The 10 Most "Dangerous" Foods

I want to be clear: the items on this list aren't dangerous in the sense that they are poisonous.

But they are dangerous in the sense that they poison your children's eating habits.

Danger #1: Regularly eating any of these items will constrict rather than expand the range of foods your children will accept.

Nothing on the list looks, smells, tastes or feels like any of the new foods you're always coaxing your kids to eat. This matters because kids eat foods with sensory properties they're used to.  Instead of introducing new tastes and textures, the foods on this list reinforce the ones your kids already enjoy.  They're all...

• Bland or Sweet
• Liquid/non-chewable goo or Chewy/Crunchy

Danger #2: These foods all point your children's taste buds in the direction of the junk you're trying to control.

When "healthy" foods mimic junk they encourage your children to eat more junk. For instance...

• Chocolate milk has more sugar than some chocolate bars and drinking it regularly teaches kids to like chocolate, not milk.
• Oatmeal breakfast bars taste more like cookies than oatmeal (and are usually less nutritious than oatmeal cookies). 

Danger #3: These foods trick YOU into teaching your kids these foods are healthy.

These items seem to pass nutritional muster -- if barely -- and because you've got your eyes on monitoring vegetables and junk, these items slip right by.  

Even worse, because these foods (and I use the term loosely) seem "good enough" (even though they're really not) they fill in for healthier fare, and that's what we teach our kids. Who hasn't made their kids finish their mac & cheese, their pizza, or their bagel (because it's the "good" stuff) before moving on to dessert?

"Dangerous" Foods can be used safely, they just have to be used sparingly.

• Be Unpredictable: Make sure there's a gap of at least one day between "uses" so your kids don't expect these items as daily fare.
• Be Selective: Don't use more than 1 or 2 items from the list on any one day.
• Be Choosy: Consider these items as stand-ins for junk (even if they're healthier) and then let your kids choose between these foods and the junk they clamor for. Make it sweet yogurt or ice cream, chocolate milk or cookies...

10 Most "Dangerous" Foods (in no particular order):

1) Cheese Read What's the Problem with Cheese?

2) Sweet Yogurt Read Yogurt vs. Coke

3) "Healthy" crunchy snacks like veggie chips, pretzels or Goldfish crackers. Read Goldfish vs. Bunnies and Potato Chips Win Again!

4) Bagel and Cream Cheese Read The Snacking Minefield and Manna from Heaven.

5) Granola or Breakfast Bars Read Cookies for Breakfast?!

6) Chocolate Milk Read Chocolate Milk vs. Chocolate Bars and Chocolate-Flavored Formula Rocks!

7) Juice Read Training Tiny Taste Buds

8) Sports Drinks Read Soccer Moms, BEWARE!

9) Pizza Read Pizza and Peas: The Untold Story.

10) Macaroni & Cheese Read Mac & Cheese Scores Again!

You may have a slightly different group of dangerous foods, but if you're having trouble getting your kids to eat something exotic (like tuna, tomatoes or turnips) evaluate the foods you feed them on a regular basis.

And then start mixing it up. Read House Building 101.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

Training Tiny Taste Buds

If you give your kids juice for the nutrients, you would be better off giving them Froot Loops.

Froot Loops has more vitamins than juice.  It also has less sugar – 12g per serving instead of 20-23g in the typical 6.75-ounce juice box. 

Of course, giving your kids Froot Loops every day would teach them the wrong habits, and it would get their taste buds used to too much sugar, but that’s the point.

Most 100% apple, grape, punch and other “kid-friendly” blends have around 3g of sugar per ounce.  For a point of reference, Coke has 3.3g of sugar per ounce.

True, Juicy Juice is made from juice concentrate – a natural sugar -- but your kids’ taste buds can’t tell the difference. 

• According to the USDA, juice concentrate is a euphemism for added sugar. In other words, sugar is sugar.

• 100% juice may give your children 100% of their Vitamin C needs, but that’s only because the Vitamin C has been added.  In other words, it’s fortified sugar.

