A big thank you to all those who participated in the discussion on my last blog article Fruity Cheerios vs Froot Loops where I shared how we managed to switch my daughter to Cheeios from Froot Loops. This was a big deal because she is so fond of Froot Loops that she doesn’t want to try anything else.

But I need to give a special word of thanks to Selmada who left a comment about teaching her to read labels. I tried this idea over the weekend, first with her reading the label on the Fruity Cheerios just to get her used to the contents of a nutrition facts label. She got quite interested in it running her tiny forefinger down the long list as she read out vitamin D, calcium and iron. Later that night at dinner, we talked about the food label and the different items it contains and what they mean. We talked about sugar, fat, protein, vitamin D and calcium. We talked about how calcium and vitamin D made our bodies strong and gave us good bones. We talked about how junk food is full of sugar and fat. We also talked about how different breakfast foods contain different things and why some of them may be better for us. All this conversation happened without the box of cereal on the table as we ate our dinner together.

The next morning, I was quite surprised when she asked for a bowl of instant oatmeal with milk instead of the usual Cheerios! She even insisted on helping me take out 1/2 cup of instant oatmeal mix and mix with a cup of milk; reading the label of course! It was ready in a few minutes and she happily sat down on the table to begin eating it after it had cooled down a little.

I encouraged her to look at the label and find how much sugar the oatmeal had. She ran her tiny finger again and read 1 g. Then I showed her the box of Fruity Cheerios and she read 9 g. As she made the connection, she exclaimed “Cheerios has more sugar than oatmeal”! I said it was ok and we could still enjoy it once in a while.

Then I pointed to the bottle of honey and helped her find the amount of sugar – it was very difficult to find because the label is small and not easy to read.

“16 grams”, she exclaimed in a loud, surprised tone of voice.

“..and that is why we should use only a little bit of honey in the oatmeal”, she suggested after the difference in amount had registered in her mind.

“Yes”, said I as I watched her squeeze out a smaller than usual amount of honey from the bottle.

Her twin brother got interested in checking out the label once he had his own bowl of oatmeal in front of him.

Wow, sometimes things just have a way of coming together!

©2011 Littlestomaks.com

photo credit: maia hopes.

My daughter loves Froot Loops^® for breakfast. Every morning she likes to have a bowl of these colorful rings with milk. As if it is not sweet enough for her, she squeezes a generous dose of honey over it from her Honey-Bear bottle. It has become her daily routine. She does not want to eat any other cereal. In fact, we carried two boxes of Froot Loops with us to India because we knew she was not going to touch anything else in the morning!

I know, it is not really healthy. Surprisingly – and to our great relief – she is not big on other sugary stuff, which is why we don’t try to stop her from enjoying her favorite breakfast cereal. Because eating breakfast each morning is very important, we have accepted her preference.

Still, we have been trying to find a way to reduce the sugar level in her breakfast bowl. This weekend, we stumbled upon Fruity Cheerios® which looked almost identical to the box of Froot Loops sitting on the nearby shelf. Since Cheerios is one of our favorite food brands, we decided to give it a try!

We also bought a box of our regular Froot Loops, just to be safe!

Front of the box labeling on Fruity Cheerios emphasized whole grain, calcium and vitamin D. But on a closer look, as shown in the following table, it has lower sugar and higher levels of other vitamins and minerals compared to Froot Loops.

When I showed the Fruity Cheerios box to my daughter, she paused for a moment but then happily tried it instead of the Froot Loops. Just for the record, I did not try to trick her into thinking that I was giving her the usual Froot Loops. Plus she can now read the box anyway!

She still added the regular dose of honey….oh well!

Overall, I think it is a better choice, but in some ways you could call it the lesser of the two evils. There are, no doubt, healthier breakfast choices, but then we don’t have that option right now. We plan to slowly start introducing her to other foods at breakfast.

What do you think? Share your child’s breakfast favorites in comments below!

Disclaimer – I have not received any sponsorship or free samples of product for writing this review. For complete nutritional information check out Fruity Cheerios and Froot Loops.

©2011 Littlestomaks.com

Greetings! There is no doubt that popular food brands have enormous appeal and influence, especially on children who are exposed to heavy marketing. Not a surprise therefore that even 3 year olds can recognize these brands. The bad news is that most of these brands offer sugary, salty and fatty junk foods, to which kids get hooked on early! Parents have to face this challenge as they try to encourage their children to develop healthy eating habits. Sounds familiar?

