How Common Breakfast Foods Lead to Childhood Obesity
Posted: Friday, May 08, 2009
by Briana Southward
The Naked Label
Breakfast is considered one of the most important meals of the day. For children, eating a healthy breakfast can have a positive impact on their ability to learn. However, just eating breakfast is often not enough. It is also important to eat the right things for breakfast.
Unfortunately, understanding what is healthy and what is unhealthy is often challenging for parents. This doesnt surprise me since so many companies spend millions of dollars convincing us that their products are healthy and therefore we should consume more of them. Companies will often take one or two good things about a product and focus their messaging solely on those items. However, this by no means illustrates the whole picture. It is important that we as consumers start looking past this messaging to unveil the whole picture and then make our product decisions based on that.
Lets take a closer look at some of these commonly consumed breakfast products to see what is really in them. This should help to provide insight into what to look for when reading the food labels.
Peanut Butter: Peanuts are actually good for us and so is peanut butter. The problem is that not all peanut butter can be put in the good for us category. Some companies have taken a healthy food and added extra unhealthy ingredients to make consumers like the taste better and make the product itself look better. To do this, companies add sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and preservatives. All of which when added to a perfectly healthy product change its health benefits. When looking at peanut butter labels I stay away from any peanut butter that contains any of the previously mentioned ingredients (sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and preservatives). Look for natural peanut butter that has only one ingredient, peanuts! When you buy this product you will notice that it needs to be refrigerated because it doesnt have added preservatives that allow the other peanut butters to be kept in the cupboard for long periods of time. You will also notice that when you first open it you will need to give it a quick stir, this is because they havent added hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is extremely unhealthy for us but keeps the natural oil in the peanut butter from separating. To me these seem like worthwhile tradeoffs for health.
Jam/Jelly: Many Jam/Jelly products are full of sugar. So much sugar in fact that it is often the first or second ingredient. Some products then add extra preservatives. When purchasing jam/jelly I look for brands that dont contain added sugar. You can find some that are sweetened with natural fruit juice.
White Bread: White bread is made by removing the bran and germ and then bleaching the flour. This process removes many of the nutrients and have many people referring to it as dead bread. To ensure I am eating nutritious bread I stay away from all of the white and enriched varieties and stick with whole grain brands.
Chocolate Spread (i.e. Nutella): Nutella states that Nutella is a delicious hazelnut spread that contains quality ingredients such as skim milk and a hint of cocoa. It is claims like these that really make my blood boil. Upon further inspection of the ingredients, one can see that the first ingredient is SUGAR, which of course they conveniently leave out of their messaging that claims the product is healthy. In the ingredient lineup sugar is followed by modified palm oil, hazelnuts, COCOA, and then skim milk, etc. Im sure most people reading this can see the difference between the claim and the ingredients. They do make the product sound nutritious and delicious but the ingredients show otherwise. There isnt a good substitute for this product, I believe it is best to simply stay away from it all together.
Cereal: Many people start their day with a bowl of cereal. There are some cereals that are better for you than others but the problem is that the vast majority of cereals that are consumed are full of unhealthy ingredients. Many of them contain massive amounts of sugar (sugar is often the second ingredient and in some cases the first), hydrogenated vegetable oil which leads to the trans fats you see in products, and preservatives. It is important to look at the ingredients and to understand what those ingredients are. Looking for cereals like muesli that have a lot of grains and low or no amounts of sugar is a good place to start. Also, try to stay away from any product that contains hydrogenated oils.
In North America obesity rates have been sky rocketing and this is especially true among our youth. These obesity problems have also impacted the increasing number of people suffering from heart disease, type two diabetes, etc. It is up to parents to provide their children with the food they need to beat the obesity problems children are faced with today. Understanding what is in our food is the first step. Unfortunately, it has gotten to the point where consumers need to question all of the claims made by companies about how healthy their products are and instead read the labels to determine the health benefits for themselves.
Briana Southward is the author of The Naked Label, a blog that undresses the food we eat to better understand what we are consuming. It strips off all the fancy marketing and misleading messages to get at the truth. If you are interested to see whats naked this week, learn about great substitute products, and get recipe ideas, check out www.TheNakedLabel.com
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