Welcome!

Allow me to begin by telling you a little bit about who I am, what I'm doing, and why.

In September of 2010 I commenced my third year of study in a nursing program at Ryerson University. The overarching theme for third year studies is "Community Health". At the point of my placement and entry into the Armour Heights Community, this described the extent of my knowledge on Community Health Practice, as up until that point, individual patient-care was all I had been trained for.

I was extremely fortunate to have been placed in both of Ms.Ferley's kindergarten classes, and would go on to have what would ultimately become the most enjoyable educational experience I have had to date.

After speaking with Ms.Ferley and Mrs.Spidle, I determined that Nutrition would be a good issue to devote my time and resources to throughout the course of my time at Armour Heights. Having said that, I want to make it very clear that...

this is not a website that tells people what to eat and how to behave.

Rather, this is a place where I can share with you some things that I have learned through a lengthy period of investigation, which may have powerful implications concerning your state of health and that of your children.

Also, the comments section can be used to discuss and clarify topics of interest to you, and I look forward to communicating with you there.

Now that I've talked about the who and the what, let us now become concerned with the why. Why did I choose to tackle Nutrition?

You might think that you already know a lot about nutrition, and from what I've seen in the classroom during snacktime - you probably do, but there is always room for improvement. What is more important is that as it turns out, making healthy eating choices on a regular basis is a lot more complicated than simply being able to separate the "good" foods from the "bad", and more importantly still is that it is not an art that a child can fully understand or appreciate after being subject to a presentation or an activity session (although these do help).

Your children will soon be choosing their own diets. Perhaps they already do, to a degree. Research (and perhaps common sense) shows that regardless of the socioeconomic status of parents, children all make similar food choices - and not very good ones at that. The goal of this website is to start a dialogue about how teaching children to make the right choices can be accomplished and to learn about some of the factors at play which contribute to children's poor nutritional decision-making.

     See you in the comments!

          - Nicholas




Reference: Lambert, N., Plumb, J., Looise, B., Johnson, I., Harvey, I., Wheeler, C., et al. (2005). Using smart card technology to monitor the eating habits of children in a school cafeteria: the nutritional significance of beverage and dessert choices. Journal of Human Nutrition & Dietetics, 16(4), 271-279. Retrieved from CINAHL database.

Always Foods and Sometimes Foods

On Tuesday October 26, I had the opportunity to "teach the children about Nutrition". This post explains how I went about doing that.

Instead of simply telling the children what to eat and what not to eat, I took a new approach. I developed a simple activity for them with the explicit goal of teaching them to associate the food they eat with the way they feel on a daily basis.

In the activity, the children were taught to make a distinction between Sometimes Foods and Always Foods. This is a concept which has recently been used with varying degrees of success all over the Western United States.

Part of my rationale behind using this concept is that it eliminates explicit connotations of "good" and "bad" or "healthy" and "unhealthy" that are traditionally a part of nutrition education. All too often nutrition teaching aims to motivate healthier choices by means of guilt. In my opinion guilt is a bad reason to make healthier choices. I feel that healthier choices should only arise out of a desire to live up to one's fullest potential. It's a much harder concept to teach a four-year old - but hey, you gotta hand it to a guy for trying, right?

Depending on where you get your nutritional data, and whether the source is corporately-funded or not, you may have different beliefs regarding which foods are healthy to eat always and which foods fall into the sometimes category. Truth is, which foods go where is only of secondary importance at this point. It's not about telling them to "eat this" or "not to eat that" but rather, getting them to pay attention to the fact that food habits influence their emotional and energetic states and can alter the way they feel and function at school.

I developed instructions for carrying out the activity, here they are:

After the activity, Ms.Ferley had the children draw Sometimes Foods and Always Foods on a sheet of paper, which looked like this:

This one was my favourite. The Red Cucumber really did it for me.

Strange as it may appear, psychological research literature suggests that an activity such as this may go a much longer way in building a foundation for healthy eating habits than would a lecture on what is healthy, what is unhealthy, what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong... after all, the world's not black and white, right? The literature states that making associations between concepts (such as food and feelings) as opposed to being taught concepts without associations (this food is good, this food is bad) enables them to be remembered much more clearly. Also, when emotion is thrown into the learning-mix, the whole experience becomes enhanced, further boosting the child's ability to remember what is being taught.

If you liked this concept along with the rationale behind it, take it. Use it. Go forth with it! Consider a discussion with your child about the powerful connection between food and feelings.

     - Nicholas

References:

Bridge, D., Chiao, J., & Paller, K. (2010). Emotional context at learning systematically biases memory for facial information. Memory & Cognition, 38(2), 125-133. Retrieved from CINAHL database.

Old, S., & Naveh-Benjamin, M. (2008). Differential Effects of Age on Item and Associative Measures of Memory: A Meta-Analysis. Psychology & Aging, 23(1), 104-118. doi:10.1037/0882-7974.23.1.104.

Some Notes on Juice

During the Sometimes Foods/Always Foods Activity Session, your children were taught that juice is a sometimes food. This post discusses several reasons why.

In my first week at Armour I immediately noticed that none of the children were bringing juice with their snacks. This made me incredibly happy. Then I realized that the absence of juice in the classes was due to environmental concerns over the packaging, which also made me happy, except that I realized I would have to tell you the truth about juice after all.

First off, the Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) of fruit juice for children is 6oz.

