Kraft calls the new line “wholesome,” but are they?
Turkey and Cheddar Sub Sandwich seems like it could be a healthy choice, but actually it is filled with fat, sodium and sugar. Here’s a complete list of ingredients that may shock you.
Digging a little deeper
I’m curious now to find out what’s behind the “New Deep Dish Cheese Pizza.” Here’s how it’s described:
You won’t have to dig deep for our Deep Dish Pizza, made with Kraft 2% Mozzarella and 2% Cheddar, deep dish crust made with whole grain, Tombstone Pizza Sauce, Tree Top® Applesauce, Mini Nilla Wafers, spring water and Tropical Punch Kool-Aid Singles.
It doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Low fat cheese, whole grain crust, pizza sauce, applesauce, mini Nilla Wafers, spring water; what’s so bad about that? One more ingredient includes Tropical Punch Kool-Aid Singles. Hmm…what was wrong with just the water? Why add all that sugar?
Okay, I’m digging deeper now to read the ingredients. Well, take a peek, and you decide. The long list of ingredients isn’t healthy. The Deep Dish Pizza is filled with fat, calories, sodium, cholesterol, and sugar.
Read the Ingredients
It’s really important to read the ingredients and not just the label. The packaging and wording are created in such a way to capture your attention and it gives the appearance that it’s healthy, but in fact it is not.
Playing detective
You could actually make a game out of this with your kids. Take them food shopping with you and have them take the “Food Label Challenge Test.” (I just made that up). Show them the package and the front label, ask them if they think it’s healthy or not. Have them read the ingredients, you may be surprised at what you find! The little gumshoes may enjoy the challenge.
So remember, make sure the next time you’re out food shopping, read the ingredients, not just the front label. Playing detective might not be such a bad idea; you may be surprised at what you find in your foods.
*This blog post was originally published at Health in 30*
At a time when two thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, health officials are correctly warning that most of us need to lose weight. But we may be setting ourselves up for a surge in eating disorders.
The two main types of eating disorders are food restricting (commonly referred to as “anorexia”) and binge eating and purging (commonly referred to as “bulimia”). The disorders typically begin in adolescence and affect women much more commonly than men.
Statistics are tough to come by – partly because of under-diagnosis and incomplete reporting – but a recent review estimated that 500,000 women in the U.S. have anorexia and 1-2 million women have bulimia.
A key feature of an eating disorder is the disparity between perception and reality. Over the past thirty years, obesity (BMI >= 95th percentile) in teenagers increased from 5.0 percent to 17.6 percent. While that rate has skyrocketed, it’s still much lower than the perceived rate of obesity among students.
Among children in grades nine through 12, 10 percent of females were obese and 15.5 percent were “at risk” for becoming obese (BMI >=85 percentile but <95th percentile). Yet 38.1 percent of students described themselves as overweight and 61.7 percent were trying to lose weight.
Put another way, more than half the women trying to lose weight were not overweight.
Why do people who are not overweight think they need to lose weight? There’s no simple explanation. Experts believe that genetic, environmental, psychological, and social factors can all play a role in eating disorders. Studies suggest that movies, magazines, and television contribute to eating disorders by idealizing overly thin women and exacerbating body dissatisfaction, especially in people with low self-esteem. Fashion magazines often feature models with obvious signs of anorexia. The theme is clear: less is more.
My intuition tells me we’re at a tricky point in the national discussion of weight. Since research suggests that the wrong public message can be especially dangerous for patients at risk of an eating disorder, we need to be very careful as we develop strategies against obesity. As they create their plans, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) should include experts in eating disorders.
