Nutrition Information

Have you ever looked up calories on a certain dish and been blown away by the large number? You catch yourself saying, “What!No way!”  I know I have and I’m sure much of the U.S. population has had a gut wrenching gasp from time to time. The fact is most of us have no idea how much we are putting into our bodies.

In a survey conducted by the International Food Information Council Foundation (IFICF) respondents provided weight status: 57 percent considered themselves overweight and 8 percent considered themselves obese. However, in reality, 33 percent of Americans are overweight and 34 percent are obese, meaning people are clueless not only about what and how much they should be eating, but on their own health and weight status.

If that isn’t a big enough number, I will put it in perspective for you. This means that 1 out of 3 people are over weight and 1 out of 3 people are obese. These are huge statistics, no pun intended.As our waistbands expand, our hospital bills do too. A person is more susceptible to heart conditions and diabetes then someone who has their weight under control.

Americans are doubling the size of medical spending on obesity-related conditions. In fact, the cost to the nation could soon reach $147 billion per year and account for 9.1 percent of total medical spending.

So what do we do to bring these numbers down? We take responsibility for what we put in our bodies which includes eating out or on the go. Here are some tips to help:

1. Know your area: You need to know the places to eat around your house and work. You should find the nutrition information from the places you eat and plan nutritional meals. This keeps you from guessing your calorie intake and putting you the right track toward a healthier life style.

2. Learn to cook: We are an”on the go” nation but we should learn to stay at home to eat. If you aren’t a good cook, you need to learn and don’t just settle for a pre-made frozen meal. This gives you full control on what goes in your body. Remember, less bread and more vegetables.

3. Make a realistic budget: When we don’t have a food budget, we tend to eat out more. You need to set a budget for groceries and eating out. This keeps your calorie count down just because you are not going out all the time.

4. Natural is the way to go: We eat more processed food then any other nation and most of that food has sugars and salts that keep our waistlines big. You should replace a processed product  with a natural product every week or every other week. This keeps your body from going into shock from the switch of processed sugars to natural sugars

5. Make a contract with yourself and your support group: As corny as it sounds, you should write a contract and have a fiend or family member sign as a witness.This gets your family and/or friends involved in this plan of action. You get more support and encouragement from the people around you.

6. This is a lifestyle: Remember, you are entering a lifestyle and not a diet. Many people enter into diets and almost always fail. Why is that you say? A diet is a band-aid to a lifestyle problem and you will consistently lose. If you treat your diet changes as a permanent lifestyle, you will come out as a stronger and healthier person.

The bottom line is we need to be held responsible. Weather we are on a budget or have a large bank account, we need to plan and take steps to improve our health. That is when we will see a decrease in hospital bills and dress sizes.

Article From Healthy News

Roaming Cattle

When you go to the grocery store to buy that nice steak you have dreamed about all day, you probably want to know the grade and the color of the meat your about to buy. Do ever you question if it is the original cow? You probably don’t but this post might give you second thoughts.

Recently, the EU has started debates about whether cloned meat products should be sold to the general public. Yes, I said cloned meat which means in its original form the meat was a cloned cow. The U.S. has already jumped on board with this “original” idea of selling cloned meat to the public.You may be wondering why we are not hearing about this debate. No worries, the USDA decided back in 2008 that cloned meat is safe enough to put on our dinner plates.

In January 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, after years of study, said it found no inherent safety problems with meat or milk from cow, goat or pig clones or their offspring. (The FDA didn’t have enough information to weigh in on sheep.) It also lifted a long-standing voluntary moratorium on putting such meat and milk on the market while it studied clones.

The problem is we have no idea if the meat product we are buying is cloned meat. Meat manufacturers do not have to put this little piece of information on their labels which keeps consumers completely in the dark. Yes, the USDA conducted studies and found no safety problems. Do we really believe this? Lets remember, there were studies conducted on growth hormone (rBST) that concluded the hormone was safe. Years later the hormone is close to being completely banned from the U.S. market after seeing the effects on cattle. We still do not know what the growth hormone may have done to humans.

The issue is that we do not know we are consuming cloned meat and we should have this knowledge. Our food is getting to the point where even the animals themselves are being”processed” and that fact is not appetizing. So as you sit to enjoy that fine grade of red meat, you may ask..is this meat an original or a copy? As for me, I will enjoy my salad.

