Pizza. Pizza. Pizza.

Some parents feed their kids pizza every day.  Some parents even encourage their kids to pound down the pizza 2 or 3 times a day. Can you believe it?

No? OK. Maybe most parents aren’t exactly passing out pizza 2 or 3 times a day, but they are giving their kids pizza-equivalents: grilled cheese sandwiches, quesadillas, mac & cheese…

From a nutrition perspective, these foods all have basically the same nutrition profile. 

More importantly, from a habits perspective, regularly eating pizza and pizza-equivalents reinforces your kids’ love of pizza; it does nothing to teach them to eat peas, broccoli, or mushrooms…  That's why pizza makes it onto my list of The 10 Most "Dangerous" Foods.

When is pizza not pizza?  When it's pasta! Pizza equivalents are all made with the same ingredients. 

Flour. Cheese. Tomato.  Here are 10 equivalents.  See what I mean?

1. Pasta with tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese
2. Grilled cheese sandwich
3. Quesadilla
4. Bagel with cream cheese
5. Macaroni & cheese
6. Ravioli
7. Cheese and crackers
8. Cheese sandwich
9. Lasagna
10. Calzones (AKA Pizza Pockets)

So a child who wakes up to a bagel and cream cheese, moves on to a grilled cheese sandwich at lunch, and finishes up the day with a bowl of pasta has eaten...well...a lot of pizza.

Read What's the Problem with Cheese? and La Crème de la Crème.

Pizza equivalents have the same nutrition profile.

Here are the numbers for a slice of pizza from Pizza Hut compared to a Kids Grilled Cheese from Panera Bread.

 Honestly, I don't make this stuff up!

Pizza equivalents constrict rather than broaden the number of foods your children will accept.

It’s true that pizza is crunchy and pasta is gooey, but if you go down the list of pizza-equivalents you will see that they offer a limited range of mouth-feel experiences.  And it's mouth-feel that determines what your kids will eat. 

Read Pizza and Peas: The Untold Story.

There are lots of other equivalents out there. 

Most “child-friendly” foods are sweet, gooey or crunchy.  If you have trouble introducing new foods, overusing child-friendly foods may explain why.  Even if you think you are offering up a diverse diet, your kids are probably not experiencing a lot of variety.  

Read The Variety Masquerade.

You don’t have to introduce new foods to expose your kids to different tastes and textures. 

I’m going to say that again: You don’t have to introduce new foods.

You simply have to start examining the foods you offer from your kids' perspective, and then consciously rotate through foods based on flavor, texture, aroma, appearance and temperature. For instance, serve eggs for breakfast one day, cereal the following day, and yogurt smoothies the next.  Read House Building 101.

Remember, every time you feed your kids, you are:

• Training their taste buds.
• Teaching them how often to expect certain flavors.
• Shaping their ideas about what foods they should want to eat and when.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

La Crème de la Crème.

You have to use a lot of imagination to classify a bagel and cream cheese as healthy.

But that’s what we’re teaching our kids.  (I wish I had a dime for every time a child was made to finish her bagel and cream cheese before she could have dessert. I would be rich!)

A bagel with cream cheese — basically a blob of refined flour coated in fat — may be a tasty way to start the day, but did you know that …

• The typical bagel is equivalent to 4 slices of Wonder White Bread?
• Cream cheese is 80% (or more, depending on the brand) pure fat, most of it saturated?
• Cream cheese contains so little calcium that the USDA doesn’t consider cream cheese to be part of the milk group?

If you top your kid’s bagel with cream cheese thinking it’s healthy, you would be better off piling on the pudding instead.

Compared to Philadelphia Cream Cheese, each 2-ounce serving of Kozy Shack Chocolate Pudding has …

• Fewer calories (70 vs. 200)
• Less sodium (70mg vs. 210mg)
• Less fat (1.8g vs. 18g)
• More calcium (5% vs. 4%)

I admit that the pudding does have more sugar than the cream cheese (9.5g vs. 2g), but the additional 7.5 grams isn’t much.  In fact, we routinely accept this kind of a trade-off: chocolate milk has 12-15 grams of added sugar; a serving of Honey Nut Cheerios supplies 9 grams.  Read The (Chocolate) Milk Mistake.

And, yes, the pudding does have half the protein, but the 4 grams delivered by the cream cheese is nothing to write home about.  Give your kids the pudding instead of the cream cheese and you can make up the 2-gram deficit with…

• A serving of Goldfish crackers (4g).
• One slice of Wonder Bread Classic White Bread (2g).
• Half a Reese’s Peanut Butter Big Cup (2.5g). (In fact, maybe you should consider putting the Peanut Butter Cup on the bagel.  If you can cope with the sugar, you’ll get slightly less calcium from the peanut butter cup than from the cream cheese, but you'll also get fewer calories, less sodium, less fat and more protein.)

 Better yet, give your kids an egg. It has 6 grams of protein. 

