Finally getting this Certified Nutrition You Can Trust out of the blog archive, and for good reason on why I wanted to wait… this amazing tool is now available that I wanted to share on this post: “Food Scores” by the EWG.
This tool will give you the ability to “Rate Your Plate” and search 80,000+ foods all given a score 1-10 based on nutrition, processing (whole foods vs. processed), and ingredients (including ratings based on factors like pesticide-load, additives, contaminants, antibiotic residue, etc).
It literally just came out today, so I haven’t had too much time to look through it… but from what I see so far, I’m liking it and I think it will be a great tool to help you out when choosing foods! A simple search and you can get a good idea of the quality of foods (or food-like products) and brands you and your family are consuming.
You are what you eat!
OK OK, enough of that excitement… now on to our Lunchables post, which I’ll add, for the example meat, cheese, cracker, cookie one I used for this post, scored a 10 on the Food Scores (the worst score possible).
Lunchables:
We live in a high paced, nano-second driven world, where grabbing for convenience can sometimes be a necessity, including sending our kids off to school with convenience foods like a Lunchables, money for vending machines and school lunch program options. I wish I could say our school lunch programs and cafeterias at all grade levels, K through college, served quality sourced, integrity real food and were great for health, vitality & performance (and growth & development for our children), but the mass majority don’t… not even close. In fact, it’s some of the worst food and the quality can be worse than fast food chains. Would you eat this day in and day out? How about this?
When I’m consulting with parents I usually give them this “ah-ha”: would you eat the food served in a prison? Would you have your children eat it? And would you eat it day in and day out?
Usually the answer is “no”. The reason I do it is because the mental association to prison usually = bad, and the mental association with school usually = good. But the truth of the matter is the same Big Food sources of food that are served in a prison, are the same, if not worse, Big Food sources we find in many school lunch programs, as well as, ingredients and quality we find in Big Food convenience products like a Lunchables.
Convenience in today’s food supply world doesn’t typically = healthy.
So I do understand convenience works when grabbing something like a Lunchables… but at what expense to our health? What expense to our children’s health, growth and development?
Big Food does an amazing job marketing and disguising ingredients so many parents and individuals just don’t know how unhealthy these food-like products are. The Lunchables website for example doesn’t even list their ingredients so we can’t check! But on most all food [-like products], it’s all very calculated so that our attention is focused to the front of flashy packaging and buzz words like “natural”, “fat-free”, “reduced-fat”, “low-calorie”, “Only 100 calories!”,”gluten-free”, “high in fiber”, “good source of protein” etc. while being driven away from the tiny-size text on the back label: the part of the packaging we truly need to be focused on… and even when we do find ourselves looking at the ingredient label, that can be confusing in and of itself where you feel like you need a PhD in chemistry to understand what some of the words are, right?
And that’s why we do consumer awareness Certified NYCT posts like these.
In this post, we’re going to look at some of the Not Certified Nutrition You Can Trust suspect ingredients in a Lunchables, as well as look at healthier Certified Nutrition You Can Trust alternatives for a Lunchables.
Read more →
