If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I believe many of our country’s health problems (think obesity, childhood obesity, heart disease) could be solved if we all truly ate the 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables we’re supposed to get each day.  Well, today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reiterated this exact message with the launch of MyPlate which recommends half your plate at every meal be comprised of vegetables and fruits.  MyPlate replaces MyPyramid, which many viewed as difficult to understand and put into practice.

In the press conference held this morning, First Lady Michelle Obama stressed that families are busy and that parents have many jobs (think referee, doctor, employee, chef), but that we all want to serve healthy foods and meals.   MyPlate provides a simple and understandable visual for adults and kids alike to understand what foods to eat in what proportions.

In reviewing the new food icon and the materials provided along with it for consumers, my first impression of MyPlate is positive, and here’s why:

• Obesity in adults and children is by far the biggest public health issue in our country today.  To this end, the first three tips related to MyPlate address this important issue – balance calories, enjoy your food, but eat less, avoid oversized portions.  The focus here is spot on.
• Stressing half a plate as fruits and vegetables is a simple and easily understood message.  It provides a mental and visual reminder to get vegetables and fruits at meals where we might not always think about it, like breakfast.  I know most days my son eats a bowl or two of cereal before he heads out the door to school.  Adding a fruit or vegetable will help ensure he gets that 5-9 he needs every day.
• There are messages weaved throughout the material that are aligned with healthy eating habits.  For example, there is a recommendation to take your time with meals, savoring the flavors and paying attention to when you feel full.  This is absolutely an important nutrition message.  Using smaller plates is another recommendation made.  Work done by Brian Wansink, PhD, clearly shows that environment – including the size of your plates, bowls and glasses – can impact the amount of food you eat.  Again, the message is spot on.

Of course, it’s too early to tell how effective MyPlate will be in helping consumers achieve healthy eating habits that prevent disease and maintain healthy weights, but it is absolutely movement in the right direction.

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I have found in my nearly 13 years as a parent that establishing what I call “Food Rules” can be helpful in establishing healthy eating habits for my son, but for the adults in the house, too.  Here are some of the Food Rules that exist in my house:

• Always serve milk with meals.
• At least one fruit or vegetables is served at every meal. 
• The television is turned off while we eat (we do, however, sometimes have popcorn while watching a movie).
• Pop is a treat, allowed on special occasions.
• We eat in the kitchen or dining room only (I once had a neighbor girl wander my house with a bag of Cheetos she had walked in with.  It wasn’t pretty).
• No gadgets or phones while eating.
• When Jack has sport practice or a game (he plays soccer and basketball), water is the beverage of choice. 
• We eat out no more than two meals a week (except my husband, who eats lunch in his worksite cafeteria every day). 

What food rules do you have to help you maintain healthy eating habits?

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There are two words that are central to healthy living, but which are the most boring words ever – balance and moderation.  In this world of high tech, sensory overload, balance and moderation are definitely not on trend.  But living by these two words can make all the difference when it comes to health.

Take moderation.  The big dinner on Thanksgiving isn’t what leads to obesity.  The enjoyment of the most indulgent ice cream on a steamy summer day isn’t what clogs your arteries.  The taking a day off of exercise because you’re sick won’t spike your blood pressure.  What will derail your health in the long run is indulging every day, living in the extreme every day – the exact opposite of moderation.  Enjoy the turkey dinner and then on Friday, get back to lean eating habits full of fruits and vegetables.  Order a single scoop or “child’s size” of ice cream.  Be active every day of the week, except when you’re sick.  This is moderation – avoiding the extremes. 

Then there’s balance.  Grains provide many nutrients the human body needs, but tipping the scales to far towards grains can cause weight gain and impact triglyceride levels.  Some meat, especially, lean meats provide nutrients that are hard to get naturally in other food groups (think iron), but shifting the balance to all meat can raise the consumption of saturated fat and increase heart disease risk.  Too much of one thing isn’t the right answer, it’s finding the balance between all the foods.  The same can be said for exercise.  Too much of one thing can cause injury in the long run. 

Living a life of moderation and balance isn’t the most glamorous or trendy (or rad, phat, or gnarly depending on your generation), but it will ensure quality and quantity in the years of your life. 

Visit www.nuval.com for high scoring foods to choose in your life of balance and moderation.

This month has been ripe with nutrition announcements, and as the last day of the month has arrived, January 2011 will definitely go down in nutrition infamy.  Today, the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans were launched.