I started this week by suggesting that we need to have an offensive-defensive strategy for dealing with the attack of popular food brands. The idea is to create your family’s brand of food and nutrition by applying common branding techniques of identifying core values, developing a main message with a logo/slogan, promoting with friends and family and aggressively defending it with a few rules.

Another approach is to identify a few brands and products that resonate with your core values to support your battle against the not-so-healthy-but-otherwise-popular food brands. Association with these brands then becomes an extension of your personal brand.

This week, instead of the usual Five for Fridays, I want to share with you 5 of our favorite brands and why we like them. And no, I have not been paid to highlight them here; the idea here is to offer you a few suggestions as you try to discover what is important to you.

I would love to hear your comments! Feel free to share your favorite food brands and products.

Earth’s Best Organic

Earth’s Best, by far, is our most favorite brand! Our twins grew up on Earth’s Best fruit and vegetable purees, and they continue to love their organic toddler snacks such as Letter of the Day Cookies, Yogurt Rice Crisp Bars and Instant Oatmeal.

In researching Earth’s Best for this article, I found out – much to my surprise – that the company’s founders Ron and Arnie Koss are twins! Their vision of nurturing children with purest foods and growing those foods responsibly to promote a healthier earth resonates with our core values completely.

Earth’s Best brand now belongs to the Hain Celestial Group, Inc. who is responsible for bringing their toddler products to market, and of course, we are very thankful! Their product lineup ranges from infant formulas to baby’s first foods to toddler snacks and meals. They seem to be big on using Seasame Street characters as a marketing tool on their products. Honestly we are not too crazy about it! For us, the appeal is in their promise of organic quality and commitment to the environment.

For a complete list of their products and to learn about their history, visit Earth’s Best website.

Horizon Organic

We are a big fan of Horizon’s organic milk with DHA. We have had our twins on this milk ever since they started cow’s milk. At first, we were looking for an organic milk brand, but when we found Horizon’s milk with added DHA in our local supermarket, it was a no-brainer! DHA is known to support healthy brain and eye development in infants and toddlers. The source of DHA is from algae branded as life’s DHA from Martek Bioscience Corporation.

We believe that milk is an important source of nutrition for a growing child, unless there is the unfortunate situation of milk allergy. Selecting certified organic milk is better because it does not contain any antibiotics or growth hormones.

We are impressed by Horizon’s commitment to organic principles, compassion for their livestock and passion for the land. In my research, I found Horizon’s Standard of Care, which goes in great detail about their beliefs and management practices to support these beliefs. The integrity of this brand is impressive.

For a complete list of their products and company facts, visit Horizon Dairy website and Horizon Organic Facts.

Campbell’s Kids Soups

Campbell’s soups are a household name, no doubt, as you can tell by the prominent place they occupy in any grocery store. Our daughter enjoys Campbell’s kids soups with her favorite characters like Dora and Disney Princess. She loves to help Mom open a can and pour its contents in a saucepan for a quick meal. On a busy day, these ready-to-eat soups come in very handy! We are careful to read the labels because these soups can be high in salt, although Campbell’s is ahead of the curve in reducing the sodium content from its products.

We like Campbell’s as a brand, because they seem to really listen to their consumers while being sensitive to the economic difficulties. Clearly, their brand is positioned for the masses. Although their approach to healthful nutrition and environmental sustainability is incremental in our opinion, we do like their focus on affordable nutrition and continuous improvement. They have also figured out a great way to encourage consumers to prepare home cooked meals using their soups and recipes on the label. From that point of view,  we believe that Campbell’s has the potential to enable a move away from fast food and restaurant food toward home cooking at a very large scale.

Here is an interesting piece of trivia I found while researching their brand – they also produce their own seeds for tomato and peppers!

For a complete list of their products, visit Campbell’s Condensed Soups.

Cheerios

Although our twins are no longer that crazy about Cheerios, this cereal is a family favorite and occupies almost a permanent place on our cereal shelf. When they were younger, it was one of their favorite finger foods, especially when they needed to munch on something in the car!

Although there are many different types of products in the Cheerios family, we go for the plain standard Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios. We like the whole grain oats, low sugar and vitamins (particularly vitamin D) in this cereal. Recently, there has been some recent controversy about their claims around cholesterol and heart health, but we think it is more of a legal issue for them rather than a real concern with the product.

For a complete list of their products, visit Cheerios.

Green Giant Frozen Vegetables

We usually keep our freezer stocked with several packages of Green Giant frozen vegetables. Although fresh produce is the best choice, the convenience of packaged frozen vegetable -  some ready to serve with a sauce – makes it easy to add veggies in your daily diet. We like the affordable diversity of different frozen vegetables from Green Giant. But we also try to limit our selection to some of their simpler products like peas, cauliflower, broccoli and mixed vegetables. Their rice pilaf is also one of our favorites.

