

But at its core, the day signifies the importance of a father in a child’s life. In the past, the father was the breadwinner, and the mother was the homemaker. Roles were gender defined, and men had little if anything to do with food at home, other than eating it.

Times have changed. Most families have two working parents, food preparation is much easier and convenient than in years past, and many new family structures exist as well. Yet there is still a gender divide when it comes to healthy eating practices.

Approximately 80% of the readers of this blog are women. If you look across the web at other food / nutrition/ health websites, the numbers are similar. 97% of dietitians are women. In the home, this translates to different approaches to eating, snacks, and habits by moms on the health side, and dads on the fun/tasty side.

Kids pick up on this very quickly. If mom is serving up a salad and fish, but dad pops a frozen cheeseburger in the microwave while guzzling a Coke, kids get a mixed message about what to eat.

Even subtle gestures, such as jokes about stinky broccoli at dinner, tell the kids, especially boys, what is considered “manly” food, and what is for girls and sissies. TV isn’t helping either. “Hungry Man” commercials present TV Dinners for guys while “Lean Cuisine” is for gals.

That’s why parents need to present a united front.

Dads should be food and nutrition role models, in addition to moms. In too many households, mom is the sole person charged with grocery shopping, food preparation, and making sure the kids eat balanced meals. By participating in the food preparation process, dad can learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t in his family. There’s a good chance the children will want to join in on the kitchen party as well. And when kids help prepare a dish (even broccoli) there’s an increased chance they’ll eat it too.

Happy Father’s Day!

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In a sign of the times, the Sweets & Snacks Expo earlier this week in Chicago focused on healthier treats.

Saleswomen for Hershey Co. handed out Reese’s Minis, chocolate-peanut butter cups the size of marbles, which they touted as ideal for portion control. Nearby, staff members for candy behemoth Mars chatted up their sugar-free Dove chocolates and the company’s goodnessKnows snack squares containing “phytonutrients that have been shown to help support healthy circulation.” read more from the LA Times…

While this trend toward healthy treats may sound like a great idea, we’d like to challenge the notion that snacks have to be nutritious for us. Candy should be a tasty interlude that we enjoy every once in while. If we realize that theses are treats, and NOT a part of our daily nutritional requirements, we won’t go looking for phytonutrients, antioxidants, and other health benefits in our chocolate bars. We’ll be getting them from real food.

Granted, removing trans fatty oils from candy bars is a great idea. But that doesn’t mean we need to eat one after every meal.

The greatest innovation in candy will be when people start consuming much smaller amounts than they currently do. But that’s not something the companies are interested in. Herein lies the conflict between health and profits.

What to do at the supermarket:

Try to limit the number of items you purchase in the snack aisles. Think of fruit as the first go to snack option instead of candy.

Have a great holiday weekend. To our friends in uniform, and our fallen brethren – we salute you!

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Jamie Oliver is starting a food revolution with his new show, but for brands advertising on ABC, it’s business as usual. Embedded above is a 30 second spot for Ragu pasta sauce, aired as a commercial during the show last Friday night. Apparently, the annoyingly cute boy who’s feeding his dog broccoli from the dinner table does not like veggies. Ragu to the rescue? – His mom serves pasta with Ragu sauce and the dear the child gets his serving of veggies. Plus it’s “all natural”. The end…

Our first question – Why vilify broccoli? Did it do anything wrong?

And our second question – why does Ragu think its sauce is an erstwhile replacement?

What you need to know:

We took a look at  Ragu Old World Style Traditional Pasta Sauce. Unfortunately the Ragu website includes just an image of the product without any nutrition information. (Except for a statement about meeting FDA guidelines for “healthy”. We’ll get to “healthy” in a bit.) Why would a site for a healthy product NOT present its nutrition info?

We took the information from elsewhere. Here is the ingredient list:

Tomato Puree (Water, Tomato Paste), Soybean Oil, Salt, Sugar, Dehydrated Onions, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Spices, Romano Cheese (Part-Skim Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes), Natural Flavor.

The good: everything is understandable, except maybe for the “Natural Flavor”. The flavor is a trade secret and is concocted in top secret labs  to give this processed product the flavor it should have had were it prepared fresh at home by you.

The bad: the first ingredient here is water! You’re pouring mostly water into the pasta dish! Salt is the #4 ingredient. That means there is more salt here than onions, olive oil, and cheese. Since the amount of salt used is minuscule, you can deduce that the ingredients that follow barely register.

The nutrition facts panel reveals a low calorie sauce (to be expected when the main ingredient is water). A serving, half a cup, is only 70 calories. But is half a cup enough?

Each serving comes with one and a half teaspoons of sugar, and 480mg of sodium. That’s 20% of the daily maximum for salt consumption! In half a cup of sauce.

On the redeeming side, the sauce retains a bit of fiber (2 grams) and as with any cooked tomato product also contains healthy lycopenes.

