College Kid Kitchen
Monday, October 28, 2013
Experiment 4: Dear Tim, Run While You Can
Did you miss us? No? Well too bad! In this episode, I rant about why mixing nacho cheese and salsa is awful and give a mini-lesson on kit-kats!
College Kid 2
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Experiment 3- Part 2: You Get to Eat It By Yourself
College Kid 2
Music: Relient K- Anchorage
Friday, September 20, 2013
The Value in “Daily Value Percentages”
Hey guys,
there’s something that I never really paid attention to before that really came
to my attention when I did the sodium article. There’s something on almost
every label you’ll see that says “Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000
calorie diet.” Where did 2000 calories even COME From?
According to
Marion Nestle, a writer on Food Politics.com, “They
proposed 2,000 calories as:
- consistent with widely used food
plans
- close to the calorie requirements
for postmenopausal women, the population group most prone to weight gain
- a reasonably rounded-down value
from 2,350 calories
- easier to use than 2,350 and,
therefore, a better tool for nutrition education
Whether a rounding down of nearly 20 percent is
reasonable or not, the FDA ultimately viewed these arguments as persuasive.”
So what is needed for kids? Well ages 1-3 can
look at 1,200-1,400 calories per day. Kids that are 4-6 are looking at
1,500-1,750 calories. Kids that are 7-9 are looking at 1,700-1,950. Yet on some
kids’ foods we still see the nutrition labeled related to 2,000 calories a day.
(Parents.com)
So that’s calories, but what really got to me
was the Sodium Percentages that I was looking at. An adult is supposed to eat 2,300
mg of Sodium per day. Let’s take the Pepperoni Pizza Lunchables as an example.
The nutrition facts say that it has 760mg of Sodium and that is 32% of your
daily value. Now let me remind you, as I showed on my sodium article, kids
should be eating between 1,000-1,500 milligrams of sodium a day. Let’s do a
little math. 760 mg is in fact 33% of 2300 mg, THE ADULT SERVING FOR SODIUM,
NOT THE KIDS. So for a kid, even if you’re healthily eating 2,000 calories,
that doesn’t mean the sodium level is 32% of the daily value you should be
enjoying.
Let’s go up to the higher end of the age
spectrum 9-18 at 1,500 mgs of Sodium. 760 milligrams is FIFTY PERCENT OF THAT
DAILY VALUE!!!!!! Just because they may eat 2,000 calories a day does NOT mean
that the other daily values are accurate for a child’s needs and yet Lunchables,
who are geared at children, are putting forward the ADULT SIZE FOR SODIUM. Not
to make a pun, but we all need to read the daily values with a grain of salt.
College Kid 1
Sodium: Taking these labels with more than one grain of salt.
Sodium is a
really useful little nutrient. It’s most commonly found in Salt which we find
in just about everything we eat.
According to MyFoodDiary.com in 2013: “Sodium
is needed for muscle contractions, nerve transmissions, maintaining pH balance,
and hydration. Sodium regulates the fluid outside of the cells and
is needed to pump fluid into the cells as potassium carries by-products out.”
These are
all REALLY important. Sodium is half of the chemistry that helps the electricity
in your body function, (the other half is Potassium) and having adequate
amounts of both in your system is SUPER important.
So how much
of this awesome substance should we be eating? Well for ages 1-3, adequate
consumption should be at 1,000 milligrams daily. A 4-8 year old should aim for
about 1,200 milligrams. And anyone from the ages of 9-18 should shoot for about
1,500. So how do these numbers compare to the sodium levels in our Lunchables?
In a Cracker
Stacker (no juice drink) Ham and Swiss Meal: 690mg of Sodium.
In a Cracker
Stacker (no juice drink) Ham and Cheddar Meal: 670mg of Sodium.
In a Cracker
Stacker (no juice drink) Turkey and Cheddar Meal: 620 mg of Sodium.
In a Pizza (with
juice drink) Pepperoni Meal: 760 mg
In a Pizza (with
juice drink) Extra Cheesy Meal: 620 mg
In a Chicken
Dunk (with juice drink) Meal: 550 mg.
There are
not small numbers compared to the total if we’re looking at 1000-1500 mg.
But why does
it matter? What happens if you eat too much sodium? How does it hurt us? It
makes you thirsty, it puts you at risk for high blood pressure, it sometimes
may cause fluid retention, which in turn is the risk for heart attacks and
strokes to go up as well. These are really huge problems, and we have to make
sure that we keep our sodium levels in the healthy zone. This has been your
jump into the salt shaker.
Experiment 3 Rant
Welcome back everyone to another exciting response. This is
to the Cracker Stacker Lunchable, and we made almost the same thing but with
some tweaks. We used the turkey and cheese from a Hormel Snack Tray and used
Wheat Thins as the cracker and it tasted pretty good! We listed the nutrition
facts above in comparison to each of the other meals, and it wasn’t a perfect
win. It wasn’t a complete sweep, but we were able to make something slightly
healthier. If we had time and I had the money we would experiment with
different combinations of meat and cheeses to get that optimum healthfulness,
but sadly for you guys I was on a budget this week and had to keep it very
simple. But LOOK AROUND!! Experiment with different meats, cheeses,
and crackers until you find what works for you. Or if you want something, you
know, bigger? Make a sandwich, it’s amazing.
There’s something I will always hold dear about crackers and
cheese though, and I say cheese NOT cheese product, guys. That was another
thing we looked at when we were making some comparisons, the number of
ingredients and how many of them were chemicals. It is really disheartening
when the third ingredient in the Lunchables ham is sodium lactate, and it gets
less and less understandable and more and more chemically complex from there. I
did a rough count and Lunchables turkey had 15 ingredients when the one from
our counter recipe had eight. The cheese product had 14 ingredients where our
real cheese had eight. The crackers they gave had 20 ingredients and the wheat
thins had 12. It was hard to make these counts because you’re never sure if you
count all the parenthesis or just the big ingredients but this is my rough
count. So yeah, be careful when the ingredients label says “Pasteurized
Prepared Swiss (or Cheddar) Cheese Product.” Why isn’t it cheese? Why is it a
cheese product? All I know is I’ve never seen so many words that I don’t know
on one piece of cardboard, and that worries me about what it is I’m eating. Start
reading your labels, guys. It’s SCARY when you start to understand what’s
really in some of our commonplace products!!!
Wish everyone a great evening,
College Kid 1
Experiment 3: We Can't Have Circular Cheese
College Kid 2
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Experiment 2 Flop: I'm Powerfuller Than You!
College Kid 2
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