In October, the primary colors of the season are orange and yellow as autumn gives way to winter. But watch any football game, read the comics section of your newspaper or walk down any grocery aisle, and you’ll know the new color of the month is pink.

Obviously, that pink is in promotion of October as breast cancer awareness month.  As a woman and a dietitian, I’m certainly in support of raising awareness (and, more importantly, funds) for breast cancer research. Having lost a brother-in-law to cancer last year, I know first-hand the impact it can have on individuals and their loved ones.  Cancer is a devastating disease in many ways. 

However, as I watch my hometown Minnesota Vikings and notice the pink cleats, pink sweatbands, and pink pom poms, I can’t help but hope we have the same unified message this coming February, when we look to wear red in observance of  “American Heart Month” to drive awareness of heart disease.  It’s the number one killer of women (more than breast cancer).

This isn’t to play one-upmanship on breast cancer. Both are serious and in need of public awareness and support. Publicity of any and all serious conditions motivates women to take charge of their health – quitting smoking, living an active lifestyle, and eating better – and that is a good thing. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed, and hope that come February, we see hockey and basketball players across the country wearing red.

Visit www.nuval.com to learn about a nutrition guidance system where nutrients that increase your risk of heart disease and cancer lower a food score and nutrients that lower your risk of heart disease and cancer raise a food’s score.

Yesterday, I spent the day at a meeting of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Front-of-Package label schemes.  The committee’s work is all related to whether an industry-wide series of icons on the front of packages would help consumers make more nutritious food choices.  The rationale behind the work is that our collective health is in dire straits.  More people are overweight than ever, and more kids are being diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease.  What we eat is a major part of the problem.

The charge of the committee is to make a recommendation to the agencies that regulate food packages on what the best options are on the front of food labels to help consumers make healthier food choices.

Unfortunately, after five straight hours of sitting in a chair and listening to speaker after speaker on this topic yesterday, I came away more confused than ever.

The reality is that we live in a world of individualization, so to choose one solution that helps all consumers make healthier choices is likely an impossible task.  Clutter is everywhere and depending on your skills and interests as well as your lifestyle and life stage, you’re either good at managing clutter – including clutter on food labels – or you’re not.  If you’re managing a disease like diabetes or gluten intolerance or are more interested in general wellness you may look for different information on the label and want different tools to help you decide which products to stock in your pantry.

So at the end of a long day, I’m wondering if several systems are really the best option (at least for front-of-package labeling), allowing consumers to make the choice as to which option works for them and which option helps them build healthier eating habits.  After all, why does the right answer have to be just one answer?

Visit www.nuval.com to learn about a nutritional ranking system that I professionally and personally recommend.

Guest blog by Rachel Rodek, MS, RD, LDN, CSSD, Nutrition Communications Manager at NuVal LLC

Have you ever sat down with your kid during their morning cartoons and watched the commercials?  Or viewed programming directed at moms and truly concentrated on what the ads were telling you to do?  It’s astounding what kid-directed hype food companies can get away with.

There are definitely a few that push my buttons as a Registered Dietitian – but the most recent offender is a commercial for a Chocolate Hazelnut spread.

Cue busy morning household, sunlight streaming through the windows into the kitchen:  Kids running around, yelling for mom, dog barking.  Camera pans over to the perfect mom saying: “In the morning I can use all the help I can get, that’s why I love this spread – a delicious hazelnut spread that’s perfect on multi-grain toast and even whole wheat waffles.  It’s a quick an easy way to give my family a breakfast they’ll want to eat.  And it’s made with simple quality ingredients like hazelnuts, skim milk, and a hint of cocoa.  They love the taste and I feel good that they’re ready to tackle the day.”  Cut to kids eating the chocolate hazelnut spread on whole grain bread smiling and happy.

Seems like the perfect scenario, right?  The ad touches on all the hot buttons of a mom’s morning:  hectic life, screaming kids, kids won’t eat, guilt of them not eating, the need to find something nutritious and delicious.

Chocolate hazelnut spread is certainly delicious – but does it have the nutritional quality that you want to send your kids out the door with?  The ad says that it’s made of “hazelnuts, skim milk, and a hint of cocoa” – what they neglect to point out is that the very first ingredient is sugar followed by saturated fat-filled palm oil.  Kinda left out those ingredients, didn’t they?   With a NuVal™ Score of 3 (the best score is 100); the product is a far cry from the nutritional quality your kids deserve.

How can a manufacturer get away with this kind of misleading hype?  It turns out that there are specific rules and regulations put out by Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), under the Council for Better Business Bureaus, which food companies can voluntarily follow to be able to tout foods to children.  One rule includes:

Ads for foods should clearly depict the appropriate role of the product within the framework of the eating occasion depicted.  Ads for a mealtime should depict food within a nutritionally balanced meal.  Snack foods should be clearly depicted as such, and not as substitutes for meals.

This seems reasonable and was clearly developed in order to create responsible advertising to children; but it doesn’t negate the fact that potentially poor food choices are being promoted to kids.