As for “healthy”, to be considered so by the FDA,  pasta sauce must be low in fat and saturated fat, contain limited amounts of cholesterol and sodium, and contain a minimum amount of certain nutrients. The sodium level here, 480mg per serving, is the maximum allowed. The 10% vitamin A is the minimum required to be considered healthy. So you can see that the product has been engineered to just make it into the FDA guidelines.

What to do at the supermarket:

Firstly, don’t weigh broccoli and other fresh vegetables as equals against some sugary-salty tomato sauce thingy. Kids should learn to like the shape and taste of vegetables. Perhaps learning to prepare broccoli to make it appetizing will help more than feeding it to the dog.

As for sauces, we suggest you make your own. But even if you go ahead and buy this Ragu brand, how about adding some more vegetables into the mix – carrots, peas, chopped onion, etc… Just steam or saute them for a few minutes before adding to the sauce.

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With a fair share of travel in the past week to the annual Food and Nutrition Conference in Denver, we had an opportunity to examine airport fare. Unfortunately, most of the offerings are not much better than an average food court in a suburban shopping malls.

That’s a double downer – the food is both untasty AND unhealthy.

Not to mention the meals served on the flight itself (if at all served).

But every airport must have some hidden jewel, right?

Please share your favorite airport spot for decent food when traveling. If we get enough responses we’ll repost a list of top airport culinary destinations.

Of course, there’s always the option of bringing your own food from home. We didn’t see too many brown baggers at the terminal though.

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• Twitter Court in Oakland (laughingsquid.com)

Consumer Reports

The February 2009 issue of Consumer Reports on Health has a good writeup entitled Grocery-aisle gotchas. The erstwhile consumer information powerhouse has

put together a guide (see links, below) to some of the most confusing label claims. We’ve also looked at new labeling rules and trends that can make it easier for you to choose among products. And because food labeling still has a long way to go, we offer our take on what should be on a label—but sometimes isn’t.

While the list of gotchas is not comprehensive, it certainly illustrates how in every aisle of the supermarket good marketing helps consumers feel like they are eating healthfully when in fact they may be buying junk food in disguise. Here are the links to various topics discussed in the article:

Organic

Natural

Whole grains, cage-free

Health ratings

Made with, serving size

Health claims, nutritional claims

What should be on a label

What to do at the supermarket:

Ignore the health claims and go straight for the ingredient list and nutrition label. Even then, be suspicious of serving sizes that are too small, and ingredient lists longer than a Stephen King novel. By keeping to the supermarket perimeter and buying mostly unprocessed foods, you wont even need to read nutrition labels (fruits, vegetables..)

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Image: Campbell Soup Company

Last week, Campbell Soup Company reintroduced 12 of its popular canned soups for children, reformulated to be considered healthy by FDA standards:

…12 Campbell’s® Kids soups, reformulated to contain 480 milligrams of sodium per serving.

Now popular favorites [...] meet the government criteria for “healthy” foods – controlled for fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium and being a good source of a positive nutrient like vitamin A.

The newly-reformulated soups are the latest to come to market as part of Campbell’s ongoing commitment to wellness, for a total of 78 soups in the portfolio at the healthy levels for sodium. By leveraging a combination of unique, lower sodium natural sea salt and expertise in flavor design, Campbell has been able to deliver lower sodium options without sacrificing taste.

Read the Press Release…

What you need to know:

For years, using salt was a cheap and easy way for manufacturers to mask the canned flavor of commercial soups. However, due to high levels of consumption, salt is now recognized as a serious threat to public health. Americans consume almost twice the recommended daily allowance of 2400mg (a teaspoon) a day. This leads to high blood pressure and related ailments.

Reducing salt is a good move by Campbell’s, in line with its strategy to refurbish a tarnished image of canned soup as a mega warehouse for MSG and sodium.

Taking for example, the Disney Princess Pasta Shapes soup, Campbell’s has reduced sodium from 580mg to 480mg per serving, and eliminated monosodium glutamate completely.

However, the bit about unique, lower sodium natural sea salt is marketing hype. There is no nutritional difference between sea salt and regular salt (derived from rock salt mineral deposits). True, the flavor may slightly differ when shaken on to food, due to tiny amounts of additional minerals found in sea salt. But the amount of sodium is the same.

Also in the reformulation, the calorie count actually went up from 70 to 80 calories per serving, but this is negligible.

What to do at the supermarket:

Thinking about making your own soup but afraid to try? Soup is actually one of the easiest foods to prepare because it is very tolerant to mistakes by beginners. Scoot on over to the produce section and get some carrots, celery, pumpkin, zucchini, and onions. At home, wash, peel, dice, and throw into a pot of boiling water. Let cook for a few hours, add pepper and salt, and your soup is ready. Much tastier than canned soup, and guaranteed to contain less sodium.

OK, this week you don’t have time. In this case, look for soups with a reduced sodium level, preferably 480mg or less per serving.

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