Article is from SlashFood

Heinz Ketchup

Summer is finally here and so is grilling season. This is the time when the family dinner table is outside and the old grill is in use once again. You look forward to all of the same summer foods including hamburgers and hot dogs with the normal condiments. As you take your first bite into that juicy hamburger, you may notice a different taste. It’s not the hamburger patty or the mustard but it may be the ketchup. If it is Heinz Ketchup, you may notice there is less salt than what you usually taste in your favorite ketchup brand.

No, you are not going crazy and your taste buds are fine. You probably picked up the new Heinz Ketchup formula from the grocery store. The Heinz Ketchup brand decided to put less salt in their formula to make ketchup a little healthier for the consumer.

Just after the FDA announced its plans to limit salt in processed foods, Heinz has given word that it’s tweaking the recipe for its iconic ketchup…Spokeswoman Jessica Jackson told the Post that the company was keeping “the needs of our consumers and our commitment to health and wellness” in mind.

The new formula should hit the shelves this summer but consumers won’t even know the when or the where. The new Heinz Ketchup bottle won’t have anything on the label promoting the new formula.There are only two ways to know if you grabbed a different bottle of Heinz. You could check the nutrition facts on the back or savor this condiment on a hamburger.

So will this effect Heinz Ketchup sales? The brand has kept the same formula for 40 years so consumers are bound to notice a slight difference. Are we on the brink of another “New Coke” PR catastrophe? You will have the chance to decide this summer.Personally, I’m glad to see a brand this large taking steps to keep their consumers healthy. It may be a baby step but it’s a step in the right direction.

Article from SlashFood

Cereal Aisle

The FDA has come out with a program to help consumers decide between good products and bad products. The Traffic Light program is supposed to help guide consumer to health food choices by using the traffic light system.

The colors of, yes, a traffic light  gives shoppers a quick burst of nutritional information. Based upon fat, saturated fat, sugars and salts a product contains, a red sticker indicates “high,” an amber sticker indicates “medium” and a green sticker indicates “low.”

The purpose of the “traffic light” is to make shopping quick and convenient while providing useful information. Now, this may seem like a great program but there are some underlying issues. First, the consumer may be choosing the product because it has a “green light” without any knowledge of what this label means.The consumer may not know that “green” means low saturated fat which defeats the purpose of the label in the first place.

The second problem is that the program is voluntary. The food industry does not have to comply with this program so you probably are not going to have a high volume of participation. If I were a food company, I would not spend millions of dollars to place a label on my product, especially, when my product may have a “red light” on the package. This is not good marketing.

The last problem is the reason for this system to be in place at all. If you need to have a label to tell you what is good or bad, you need to educate yourself better about what you are putting into your body. A food company can tell you anything but it may not be the truth. As a consumer and a human being, you have the right to research and know what processed foods are doing to you. Organic foods do not need a “traffic label” and are under strict guidelines. Even if you do not want to buy organic, you can still read the ingredients and choose the product with the least amount of chemicals.Remember, you are the consumer which means you have the power to help change this processed food industry.

Article is from SlashFood

The Produce Section

Just when you thought grocery shopping wasn’t hard enough, you need to be aware of the produce section too! Fruits and vegetables may appear safe but if they are not organic, they probably contain some nasty pesticides. To help consumers steer away from pesticide produce, The Daily Green created a top 12 list of the “Dirtiest Foods” which include apples,potatoes and bell peppers.

Here are the top 6 worst produce items:

1. Celery
Celery has no protective skin, which makes it almost impossible to wash off the chemicals (64 of them!) that are used on crops. Buy organic celery, or choose alternatives like broccoli, radishes and onions.

2. Peaches
Multiple pesticides (as many as 62 of them) are regularly applied to these delicately skinned fruits in conventional orchards.Can’t find organic? Safer alternatives include watermelon, tangerines, oranges and grapefruit.

3. Strawberries
If you buy strawberries, especially out of season, they’re most likely imported from countries that use less-stringent regulations for pesticide use. 59 pesticides have been detected in residue on strawberries. Can’t find organic? Safer alternatives include kiwi and pineapples.