To drive the point home, here are 10 other delicacies that have less sugar than juice.

Some of these treats have vitamins, and others have less desirable tidbits such as fat and calories, but here is how the sugar stacks up.

Compared to the 20-23g of sugar in the typical Juicy Juice box…

1) Juice Drinks: Capri Sun Original fruit drinks have only 16g of sugar per 6.75-ounce pouch. Even 8 ounces of Sunny D has only 20g.

2) Sweetened Cereals:  A bowl of Fruity Pebbles has 11g of sugar.  Even Count Chocula has only 12g per bowl.

3) Fruit Leather:  One pouch of Stretch Island Fruit Leather, Autumn Apple flavor, has 9g of sugar.

4) Fruit Flavored Candy:  One pouch of Kellogg’s Barbie Fruit Flavored Snack has 13g of sugar.

5) Popsicles: One Dreyer’s Fruit Bar Grape has 20g of sugar.

6) Pop-Tarts:  One Kellogg’s Pop-Tart Frosted Blueberry has 17g of sugar.

7) Cereal Bars: Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Mixed Berry Bar has 12g of sugar.

8) Donuts:  One Dunkin’ Donuts Strawberry Frosted Donut has 14g of sugar.

9) Flavored Water: One pouch of Capri Sun Roarin’ Waters has only 7g of sugar.(Isn't that a lot for water?) 

Guess what?  Even some chocolate beats juice in the sugar department.

10) Chocolate: 8 Caramel-Filled Hershey’s Kisses have 21g of sugar. One Reese’s Peanut Butter Big Cup has 19g of sugar.

Kids come out of the shoot ready for sweet, but you don’t need to encourage it. 

If your kids have a limited palate, especially when it comes to veggies, I recommend you look to juice as a hidden culprit.

In fact, juice is one of the easiest places to clean up your kids' eating act.

Read Juice: Apple, Grape, Punch; Coke Beats Juice.

Juices aren’t all created equal - orange juice has something to offer - but the juices and juice drinks that most kids consume are some combination of apple, pear and/or grape juice.

Even Capri Sun Juice Drink Sunrise Orange Wake Up.

Ingredients: Water, Sugar, Apple and Orange Juice Concentrates, Calcium Lactate, Citric Acid, Water Extracted Orange Juice Concentrate, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Natural Flavor.

Most parents keep their eye on their children's sugar consumption, but look in the wrong places. 

Even though my family loves juice, I have to say: if you wouldn’t serve your kids Froot Loops on a daily basis, remember that juice is worse.  Not only does it generally replace water, but it gives your kids the wrong idea about what is healthy. 

Most of all, juice trains (and trains again) your kids' taste buds to enjoy the flavor they already love – sweet.

So teach your kids to use juice like the candy it is (sparingly and as a treat) and you'll be teaching them the habits they need for a lifetime of healthy eating. In the short run, weaning your kids off sugar might just help them open up to broccoli too.  Read Ways to Wean Your Juice-Fiend.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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All websites accessed 5/28/2010

Party Hardy!

No one expects party food to be nutritious -- and I'm not here to bash parties -- but you've got to admit, the typical kids’ party really takes the cake (if you know what I mean).

It’s difficult to know the nutritional value of most party fare:

• There isn’t one set menu -- although kids' parties where I live almost always serve pizza, juice and cupcakes.
• The calorie content for seemingly identical items can vary quite a lot -- the range for cupcakes can be more than 500 calories.

I'll get to the nutrition of party food in a moment, but first, let's think about habits.

If parties occurred infrequently -- and if kids only ate pizza, juice and cupcakes when they attended parties -- there would be no problem.

But kids seem to gobble up party food on a weekly, or sometimes even a semi-weekly, basis.  And while it may be true that most kids don't hit the trifecta of pizza, juice and cupcakes too often, I think it's safe to say that many kids have the opportunity to indulge in a duet of two (pizza and juice or cupcakes and juice) fairly frequently.

The Habits Perspective: Have your ever thought about what blurring the line between party food and regular food teaches your children about food and eating?

