Beware of ready to eat lunch items marketed to children. They are often loaded with sugar, fat and salt. Get kids to help you stock the freezer with homemade snacks. There are lots of easy recipes out there for granola bars or energy balls that are much healthier than store bought options. If you don’t have the time to make your own, choose commercial products with the most whole ingredients, and the least sugar, fat and salt. Trying to choose healthy commercial products can be frustrating. Nutrition facts tables tell us a lot, but the devil is in the details of the ingredient list.
- Choose foods with short ingredient lists with words you understand.
- Make sure that the first 3 ingredients are nutritious. Ingredients are listed by weight so the first 3 usually make up the bulk of the product.
- Choose foods that have no more than one type of sugar in them. Manufacturers sometimes use two or three different types of sweeteners so that each one shows up lower down the ingredient list. If these three sweeteners were put together, they may well have been first on the ingredient list.
- Avoid snack foods that have hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats in them. A food labelled “Trans Fat Free” may still have up to .2 grams of trans fats in each serving. One serving for snack and a few servings for lunch and suddenly your child may have a significant amount of trans fats in her diet that day.
- Use the nutrition facts table to compare products and choose foods lower in salt. A cracker with “25% less salt” may still have more salt than another brand of cracker.
For more information about nutrient claims and labels, start by taking this tour offered by health Canada: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/label-etiquet/nutrition/index-eng.php
If you want to learn more about the nitty gritty details of labelling, these labelling guidelines are very interesting:
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/fssa/labeti/guide/ch7ae.shtml#tab7-5