As a brand, which is now a part of the giant General Mills, they seem to be able to retain their identity and maintain a connection with their roots in the Minnesota River Valley. We are also impressed by their commitment to sustainability. They are sponsoring an innovative project with The Nature Conservancy. It involves using a combination of native vegetation in infiltration ponds to collect the water runoff from the fields. It is then diverted to a bioreactor (trenches filled with woodchips) where the excess nitrogen is removed and land erosion controlled. This system will also create a habitat for wildlife. Sounds like an interesting idea; although it may take up to 10 years to see the results.

For a complete list of their products, visit The Green Giant.

Enjoy and share with us your favorite brands and products.

©2010 Littlestomaks.com

Disclaimer: We have not received any sponsorship or free products from these brands and companies for our review. Our opinions are based on personal use and publicly available information.

Ni Hao! Hope all of you are having a great week so far. This week is Food Allergy Awareness Week. This is the 12th year that the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) has organized a week of awareness about food allergies. Check out their website for more details on how to get involved if you are interested. If your child has food allergies, I would love to have you leave a comment and share your tips for managing nutrition.

Here is another set of 5 nutrition related news and articles from this week that I found interesting. Feel free to share your opinions in the comments section.

Ready for your order? Now let me tell you about sodium in our special today…

When I am dining out, I am usually quite impressed by the ability of the server to rattle off details of their specials of the day. But did you ever wonder why they don’t tell you anything about salt as they try hard to make your mouth water by the fancy description of the recipe? Turns out that if they did, the shock value would be enough for you to simply say “no thank you” and walk out never to return again!

In their report “Heart Attack Entrees and Side Orders of Stroke“, researchers from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) disclose that many of the popular menu items in chain restaurants have “dangerously high levels” of sodium. They examined 17 chain restaurants and found that 85 out of 102 meals had more sodium than a whole day’s worth (2300 mg) and several had more than 4 days worth of sodium! Among the top 10 saltiest meals -  Red Lobster’s Admiral Feast has over 7100 mg and Oliver Garden’s Tour of Italy lasagna with breadsicks, salad, dressing and a coke has over 6100 mg of sodium. Items on Kids menu are no better either with some containing as much as 2400 mg of sodium. CSPI estimates that reducing daily sodium intake by just 25% over the next 10 years could help save the US government over 9 billion dollars per year in direct medical costs.

Isn’t it ironical that even with so much salt in the meals, they still have the salt and pepper shakers on each table?

When eating out, ask for the low salt version of the dish you want to order. Same goes for fat, cholesterol and sugar. If enough customers start asking for healthy food, I think restaurants will change their menu to favor healthy recipes.

If Cheerios^® claims to lower cholesterol, should it be considered a “drug”?

The FDA certainly seems to think so. This week, they sent a warning letter to the CEO of General Mills informing him of “serious violations of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act” by the promotion of Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat cereal as cholesterol lowering. That would qualify it to be a drug they reasoned, because it seems to treat a medical condition for which drugs are prescribed. In the eyes of the FDA, it counts as an unapproved use since the product has not been evaluated by the FDA for safety and efficacy. Drug approval takes very long and requires a very strict quality control in manufacturing. This could turn out to be quite serious for General Mills who may have to withdraw this claim or modify it to comply with the regulations.

Another claim that FDA found troublesome was that “heart-healthy diets rich in whole grain foods can reduce the risk of heart disease”. Seems like they conveniently forgot to include fruits and vegetables in this claim, which together with a diet low in fat and cholesterol lower the risk of heart disease. Whole grains or dietary fiber is only one factor.

We personally like Cheerios -  it is a brand I have written about favorably in the past. But I am glad that FDA is sensitive to such over-ambitious claims cited in their warning letter. It is not uncommon to see health-related claims on products – for example, nutritional supplements make all kind of claims – but then they are also required to add that their claims have not been evaluated (and approved) by the FDA.

Will this affect your decision to by Cheerios or other products from General Mills? Weigh in.

HIV and safety of breast milk

Imagine the heartbreaking dilemma of a woman with HIV wanting to feed her baby with breast milk. Now imagine that this woman lives in a poor country, where women like her are routinely told not to breastfeed and formula is not affordable.  What are her options? Should she let her baby grow up without the benefit of breast milk, or in the worst case, even die of early childhood diseases?