Let's see what that looks like.

six ounces - it looks like it would last most kids about six seconds, at which point they'd probably ask for more

 Now, before we continue, it should be noted juices aren't necessarily "bad" for you. Juice can be very good some of the time. Allow me to speak briefly of the recent corporate trend of offering "2 x concentrated!" laundry detergent - because juice is kind of like that. You wouldn't use a "regular" amount of that laundry detergent to wash your clothes all the time, because the stress on your clothes would be immense and they would become weathered, faded and degraded in the process. Most juice has a comparable effect on the human body. Even the juices that claim to be healthy, organic or packed with antioxidants are actually harmful to the body when ingested too frequently. What's more, the juice industry has raised the sugar and sodium content of its products since you were a kid, and misinformation abounds claiming that a glass or more of juice a day is actually good for you.

The truth is grimmer. In fact, children who drink more than two sweetened fruit juice beverages a week significantly increase their risk of type II diabetes. Luckily, good science has been indicating this for some time and the knowledge is finally becoming mainstream.

Some recommended tips include watering the juice down (slowly), buying less juice, and encouraging water consumption.

What I would personally recommend, especially if your child has grown really attached to juice is to reinforce the association between food and feelings. Just let them keep drinking it, and after the next inevitable sugar-crash ask them if they think their low energy level has anything to do with the juice they drank earlier.

     - Nicholas

References:

Odegaard, A., Woon-Puay, K., Arakawa, K., Yu, M., & Pereira, M. (2010). Soft Drink and Juice Consumption and Risk of Physician-diagnosed Incident Type 2 Diabetes. American Journal of Epidemiology, 171(6), 701-708. doi:10.1093/aje/kwp452.

"Cheese and Crackers" Is Much More Complicated Than We Initially Thought

This post is all about illuminating corporate marketing strategies which in some circumstances may interfere with a shopper's ability to make an informed choice. Time for a field trip to the grocery store.

Let's look at some cheese packages:

Black Diamond Cheestrings, Kraft LiveActive, Kraft Amooza SPORT & Babybel Light

Well, well, well. What do we have here?
 Before reading on, take a moment to look at these cheeses and think about which one you think is "healthiest".

 ***SPOILER ALERT***

What we have here are two cheeses which appeal to the parental desire for children to be active, one cheese which appeals to the desire to be healthy, and one cheese which rests solely upon the sense of tradition which it represents. What with cheeses now promoting social values and such how is one to determine which cheeses are telling the truth and which cheeses are spreading sweet creamy lies?

Labels, that's how:


Okay, let's start by comparing the two cheeses on top. Cheestrings vs. LiveActive.

Note that the serving size is the same, making comparison really easy.

Nutritional Red Flags are circled.

Here are some questions that come to mind when I compare these labels:

• Why does the healthy cheese have more calories?
• Why does the healthy cheese have twice as much fat?
• Why do both the healthy cheese and the sporty cheese have high levels of sodium?
• Why do both cheeses contain trans fat? Trans fats in any amount increase risk of heart disease and stroke.

Both products implicitly and explicitly claim to be healthy.
The Cheestrings have the sporty cartoon character coupled with the Heart & Stroke Health Check Logo (seen below).

The presence of trans fat suggests that the integrity of this label is compromised. 

The LiveActive cheese appeals to the hippie in all of us with all of it's green, greeny, active probiotic, healthy, active, green activeness! Don't forget... it's green. Containing more trans fat than most cheese on the market, Kraft doesn't have the audacity to make any explicit health claims in this case, resorting to an eye-catching "90 Calories!" label, which we already know is higher than other cheeses on the shelf.

No cheese in history has ever been more obnoxiously green.

Let's briefly compare the other two cheeses. Kraft Amooza vs. Babybel Light.

Again we find some red flags. The sporty cheese is packed with sodium, contains a nonzero amount of trans fat, and is trying to present itself as the healthier option. Salty salty lies - and Babybel isn't even making any implicit health claims.

As you can see, there is power in comparing labels as opposed to reading them in isolation from each other.

What else can we take away from this? Quality cheeses do not come in shiny and colourful plastic packages.

Enough about cheese.

Let's move on and talk about crackers.

Ritz, Kashi & Vegetable Thins

Before we look at the labels, I want you to take note of this:

found on the Ritz and Vegetable Thins boxes.

 Other than the fact that the Ritz and Vegetable Thins brands are both owned by Christie™ (which is in turn owned by Kraft), what else do both of these Sensible Solutions have in common?

Let's consult the labels to find out:

Allow me to draw your attention immediately to the Sodium Content.

Now this is really interesting. We have the healthy Kashi crackers on the left, and Ritz on the right.

If we just look at the sodium content, we see that both are unacceptable, but Kashi has lower sodium, so the healthy brand does appear to be healthier.

But it's not. Why?

Although Kashi has less sodium it still has a substantial amount, and on top of that it has a whopping 160mg of potassium (an equally problematic sodium substitute) ultimately making it a much saltier cracker. I'm missing a photo of the Wheat Thins label, which, as another designated Sensible Solution should live up to its promise, but doesn't with a sodium content of 200mg per serving.

That Sensible Solutions label... where else have I seen that before...

bullseye.

Also owned by Christie™. Hmm...

After all of this analysis, I think I'll still be able to sleep at night if I say that cheese n' crackers is best designated as a Sometimes Food.

Don't trust packaging.

     -Nicholas

References:

Molseed, L. (2004). Tracking trans fats: cutting down on trans fat may help cut down on heart disease. Diabetes Forecast, 57(6), 52-55. Retrieved from CINAHL database.