I've written about the impact of juice and pizza on kids' eating habits.  Read Juice: Apple, Grape, Punch; Coke Beats Juice; Pizza and Peas: The Untold Story; The Snacking Minefield.

And I assume everyone knows what eating cupcakes on a regular (say weekly) basis would do to their kids' eating habits.

Well, regularly eating party food messes with your kids' habits too.  It teaches kids the wrong message about:

• What foods are valued. Read The Look.
• What kinds of foods they should prefer.  Read Mind Over Matter
• How often it's OK to eat nutritionally inferior fare. Read It Doesn't Matter WHAT Your Kids Eat.

In addition, pizza, juice and cupcakes all shape your children's taste buds to prefer high fat, sweet and/or salty foods.  These nutrients have been linked to overeating.  They also influence whether your kids will accept the finer foods you offer, foods like asparagus.

The Nutrition Perspective: To accommodate the range in calorie counts, let’s consider two different scenarios -- one party hosted by Minimus Mom and another one hosted by Maximus Mom.

With Minimus Mom your child is likely to take in..

• ½ slice of Pizza Hut thin crust cheese pizza from a regular pie = 95 calories
• 1 small juice box = 60 calories
• 1 small Hostess Cupcake type of cupcake = 200 calories

Total for the party = 355 calories.  That’s not bad, even if it is basically a third of a toddler’s daily intake.

With Maximus Mom your child is likely to take in…

• 1 slice of Pizza Hut hand tossed crust cheese pizza from a regular pie = 220 calories
• 1 large juice box = 100 calories
• 1 cupcake from someplace such as Crumbs Bake Shop or one of the new cupcakes from Cinnabon = 500 or more calories.

Total for this party = 820 calories or around 80% of your toddler’s daily intake.

See USDA calorie intake recommendations.

Remember, though, that neither the count for Minimus Mom nor the count for Maximus Mom takes into consider all the extras.  If your child...

• Drinks 2 juice boxes instead of 1, add 100 calories.
• Snacks on 1 ounce of Goldfish Crackers, add 140 calories 
• Scores a scoop of ice cream, add 100-200 calories. 

With these added delicacies your child could consume 600- 1000 calories at one event.  (And don't forget the candy from the party favor bag that she'll gobble down on the way home.)

The variation in calorie counts for pizza depends upon things you can see -- the type of crust, type of topping and size of the pie (larger pies yield larger slices) -- but that's not true with cupcakes and the truth about what goes into these little treasures will really shock you.

An NPR story from a few years ago calculated that eating one of Crumbs Bake Shop's creations is the equivalent of eating 3 slices of pizza. According to this report, at least one Crumb's concoction contains over 700 calories -- and 36 grams of fat.  (I can't verify this because Crumbs doesn't supply nutrition information for their cakes -- and after seeing these numbers, I can understand why -- but other internet sources concur.)

For some perspective: 1/2 cup of Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Caramel Fudge ice cream has only 270 calories and 14 grams of fat.

So what can you do to salvage parties?

1) Save party food for parties. Not only will this put pizza, juice and cupcakes into your children's diets in the right proportion, it will teach your kids the right lessons about party food.

2) Start using parties to teach your kids some valuable lessons about eating right. For instance, it's an ideal venue for teaching kids some ways to avoid overeating.  I'll say more about this in my next post.

3) Then, let your kids party hardy!

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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Sources:

http://www.pizzahut.com/Files/PDF/PH&WSNationalBrochure4.13.10.pdf - accessed 6/3/10

http://www.juicyjuice.com/Products/Juicy-Juice-Fruit-Juice.aspx# - accessed 6/3/10;

Center for Science in the Public Interest. 2010. "Sinnercake." Nutrition Action Healthletter, June. p. 16.

Pesca, Mike, 2007. "Just How Fattening is that Cupcake?" National Public Radio. May 23. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10328143 - accessed 6/3/10; 

http://www.benjerry.com/flavors/our-flavors/#product_id=38 - accessed 6/3/10;