From my perspective, it’s important to note what the Dietary Guidelines are and aren’t.  They are:

• Overall guidelines on nutritious eating habits
• Updated every 5 years to ensure the guidelines are in line with the most current science
• Useful for setting policy guidelines for the national school lunch program, food labeling regulations, offerings in federal feeding programs like Women, Infants and Children

At a big picture level, the guidelines make two recommendations:

• Balance calories in with calories out to maintain a healthy weight
• Make sure the calories you get are nutrient dense, choosing fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, low fat dairy more often and foods that high in saturated fat, sodium, added sugar, refined grains and trans fat less often

This isn’t new news, is it?  And, as a colleague of mine often likes to say, the guidelines don’t get dinner on the table.  In reality, most consumers won’t even read the updated guidelines, or know what parts of the guidelines have changed in the past five years.  And in all honesty, I’m okay with that because the guidelines are primary used as policy, not really as a “how to” guide for the day in and day out of having healthy eating habits.  For this, consumers need tools, whether an online resource that builds grocery lists from healthy recipes or a support group that understands the day-to-day struggles of healthy eating and weight management.   

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are important as the backbone of nutrition policy in our country, no question.  But without translation, without tools to interpret, they don’t help the average consumer make better food choices.

Visit www.nuval.com for a tool that does guide you to more nutritious food choices and which is based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

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.

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.

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.

Headlines this week included one about Ben and Jerrys.  Under pressure from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy organization, Ben and Jerry’s announced they will pull the “natural” claim off their products.  I’ve also heard that several food companies have received letters from the USDA indicating they can no longer make claims about the amount of positive food groups in their product (think soups that tell you the can includes a serving of vegetables) unless the product meets the definition of “healthy.”  The point here is that companies can’t tout positives about their products if there are a bunch of negatives lurking in the background.  Soup or vegetables juices, for example, may have a serving of fruits and vegetables, but they also give you a hit of sodium.  This, then, is the USDA’s point.

While your health and my health and the health of our kids and parents has always been of concern to public policy agencies, the government, and health professionals, it has become an even more serious concern today.  Rising health care costs, rising obesity rates, kids with obesity, kids with heart disease and diabetes – it’s top of mind everywhere you go. 

The reality, then, for those who make the food that is sold in our grocery stores and which we buy is that they have to get serious about the nutrition value of their foods.  It’s not enough to include vegetables in the soup, but not address the sodium.  It’s not enough to make the yogurt fat free, but pump it full of sugar.  It’s not enough to make it organic, but not manage the saturated fat nor add fiber and other positive nutrients.  It’s time for a paradigm shift to a new order of nutrition where products have great – not good, not average – nutrition profiles.

And then it’s up to us as consumers to buy them, to trade up, to acknowledge what manufacturers have done with our health in mind.  It’s then time for us all to walk the talk.

Visit www.nuval.com to see a system that gives credit to food products with great nutrition profiles.

Which do you prefer – negative feedback or positive feedback?  Obviously, you don’t need to answer.  It’s a rhetorical question.  But an important one to think about as it comes to eating habits in our country. 

After all, when was the last time you heard a positive food message?  Cut out fat, trans fat will kill you, salt is evil, carbohydrates are making us fat. . .the list of negative messages goes on and on when in reality there are plenty of positive messages we could be talking and thinking about with food. 

For example, if you focused on really getting the recommended 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, the rest of your eating habits might just fall into place nicely.  Think of all the options – glorious berries, juicy tomatoes, crunchy fresh green beans.

Another positive mantra you might choose to live by is focusing on getting 25-35 grams of fiber every day, and again the rest might just work its way out.  Think bean and avocado burritos in a whole wheat tortilla, think breakfast cereal loaded with fiber that you can really sink your teeth into. 

Sounds delicious, doesn’t it?

Visit www.nuval.com  to see a program that honors the positive benefits of fruits and vegetables as well as foods that dare to be high in fiber.

This summer, my coworker Anne has had the most amazing experience.  Anne and her family (husband, three kids) typically reside in a suburb of Boston, and live the typical suburban lifestyle.  Like many of us who live in a ring outside a major metropolitan area, they have sampled some of what Boston has to offer, but most of their time is spent running kids from activity to activity, getting to work every day, dealing with the ongoing management of homework and school papers.  But this summer, totally different story.

Anne and her husband made the decision to move their family into the core of the city this summer, and to fully engage in the downtown Boston experience.  When I saw Anne yesterday, she was still beaming coming off a week’s vacation spent exploring the city.  Her kids have taken sailing lessons.  They’ve visited every single, possible museum in the city.  They’ve hit all the historical sites.  They have painted the town in full form.  Yesterday, Anne said to me, “this has been a summer my kids will never forget.”

What strikes me most about what Anne and her husband did is that they made a very intentional choice.  They weighed the costs and benefits.  They factored in the potential reaction their kids would have.  They considered being away from their home base and how they as adults would react.  But in the end, they acted.  They made an intentional choice to give their kids a summer they will never forget.

It made me think – what intentional choices can we each make today to live healthier lives?  Intentional choice – it’s something to think about.

Visit www.nuval.com to consider a system that makes your intentional choices easier to make.