Polly Want a Cracker?

School started in earnest last week and while most people are focused on the quality of food in the cafeteria, I’m obsessed with snacks.

Since when do all kids, even 9 year olds, need a daily morning snack? And when did it become standard for that snack to be a fistful of crackers?  And while I’m at it, when did crackers become healthy?

I’ll get to the nutrition of crackers in a minute (but be warned, it’s not pretty).  First, though, I want to point out that getting kids into the habit of eating a vacuous, nutritionally insipid mid-morning snack isn’t the best idea.  If they must snack, can we at least use the opportunity to get them in the habit of eating food that’s actually healthy?

Crackers are alright on occasion, but daily cracker-snacking is best left to the birds.  Here's why:

1. Kids don't need more grains; they need more whole grains (and most crackers fail in this department).
2. Kids don't need more exposure to grain products.  They already eat them joyfully, and frequently to the exclusion of other types of foods. Instead kids need more exposure to fruits and vegetables.
3. Contrary to popular belief, snacking doesn't just redistribute calories over the course of the day. It adds calories to the daily grand total.
4. The body can scarcely tell the difference between white flour and white sugar. Seen this way, loading kids up on crackers at school doesn't make sense.

I know I’m sounding a bit like a crazy mama at the moment.  But really, crackers—especially crackers used as chips, not as platforms for real food, i.e. cheese, hummus, or something yummy like a tomato and zucchini compote—aren’t a positive addition to our kids’ culinary day.  They teach our kids that snacks are crunchy, salty things... like chips.

Yes, I know crackers are baked, and that makes them “healthier” than potato chips, but being better than a chip doesn’t de facto make something healthy. (But even if it did, isn’t that setting the bar a tad low?)  Read The Potato Chip Challenge: How We Decide What Snacks to Give Our Kids.

In terms of habits, kids would be better off eating potato chips once or twice a week than eating crackers every day. At least we tell them chips are junk.

Now that I’ve vented, let’s move on to the nutrition.

Most crackers are made from refined flour, even when they tout whole grains.

Crackers made from whole wheat, such as Triscuit Crackers, deliver 2-3 grams of fiber per serving.  Be suspicious of crackers with less.

• Cheez-It Crackers (a favorite in my daughter’s 4^th grade class): Each serving delivers less than 1g of fiber, a sign they're made from refined flour. 

• Whole Grain Cheez-It Crackers: The box says each serving provides 5g of whole grains, but each serving delivers only 1g of fiber. Why? Because even Whole Grain Cheez-It Crackers are made primarily from refined flour.  (Check out the ingredients; you'll see what I mean.)

FYI: You can get 1g of fiber from a serving of Lay's Classic Potato Chips, Chips Ahoy! cookies, or a McDonald’s Hot Caramel Sundae. One gram of fiber is no big deal.

Refining sucks the life out of whole grains.

Look at everything that gets lost when whole grains are refined.  

FYI: The only reason refined flour approaches whole flour on any nutrient is because refined flour is enriched.

See more on whole vs. refined from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Crackers are an empty snack... unless you count sodium and fat as attributes.

• One serving of Original Cheez-It Crackers has 310mg of sodium and 9g of fat. 
• One serving of the Whole Grain Cheez-It Crackers has 250mg of sodium and 8g of fat.  
• In comparison, one serving of Triscuit Crackers Original has 180mg of sodium and 4.5g of fat.

FYI: According to the Harvard School of Public Health, adults should limit their sodium intake to 1500mg per day. (Young children should have less.) I'm not sure allocating so much of your daily allotment to crackers is wise shopping.

It takes a lot of crackers to get the goods.

Your child would have to inhale 27 Whole Grain Cheez-It Crackers in order to benefit from the 1g of fiber or 10 Triscuits to take in 3g of fiber. That's a whole lot of crackers.

Which translates into plenty of calories.

Maybe this helps explain why 2-6 year olds now consume 182 more calories per day than they used to.

• One serving of Cheez-It Crackers has 180 calories.
• One serving of Whole Grain Cheez-It Crackers has 150 calories.
• One serving of Triscuit Crackers has 120 calories.

(FYI: A small 2-ounce box of Goldfish Crackers = 280 calories.) Read Goldfish vs. Bunnies.  

Don't think I'm down on Cheez-It Crackers.  I like them as an occassional treat.  What gets me going, though, is using them—and their crunchy brethren—as healthy, daily delights.

NuVal, the nutritional scoring system that doles out values between 1 and 100 (with 100 representing top nutrition) gives most crackers a mediocre score.

