Frozen Pizza Nutrition Showdown

Someone has followed in the Food Geeks footsteps and conducted a frozen pizza nutrition comparison. (Recall our first product showdown on pizza here.) Honestly though, dietitian Leslie Beck has more clout than we do, as this article is an excerpt from a piece shown on CTV's morning show, Canada AM. Hence, I'm sure we were not her inspiration..but it is nice to imagine that we could be :)

Ms. Beck provides info on both the worst and the best slices of frozen pizza out there on the Canadian market. It is quite surprising on the findings that the nutrition info on just one slice/serving of a pizza has such high numbers in sodium and fat. Example is the President's Choice Rising Crust Extra Pepperoni product, where just 1/6th of the pizza contains 16 grams of fat and 1004 milligrams of sodium - yikes!

Need a Food Habit Tracker Device?

For Food Geeks who want to know more about their eating and activity habits, the Dietitians of Canada has launched an online program called EATracker. It includes a calendar where you can log in your food consumption plus amount of energy expended daily. A big plus is that it is like a diary where you can go back and check your progress throughout time. The eating diary includes a search function by keywords or by food group, so that makes it easier to log in what you ate for the day. I was fiddling around with it, and so far it seems like a good site to analyze your daily eating habits, and also help manage your serving sizes, as each food item is broken down into a typical serving size according to Health Canada's food guide. It does need to have its improvements in providing more ethnic based foods to its food list, but it can still provide you with a general assessment.

Check it out for yourself - do keep in mind that it does not replace medical advice, but is a guideline for you to understand more of what you eat and what you do!

Colour Me Hungry - Part 2

Check out this article by Leslie Beck, a dietitian and nutrition spokesperson in Canada. She writes about why you should be eating your vegetables - colourful and leafy, plus the benefits of including more fish (yum, Omega-3 fats) in your food regimen. This follows on the tail of Ms. Pepper's love of all things colourful.

Colour me hungry

So you know when you were a kid and your mom told you to make a salad? What did you put into the salad? Some kids were probably lazy and just did lettuce and tomatoes. Other kids probably just followed whatever instructions their mom gave them. For me, I always made sure that my salad was colourful. I didn't really think about how it would taste, really. Nor did I really think about the nutritional value of the ingredients I was adding. Rather, I would simply stand back and admire the salad to determine if it was colourful enough.

Now, I always thought that this silly habit of mine was due to the fact that I was a bit of an artsy kid. I loved to paint, draw, sculpt Play-doh, and flip through art books. Now, MSN is telling me that my compulsion for creating colourful meals might actually be an instinctual mechanism for ensuring I have all of the vitamins and minerals I need to be healthy. According to this article, my love of colourful foods is actually heart-healthy and contributes to keeping me young. Who knew?

This strange compulsion of mine has followed me into adulthood, thankfully. I love the contrast of blueberries against the golden flesh of mangoes. Or the way the red and white of radishes contrasts so nicely against the green of the lettuce. And I really love how the green specks of parsley and basil float around in the red of my tomato sauce. So get out your colour wheel and start cooking!

Chocolate = Healthy Snacking?

This just in: for those located Stateside, Masterfoods USA (the people behind Mars Bars) are bringing their healthy line of chocolate bars to the convenience stores. CocoaVia is the name of these products, and their claim to fame is that they are loaded with anti-oxidants known as flavanols. These compounds have been associated with improving the health of blood vessels through preventing clotting and promoting healthy blood flow. Hence, less clogged arteries. These products have been available for purchase only via the internet and in multipacks at large retail stores, but it must be making an impact if it is going to be sold in the convenience store channel as single bars. So the trend of “good/better-for-you” snacking is going on strong! This article further states that the US snack market has decreased sales in items such as baked goods, in favour of healthy snacking alternatives.

I am oh-so curious to try one of these Cocoavia products to see if the taste holds up. The Mars people have been researching the benefits of flavanols for 15 years now, so they must know what they are doing, and have a serious investment in the (healthy) snack market. The Cocoavia website is packed with articles on the science behind chocolate, plus its heart healthy aspects. This is something I will definitely have to investigate, but being a chocolate lover myself, I do admit to eating my fair share!

Another Reason to Munch on Salad

I love my green salads. Ms. Pepper loves her salads too (but please be moderate on the dressing, as she gets irked by seeing her salad leaves doused in it). So salad lovers or those that eat lots of raw vegetables typically have higher levels of many important nutrients in their blood, according to a study from the US.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, found that even just having one serving of raw veggies daily puts people almost at their recommended daily intake of vitamin A (key in vision development and keeping your skin healthy) and vitamin E (an antioxidant), to name a few. With this new knowledge in mind, you don’t have to eat a large serving to reap the benefits – just a serving will do. You might be asking, what is a typical serving size? From Health Canada’s food guide for healthy eating, this is equivalent to a cup of tossed salad, or ½ cup of raw vegetables. So for those who rather have meat over their vegetables or “forget” to eat them, it is so easy to work it into your eating schedule! For instance, you can have a salad to complement your soup or sandwich at lunch, or munch on some carrot sticks/broccoli etc. as an afternoon snack.

And for those that cannot do without their salad dressing or dip, the study also determined that a little fat helps the body absorb the nutrients more efficiently. So break out that Caesar dip, or oil and vinegar dressing…but of course, in moderation :)

Is it Healthy or Not?

I know someone who won't eat beef because of the risk of mad cow disease, and she also won't eat shellfish because of PCB content, and she won't eat salad because she worries that you can't wash the veggies enough to get the pesticides off of them, and she won't touch poultry now with the bird flu scare, and the list goes on and on. But as many of us know, beef is a good source of iron, raw veggies are refreshing in the summer, chicken is a good source of low-fat protein, and shellfish is just yummy. So should we pay more heed to the benefits or the potential drawbacks of the foods we eat?

MSN.com has a good article that clears up some of the confusion that exists with some of our favourite foods. Interestingly, it sounds like the Food Geeks' Food Philosophy is not only a good guideline for nutritional balance, but including a large variety of foods in your diet helps to mitigate many of the health risks related to foods.