And, if teaching your kids to eat the healthier part of the meal first is your goal, a lot of times you would be better off having them dig into dessert.

For instance, compared to a typical bagel with cream cheese (which has about 480 calories and 20 grams of fat), one slice of Entenmann’s Chocolate Fudge Cake is a bargain: it has 200 fewer calories, and about half the fat.  The cake even has the same amount of fiber!

True, the chocolate cake has less protein and more sugar than the bagel and cream cheese, but it has roughly the same amount of protein and more calcium than the cream cheese. (Maybe your kids should eat the cake on the bagel!)

Of course, I don’t really think you should serve pudding, cake, or peanut butter cups on a bagel, because that would teach the wrong lesson. My point is…

It’s not about nutrition, it is all about the effect of regularly eating bagels and cream cheese on your children’s lifelong eating habits. 

Somehow, a bagel with cream cheese has become a staple of the toddler diet.  It’s right up there with macaroni and cheese, chicken nuggets, juice and all the other “dangerous” foods — foods that won’t kill your kids in the sense that they’re poisonous , but items that are dangerous in the sense that they poison your children’s eating habits.

Here’s what we know:

1. Lifelong eating habits are established in childhood.
2. A diet high in saturated fat is one of the leading causes of heart disease
3. Conditions leading to heart disease now start in childhood.
4. High fat food condition people to overeat because fat has what are called reinforcing qualities: pleasurable traits that keep us coming back for more.

If you teach kids that bagels are the healthy choice, why should they eat their veggies?

The veggies don’t have anything in common with a bagel and cream cheese. There's nothing you can do to peas to give them the crunchy, the chewy, the creamy — in other words, the palatability — of a bagel with cream cheese.  So don't train your kids' taste buds in that direction.

Plus, kids who get used to “healthy” bagel eating, think they’ve got the healthy thing covered.

Teach your kids to use bagels and cream cheese right: as a wonderful, delicious, decadent treat. (You know how I feel about bread! Read Manna from Heaven.) 

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~ 

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Sources: All product websites accessed 10/19/10; Gidding, Samuel S., Barbara A. Dennison, Leann L. Birch, Stephen R. Daniels, et. al. 2005. "Dietary recommendations for children and adolescents. A guide for practitioners. Consensus statement from the American Heart Association.  Endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics." Circulation. 112:2061-2075.  Read a copy of this article; Kessler, D. A., MD, 2009. The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. New York, NY: Rodale.

Cheez is Healthy.

I've never had a guest post before, but my 9 year old daughter, knowing that I was stressed about some upcoming deadlines, wrote the following blog.  I love it (and her for wanting to help me).  Here's a little heads up: check out my note after the post to find out what is behind my daughter's comment about bugs.

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Cheese is healthy but cheez isn't.  Motzarella, cheddar, montery jack, and swiss are all cheese but what is that stuff called cheez?  Cheez is what you find in cheeze whiz, processed chemicals with a perfume for smell and chemicals for flavor, even the color doesn't strike true.

At least the color in cheez whiz isn't made of bugs.  Some red or purple food deyes are made with ground up bugs! All the words on the outside aren't anything close to what's on the inside. Of course the ingredients tell all.  If a list of ingredients is long in any product it is probably unhealthy, but if the list is short, for instance, there is one ingredient in banana and that is bananas, it is definitely healthy.

Nothing is better than a fruit or a vegetable.  Your daughter is home from school and she want's a snack.  You want to leave soon so you put some cheez on a cracker and say to yourself, she is getting some grains and some dairy. Instead,  you could grab an apple and say to yourself it's an apple it's healthy.

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My daughter makes her momma proud!

What's the takeaway?  Eat real foods, don't con yourself into thinking something is healthy by parsing the nutrients, stay away from food made from bugs. (I couldn't have said it better myself!)

I want to say one other thing: My daughter hears a lot about food and eating in our house (in fact, it's impossible for her to avoid it), and sometimes I worry that it's too much.  But then the other day I walked into the kitchen and she was reading my copy of Chew on This by Eric Schlosser & Charles Wilson.  I hadn't even cracked the cover yet!

The bugs in the food dye that she is referring to comes from pages 121-122:

One of the most widely used color additives comes from an unexpected source. Cochineal extract (also known as carmine or carminic acid)) is made from the dead bodies of small bugs harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands. The female Dactylopius coccus costa likes to feed on cactus pads, and color from the cactus gathers in her body and her eggs. The little bugs are collected, dried, and ground into a coloring additive. It takes about 70,000 of the insects to make a pound of carmine, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red, or purple. Dannon strawberry yogurt gets its color from carmine, as do many candies, frozen fruit bars, fruit fillings, and Ocean Spray pink grapefruit juice drink.

By the way, Boysenberry, Cherry, Raspberry and Strawberry Cheesecake Dannon yogurts also get their coloring courtesy of bugs!  Yum!!

To see my take on processed foods read The Ingredients Game and The 10 Most "Dangerous" Foods.

~Changing the conversation from adults to kids. ~