In the chocolate hazelnut spread commercial, the product is served on “multi-grain toast and whole wheat waffles” to make it part of a ‘nutritionally balanced diet’.  In the ad there are glasses of milk and orange juice in front of the kids to round out the meal.  But does that make it OK to serve a food with the NuVal™ Score of 3 to your child every morning?  That’s what the manufacturers want you to think.

What do you think?

To find out more about the NuVal Nutritional Scoring System, go to www.nuval.com

On Wednesday, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report related to labeling programs designed for food packaging.  The overall idea of these programs is to provide information that is easy to see and use, which can help consumers make more nutritious food choices.  With more than 40,000 items in a grocery store today and with most of us feeling like grocery shopping is just one more chore we have to complete, this is indeed an important topic.  But the IOM report disappointed me.

The report indicates the nutrients that should be brought from the back of package to the front of package are calories, saturated and trans fat, and sodium.  I agree that these nutrients can and do have negative impacts on all our health if we get too much of them, and that this information should be readily available when consumers are deciding on which products to purchase.  But the IOM stopped there, actually indicating that there was no reason to allow positive nutrients to be brought to the front of package.  This is what disappointed me.

As we’ve discussed before, shoppers are tired of negative messages.  Additionally, there are many nutrients and foods that can be preventative against chronic diseases.  Fiber fills you up and can help you eat fewer calories overall, salmon is delicious and also has omega-3s that can be protective against heart disease.

In reality, only focusing on the negatives seems irresponsible of this important government entity.  Under this plan, Diet Coke (0 calories, 0 saturated fat, 0 trans fat, about 30 mg sodium per 8 oz.) comes off looking a whole lot better than skim milk (90 calories, 0 saturated fat, 0 trans fat, 135 mg sodium).  Even regular Coke, with under 100 calories and roughly 30 mg sodium, compares favorably with skim milk under this program.

I imagine the committee would say these examples are “unintended consequences” of the program and that for the majority of foods, featuring the negative nutrients will drive consumers to healthier choices.  I disagree.  The totality of what a food offers is what we need to be thinking about today.

Visit www.nuval.com to understand a system that does care about the positive nutrients in food.

Last week, the Boston Globe included an article on 100-calorie packs of snacks.  I found it so compelling, I even stole their title and used it here. 

The article focuses on how our culture today is all about sound bites.  Everything is in compartmentalized doses.  Twitter is 140 characters or less.   Curves offers 30 minute workouts.  iTunes lets us download one song instead of the entire album.  We spend all our time multitasking so we can’t handle more than bite-size doses of anything.

Enter the 100-calorie pack.  It fits the bill.  It’s portable, it’s compartmentalized.  It’s simple. 

Sales data support the integration of the snack pack into our culture.  As presented in the Boston Globe article, a 2010 Health and Wellness Survey by the Grocery Manufacturers Association indicates that since 2002 49% of companies who participated in the survey have introduced new single-serve products.  In 2009 alone, 206 new 100-calorie pack products were introduced at the grocery store.

So as a nutritionist, how do I feel about the 100-calorie pack?  Here are my thoughts, each in 140 characters or less.

 100-Calorie packs help all of us control portion sizes.  With obesity rates at an all time high, portions matter.

 Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.  100-calorie packs help you do this when you’re on the go. 

 Every calorie we consume should be packed with positive nutrients and limited in negatives.  100-calorie packs  don’t fit the bill here. 

In 140 characters or less, can you share your thoughts on 100-calorie packs?

Visit NuVal on Facebook to see nutrition ratings of your favorite 100-calorie packs.

One year for my birthday, my husband gave me several baseball movies on DVD including Bull Durham (an all-time classic), The Rookie (what woman can resist Dennis Quaid in this one?!) and For the Love of the Game (Kevin Costner in yet another sports movie). If you’ve never seen the Costner flick, its main character is an aging pitcher, Billy Chapel, on the verge of retirement who is in the midst of pitching a perfect game.

One of Chapel’s secrets to success as a pitcher is “engaging the mechanism,” where he forces his mind to tune out the crowd noise and distraction, and focus straight ahead on home plate, the batter standing there and the pitch he is about to throw.

“Engage the mechanism” is a trick I try and present in this blog.  My challenge is for you, the reader, to shut out the day-to-day nutrition noise in the media (renaming high fructose corn syrup to corn sugar, pushing coconut water as the new health elixir), claims you see on food packaging, and advertising that appears everywhere. Instead, train your focus on the big picture and core principles of healthy eating – getting more fruits and vegetables as your number one goal, always choosing lean protein and lowfat dairy, treating treats and snacks as they should be, and living the 85/15 rule.

Who knew baseball could teach us so much about good nutrition?

Visit www.nuval.com to help you stay focused on foods with the highest overall nutrition. 

Visit the Minnesota Twins to follow my home town team as they take on the Yankees in the first round of the American League playoffs.