It  is a sensitive topic; something a lot of us are fortunate enough not to have to worry about. Yet, the problem cannot be ignored if we want all children to grow up healthy. I was pleased to read about the efforts of researcher Sera Young of UC Davis, who is helping women of Tanzania learn a protocol to pasteurize breast milk by flash heating without affecting its nutritional value. Even though the WHO recommends HIV-positive to pasteurize breast milk,  no one in those countries knows how to do it. This project is a great start in that regard. And it is encouraging to note that the acceptance level is very high. The challenge will be to ensure that the pasteurization protocol is properly followed so that the breast milk is safe and still maintains its nutritional value. It is one thing to do it under the watchful eyes of a researcher, and something else to do it everyday on your own. But I do hope that it works in future at a much larger scale.

Link between obesity and food allergy?

This is what you could call a double whammy! Not only do we have rising rates of childhood obesity, we also have an increase in the number of early childhood food allergies and sensitivity to various foods. Now researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have uncovered a link between obesity and high levels of IgE (antibody associated with an allergic response) based on the 2005 – 2006 NHANES data. Although, they are careful not to draw too many conclusions, it hasn’t taken all that long for people to ask the question “Is obesity fueling food allergies“? It is hard to say if high BMI and obesity is a cause of food allergy, or simply a common feature. Also, is there even a common cause between the two? Hard to say – because even though poor nutrition is linked to high BMI, we cannot say for sure that it also causes food allergy or intolerance. Could it be that the child’s parents have allergies? Could it be that they introduced these foods too early when the child’s digestive system was not fully developed? Just by looking at the survey data and drawing conclusions based on a statistical analysis does not mean that obese children are more likely to develop food allergies.

Support Share Our Strength’s Great American Bake Sale

If you love to bake and would like do some good at the same time, you have a great opportunity to help end childhood hunger. Can you believe that 500,000 more children live in poverty now compared to an year ago and 16 million children rely on food stamps? Personally, I find this statistic embarrassing in our land of plenty! Now, Share Our Strength is running their Great American Bake Sale campaign where you can get involved – the proceeds of your bake sale will go to fund after-school and summer feeding programs in your community and across the country.

You can also support them by blogging about it, or even contributing a recipe to their virtual bake sale! They will raise money by selling eBooks of recipes.

The only thing I will add is that even though this campaign is sponsored by Domino and C&H sugar, try to go low on sugar! Leave a comment if you decide to contribute.

Enjoy your weekend!

Photo source – Davichi on Flickr
©2009 Littlestomaks.com

If your toddler loves Kellogg’s Fruit Loops as much as our twins, you may want to take a closer look at the front of the cereal box. I think Kellogg has done a good job of adding an easy to understand Nutrition At A Glance^TM feature using their Guideline Daily Amounts (GDAs) right on the front of the box. The standard Nutrition Facts label showing the Daily Values (DVs) still appears on the back of the box. This new feature now appears on all of Kellogg’s cereals.

A simple and easy to read system

Even though Kellogg’s Nutrtion At A Glance looks very different from the Traffic Light Food Labeling system I wrote about recently, you can quickly see the serving size, total calories, total fat, sodium and sugars, and their percentage levels based on the GDAs. Additionally you can also see up to two more useful nutrients such as fiber, vitamins (A, C, E) and minerals (calcium, magnesium, potassium) and their percentages. This can help you understand the most important nutritional information quickly without having to read the detailed Nutrition Facts label at the back. You can also compare two different types of cereals before making a decision. However, do not compare a Kellogg cereal with another company’s cereal; say for example Cheerios® from General Mills. They use the Daily Values to calculate the percentages. Also, their serving sizes may be very different. This can be very confusing since there are no standard guidelines from the FDA for these types of the front-of-the-box labels. Therefore, it is a part of the marketing strategy by these companies to promote their products. Still, I think it is a step in the right direction.

But watch out for sugars

A word about the Fruit Loops though. A 1 cup (30 g) serving contains 13g of sugars, which is just a little too much in our opinion. You will notice that the front label does not show a percentage for the sugar because the recommended daily amount has not be established. While this is true, it has been suggested by the Institute of Medicine that not more than 25% of the total calories should come from added sugars. According to Kellogg’s website, this comes to about 125 g of sugars for a 2000 calories daily diet. Most toddlers need less than 1500 calories per day, so the maximum amount of sugars consumed throughout the day should be about 95g. A single serving of Fruit Loops will deliver close to 15% of the total sugars needed for the day. Just remember to cut down on fruit juices on the day you give Fruit Loops! We try to cheat and mix only a few of the colorful loops with Cheerios. Believe it or not, sometimes it does work!!