Although the top crackers receive scores in the 80s, the median (average) score for the category of crackers is in the 20s. That's where Cheez-It Crackers fall (NuVal score=23).  

Many of our kids' favorites, however are at the bottom of the nutritional barrel. Let's face it, our kids are less likely to sink their teeth into Ryvita Rye & Oat Bran Whole Grain Rye Crispbread crackers (NuVal score=87) than they are to chow down a couple of Ritz Bits Cheese Cracker Sandwiches (NuVal score=7) 

FYI: Bananas score 91 and blueberries rate a cool 100.

Other traditional snack foods are also nutritional time bombs.  Read The Snacking Minefield , Think Snack TIME Not Snack FOOD, and Snacking and the Nutrition Zone Mentality.

For all the teachers who want quick, easy and portable snacks...

I say ask parents to wash some apples, bring in some bananas, or to cough up some carrots at least as often as they crate in the crackers.   It'll nourish our kids and teach them the right habits.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

==============================================

Sources: All websites accessed 9/20/10; Bittman, M., 2009. Food Matters: a Guide to Conscious Eating. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. p. 88; Piernas, C. and B. M. Popkin. 2010. “Trends in Snacking Among U.S. Children.” Health Affairs 29(3): 398-404.

Potato Chips Win Again!

Potato chips are the scum of the snacking world.   Let’s face it, no one thinks chips are healthy, or that eating them on a regular basis is a snacking-habit worth promoting.

In fact, potato chips have such a bad reputation that most parents use them as the standard by which they evaluate all other snacks: if it’s better than a potato chips, it’s got to be good. That’s the rationale that gives veggie chips a good rap.  But I’m here to say that when it comes to teaching kids good snacking habits, regular old potato chips are the way to go.

Read The Potato Chip Challenge: How We Decide What Snacks to Give Our Kids.

Potato chips are a better choice for your kids than veggie chips because …

1) They have been so thoroughly characterized as a “bad” snack that most parents hand them out sparingly --- and sparingly is how often your kids should eat all salty snacks. Remember: It Doesn’t Matter What Your Kids Eat.  What matters is how frequently they eat it.  Once or twice a week is enough for kids to snack on any one of the following: chips, pretzels, doodles, puffs, Goldfish, Bunnies, Cheez Its, or any kind of crispy, cracker-y kind of thing.

2) Parents don’t teach their kids that potato chips are healthy. Veggie chips are an entirely different story.  They are designed to fool parents into thinking they’re healthy -- or at least healthy enough -- to be consumed on a regular basis, and parents pass on this “healthy enough” message to their kids.

A casual look around the playground shows how successful marketers have been at convincing people that veggie chips trump potato chips.

Most mothers who give their kids veggie chips, at least the mothers I know, don’t delude themselves into thinking that they’re giving their kids a healthy snack.  They do, however, think that veggie chips are better than potato chips and that when their kids eat them they’re ingesting at least a smattering of vegetables.

“I try to get the kind with kale,” one mother recently said. Sound familiar?

Potato chips and veggie chips are basically the same product, except potato chips have more potato in them.

OK, so I'm exaggerating just a tad. There are two kinds of veggie chips: one with veggies and one without.

• On one end of the vegetable chip continuum there are Original Terra Exotic Vegetable Chips: a fried up seasonal mix of sweet potato, parsnip, batata, taro, and yucca.  (In case you’re wondering, batata is a type of sweet potato.)   

• On the other end of the continuum there are Snyder’s of Hanover Naturals Garden Veggie Crisps in Potato, Tomato & Spinach flavor: a product that has more vegetables in the name than in the chip!

Neither style of veggie chip is particularly good for your kids.  Neither is appreciably better than a potato chip, and, it goes without saying that neither does anything to teach your kids to eat vegetables.  The only thing that both do, in fact, is promote the habit of eating chips.

The difference between Lay’s Classic potato chips, Terra Chips and Garden Veggie Crisps boils down to this:

• If you’re after nutrition, go for the potato chips first.  True, Lay’s Classic Potato Chips have slightly more calories, fat and sodium than the other choices, but they also have more of the good stuff: Vitamin E, C, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin, Vitamin B6, Magnesium, and Potassium.

• If you or you’re kids are not in the mood for potato chips, choose the Terra chips next.  They have roughly the same calories and fat as the Lay’s Potato chips, but they have a lot less sodium and at least some vitamins A and C, Calcium and Iron.

• And all those other veggie chips?  Unless your kids are craving potato flour and/or potato starch, forget about them.   Garden Veggie Crisps do contain some tomato and a shake of spinach and beet powders, though the veggies can’t amount to much: tomato, spinach and beets are loaded with vitamins but these chips?  Not so much.