For this week’s CBS Doc Dot Com, I talk to Leslie Lipton and her father, Roger, about how Leslie has successfully battled anorexia. Click below to watch the video:
I also interviewed Dr. B. Timothy Walsh, a renowned expert on eating disorders and Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and author of the book, “If Your Adolescent Has an Eating Disorder.” Click below to watch the video:
The first statistic that shocked me was that the average intake of added sugar is 17% of our daily calories per day. This is added sugar, meaning it doesn’t count the sugar found naturally in fruit and milk, but rather just the sugars added to the foods we consume. 17% of our calories?!?!? That is a lot, in my opinion. It is not a secret that I have a sweet tooth especially when it comes to chocolate, but the sweets do not add up to almost 20% of my calories for the day!
The study broke down race/ethnicity, education, and income to see how these factors influenced how much sugar they ate. Check out some of the findings:
As education level and family income increased, sugar intake was lower
Asian Americans then Hispanics had the lowest intakes
Black men were highest among men
Trying to identify added sugars? Look for these terms:
I have never been one to shy away from the truths about our world. An Inconvenient Truth was a movie that affected many of us profoundly. Most of my family does not like Al Gore because they are in denial about what is happening to our planet, and our role in that. A new movie does the same about our food sources in America. It is called Food, Inc. It may upset you, but I highly recommend it. The authors explore just where our food comes from, the chicken, the beef, the grains and how our big corporate food industries operate.
I am not an anti-corporate person. I agree with Calvin Coolidge that the business of America is business. In our modern life, we have accomplished many things through industry. Our supermarkets contain a richer variety of food than ever available before in the history of mankind. But, there are important issues for us to address. What are the implications of feeding our cattle corn meal when that is not their best food source? What danger do we have of serious bacterial contamination? How do the big food corporations treat our farmers? These are all questions explored in this film. Like Anderson Cooper on CNN, this film “keeps them honest”.
Two of the main characters in the movie are authors I admire a lot: Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, and Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. These men are dedicated to keeping our food supply safe and healthy and for us to avoid the traps that make us unhealthy and obese.
Should you become a “locavore”? That is a new word to describe someone that only eats locally grown food. That may be an option for some but not for others depending on where you live. Locally grown food, like what is found in a Farmer’s Market, is more likely to be fresh and have fewer questions than other commercially developed foods. I saw an interesting bumper sticker today, “Supermarkets have branches, Farmer’s Markets have roots”.
The tagline for Food, Inc. is “You’ll never look at dinner the same way again”. I must say that is true. I continue to shop in supermarkets and eat in restaurants, but I am much more mindful about what I put in my body. We all should be.
*This blog post was originally published at eDocAmerica*
I have not posted a blog in a week because we were on vacation and truly wanted to be on vacation and not be tied to doing any “work.”
We went to north Georgia for a few days then up to the mountains in western North Carolina. How gorgeous! It was so nice to escape the humidity of Florida for a week!
I had an observation on my vacation that I thought I would share. I have talked in previous blogs about mindless eating and how we multi-task while we are eating. When we are not conscious of what we are eating, we don’t fully enjoy it. In addition, we eat more than we realize.
I observed this phenomenon in my little boy who just turned 2 years old. We were in the car a lot for hours on end, so snacking and fast food were part of the trip. Also, because he is 2 and difficult to entertain in a car, we had the DVD player set up for him to watch his favorite Elmo, Clifford, and Thomas the Tank Engine videos.
It was quite amazing that whenever he was glued to the TV, he ate whatever snacks or meals in his carseat without even looking down. He just picked up a piece and put it in his mouth. And he would ask for more. Whenever he was not glued to the TV, he wasn’t asking for food or eating as much. Hmmm…..very interesting.
From now on I am going to be very careful about two things. First, how much TV he is watching. He normally doesn’t watch much but on this trip he got very spoiled with watching his DVD’s and I am afraid it will lead to more asking to watch now that we are home. Second, I am going to only let him snack when he is fully conscious of what he is doing. No food in front of the TV so that he can be very conscious about what and how much he is putting into his mouth.
As a fairly new (2 years) parent, I am still learning these lessons first hand on how to feed children. I just had to share my story because our children learn habits, both good and bad, at a very young age!
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