4. Apples
Like peaches, apples are typically grown with the use of poisons to kill a variety of pests, from fungi to insects. Tests have found 42 different pesticides as residue on apples. Scrubbing and peeling doesn’t eliminate chemical residue completely, so it’s best to buy organic when it comes to apples. Peeling a fruit or vegetable also strips away many of their beneficial nutrients. Can’t find organic? Safer alternatives include watermelon, bananas and tangerines.

5. Blueberries
New on the Dirty Dozen list in 2010, blueberries are treated with as many as 52 pesticides, making them one of the dirtiest berries on the market.

6. Nectarines
With 33 different types of pesticides found on nectarines, they rank up there with apples and peaches among the dirtiest tree fruit. Can’t find organic? Safer alternatives include, watermelon, papaya and mango.

The bottom line is to buy USDA Certified Organic produce so you will not have anxiety every time you wonder into the produce section. The USDA has very strong guidelines in order for food to be certified organic. One big rule is produce can not be treated with any pesticides and farms have to comply to be considered USDA Certified Organic. We say “yes” to produce and we say “no” to pesticides.

Article is from The Daily Green

A focus group at Lionel Wilson College Prep Academy Middle and High School in Oakland, CA.

When I was a kid, my mom would give me money and send me on my way to school believing that I would make good lunch choices. She never knew that I considered a slice of pizza, a bag of chips, and a cinnamon churro a “good” lunch. Today, your child’s lunch is a very important topic. With obesity levels in children rising, our country has put the school lunch under much scrutiny.Most children receive their lunch from the school cafeteria and a large percent of these children eat their lunch for free. This is due to a growing number of families falling under the poverty line which qualifies the children to receive free lunch at school.

Kids eat free if their parents earn less than 130% of the poverty line — about $28,000 for a family of four — and schools are reimbursed $2.68 per meal. Families who earn up to 185% of the poverty line, about $40,000 a year, qualify for a reduced-price lunch; kids pay a little bit, and schools get $2.28 from the government. And many schools subsidize full-price meals by charging less than it takes to produce them. After accounting for labor, transportation and other costs, cafeteria directors typically have about $1 left over for the actual food. Frozen pizza, fries and chocolate milk have become school-lunch staples because it’s tough to do better.

Armed with this knowledge, a charter school in Oakland, CA. hired a company called Food Revolution to conduct focus groups with the kids to see what lunch items they would eat. The food items were all healthy and would help the school decide which meals to put on the lunch menu. This keeps the kids from wasting their food or going for a bag of chips. Soon, we won’t see the “natural” square-shaped pizza on the lunch menu. Instead, the kids get to choose healthy items including southwest chicken salad with black beans. Oh, how the days have changed…for the better.

Article is from TIME

KFC Double Down Sandwich

“The crispy “Original Recipe” version of the Double Down Sandwich weighs in at 540 calories.”

With 32 grams of fat and 1380 milligrams of salt, your body will be working very hard to digest a convenient drive thru snack. Unless, you decided to make a “healthy” choice and get the grilled Double Down Sandwich instead. You will just consume 460 calories, 23 grams of fat and 1,430 milligrams of salt . This isn’t horrible,right? So while your driving away patting yourself on the back, your body is kicking you on the inside…enjoy.

Article from Next Generation Food; Nutrition facts from KFC

Hogs are raised on a farm in Elma, Iowa

TIME magazine reports on animals raised in factory farms and it’s harmful effects to the enviroment and our food.”According to the USDA, 2% of U.S. livestock facilities raise an estimated 40% of all farm animals. This means that pigs, chickens and cows are concentrated in a small number of very large farms. But even if you’re a vegetarian, the health and environmental repercussions of these facilities may affect you.”

Animals in these farms no longer roam in the great outdoors. Instead, they are pushed into buildings where they are forced to eat processed animal feed. This leads to bigger problems. The animals produce large amounts of waste due to their new diets. So what happens to all of this waste? “The manure is liquefied. It gets flushed out into an open lagoon, where it is stored until farmers can use it on what few crops they do grow.”

The problem is the animals produce too much waste so farms allow the waste to form lagoons which leak or seep into our enviroment. Can somebody say “safety hazard”? This waste kills fish and pollutes the water where these farms are located. It looks like I won’t be living near a farm anytime soon.

Article from TIME