Look at the facts for about one ounce of each kind of chip:

Here's a rule of thumb: Don't look for vegetables in processed foods.

But if you do, check out the nutrition labels.  Remember, products made with tomatoes should get a boost from the vitamins found in tomatoes - such as Vitamin A. So should items containing spinach. If they don't, then the vegetables have been processed into oblivion and they're on the label more for show than for substance.

Better yet, skip the labels and go for real food.  Read Why Nobody Needs Nutrition Labels.

Here's another rule of thumb: Look for vegetables in actual vegetables.  

Not only is it healthier, but it's the only way to influence your kids' snacking habits in the direction you want them to go.  And if you want to get your vitamins from a chip... choose potato chips!

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

P.S. If you have high hopes for Veggie Pirate’s Booty, you’re out of luck. While this puffed snack contains a sprinkling of vegetable powders – spinach, broccoli, kale, carrot, cabbage, and parsley -- there are still no vitamins in the bag.  Save Veggie Pirate's Booty for those times when you have a hankerin’ for corn meal, rice, soy flour, and rice flour. YUM!

=========================================

Sources: Product Nutrition Labels

A Whole Lot of Nothin'

Rice cakes are sold as healthy snacks., but in reality, they’re a whole lot of nothin’.

Rice cakes are touted as low-calorie snacks, but consider this: If a food is produced to have fewer calories, it also has fewer nutritional benefits.   Think of calories as energy — that is what nutritionists call them.  If a food doesn’t have a lot of energy, it won’t fuel your kids’ bodies.

Teaching kids to fill up on bulky, empty food isn’t exactly the right lesson for a lifetime of healthy eating.

If you want to give your kids salty snacks, treat them to potato chips.

1) For starters, when we give our kids chips, we teach them they are meant to be eaten occasionally, not daily. We don't say that about rice cakes. What you teach your kids about how frequently to eat different foods might be the most important part of teaching them to eat right. Read It Doesn't Matter WHAT Your Kids Eat!

2) Chips are often a better nutritional bet than rice cakes.

It's true that different varieties stack up differently against potato chips.

• Gram for gram, Quaker Lightly Salted Rice Cakes have fewer calories, less fat, less sodium and slightly more protein than chips.  And they’re made with only whole grain brown rice and salt.

• Even if you purchase Quaker Cheddar Cheese Rice Cakes you’ll do OK – if it doesn’t bother you that they’re made with rice and corn, and if you don’t mind pumping your kids with ingredients such as corn syrup solids, maltodextrin, potassium chloride… 

• But if you buy the more “kid-friendly” mini rice cakes from Quaker known as Quakes, you’re in for a surprise. These are made from rice flour, corn and a long list of other yummy things (like partially hydrogenated oil, monosodium glutamate and sodium phosphate).  These cakes even flunk The Potato Chip Challenge.

Let’s look at the numbers.  For every 10 grams (about the size of 1 regular-size rice cake), your child will consume:

Calories:

• Lay’s Classic Potato Chips – 53
• Cheddar Cheese Quakes – 47

Fat:

• Lay’s Classic Potato Chips - 3.6g
• Cheddar Cheese Quakes – 1.7g

Sodium:

• Lay’s Classic Potato Chips – 62mg
• Cheddar Cheese Quakes – 153mg

Protein:

• Lay’s Classic Potato Chips - .75g
• Cheddar Cheese Quakes - .67g 

Fiber:

• Lay’s Classic Potato Chips – .38g
• Cheddar Cheese Quakes – 0g

If you are concerned about how your kids eat, teach them to snack on fruits and vegetables.

• It’ll be more nutritious: An entire apple has only 81 calories, .5g fat, 1mg of sodum and it also has 3g of fiber and a whole host of vitamins and minerals.  And your kids can pronounce all the ingredients -- apple!

• It’ll teach them the right lesson about snacks: Think Snack TIME not Snack FOOD.

• It’ll help you win the vegetable war.  Frequently giving your kids fresh fruit reinforces their exposure to the taste, texture, aroma, appearance of fresh, natural foods. This will help them accept other fresh, natural foods.  Alternatively, giving your kids rice cakes – even the best varieties – is like arming them to the teeth in the fight over vegetables.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

=========================================================

Sources:  http://www.quakerricesnacks.com/ accessed March 10, 2010.

Bricklin, Mark. 1993. Nutrition Advisor: The Ultimate Guide to the Health-Boosting and Health-Harming Factors in Your Diet. Rodale Press. P. 284.