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Sleepover fare

Posted on June 29, 2015 by DebbieN

My daughter who loves vegetables and will often eat them ahead of whatever else is on the plate at supper suddenly became selfconscious yesterday about serving them to her friends at her birthday sleepover–no, no, no, Mom, none of my friends will eat them, and they probably don’t want fish, we want pizza. Not your pizza. Pizza from the good takeout place in Sierra Madre. And no anchovies this time.

We’ve known these girls since kindergarten–or earlier. They eat vegetables. But pizza it was. With some raw veggies for snack thrown in beforehand.

Our experience with the standard kid party fare is not very happy. Chips, soda, candy, popcorn–and that’s just the open bowls sitting around. Then pizza, cake, ice cream, possibly more candy.You’ve got to wonder what kind of parents actively choose such a menu–and the answer these days is, most people. All of these things are pretty addictive–everyone grabs for seconds without thinking.

Our daughter has been to a few of these parties and discovered the hard way that everything she knows how to do as a Type I diabetic flies out the window the instant she gets there. All her friends are grabbing handfuls of these very high-carb, mostly processed foods which we never get at home (except for ice cream), and the behavior is as addictive as the snacks. Even when she plans a strategy ahead of time with a goal for a limited reasonable maximum of carb grams and she calculates insulin for everything meticulously, she ends up pretty high hours later–as in, at 3 a.m., long after the insulin for the food has run its course.

It’s extremely hard to calculate carbs accurately enough with most processed snack foods at a party to avoid big glucose spikes later on. Even if you do everything right. There’s just something about junk foods–either you end up eating three meals’ worth of carbs in an hour of snacking without even feeling it because your friends are eating that way and it seems normal at the time, or these foods really digest a lot differently from standard things like bread or pasta. If it’s happening to our daughter, who can see the ugly results by getting a fingerstick three or four hours down the road, when she’s antsy and fractious and can’t sleep at 3 a.m., you know it’s also putting an extra burden on your kid who has a working pancreas.

So it might be a good idea to get fresh with the standard teen birthday party menu–if you’re doing pizza, skip the bags of chips and soda, add some veg and lighten up on dessert.

Salad was not achieved despite best intentions only because there was no room to get through to the kitchen where the vegetables of the week were lounging in the fridge. With the girls suddenly launching into “girl tawk” over pizza (a less appetizing combo would be difficult to imagine), and since we don’t have a separate den, our living room and dining room quickly became no-parent territory. My husband and I sidled up, grabbed some pizza and some carrot sticks and hid out in our bedroom so as not to intrude or have to hear any of it–win/win.

So given the awkwardness of getting past them and into the kitchen, vegetabalia last night was reduced to the bag of sugar snap peas and a bag of baby carrots we’d put out for a snack–not up to par, really, but it worked out fine. The girls ate them happily enough and didn’t notice the lack of or even seem to miss chips, cheetos, popcorn, potato chips, pretzels, goldfish etc. They were all too busy watching “Big Bang Theory” episodes and gossiping nonstop. It just goes to show you–the party is not in the bag [of chips, as per the tv ads], it’s in the participants.

I’d made a rather large and beautiful raw blueberry pie for dessert–chocolate cake after pizza just seems so wrong when it’s so hot out, and besides it’s summer with a vengeance. All indications (pretested and verified by my kid) were that both the crust and the filling were up to snuff. My daughter calculated for her best chances of being happy and more or less within range at her own party so she could have a piece with her friends, and she stopped worrying about the lack of junk food. I mean, pizza serves perfectly well as its own form of junk food–you don’t need any extra.

Plus you don’t want to be crunching too loudly when Sheldon and Leonard are going at it over whichever comic book hero’s superpower is the more mathematically sound.

 

 

 

Filed under: Eating out, kid food, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on Sleepover fare

FDA warning on powdered caffeine

Posted on July 19, 2014 by DebbieN

The Washington Post carried a story yesterday on a new FDA warning about powdered caffeine’s potential for a lethal overdose. Caffeine is relatively unregulated as a dietary supplement and companies have been selling it mixed into “energy” drinks and “shots”, inhalers and other forms, including pure powder, through Amazon.com and other internet venues.

Most of the stupids (I mean, more politely, naive consumers) who buy caffeine-laced “energy” products are teenage boys and young men–no great surprise. Guys in that age range tend to have trouble getting up in the morning and being alert for class. The proliferation of the iPad, the smart phone, and game apps isn’t helping. A cheap, legal and potent stimulant seems like just the thing to counteract the effect of late nights and early exams. Combine that with a pitch about “energy” and fitness–mostly in the form of weightlifting and bodybuilding, a sector rife with dietary supplement abuse marketing, and wishful thinking about instant “buffness”, as my now-teenage daughter scoffs–and you’ve got a really bad deal.

But it doesn’t take much of the purified caffeine powder to overdose and the difference between stimulated and dead can be as little as a few milligrams–much too hard to measure accurately with a teaspoon or even most kitchen scales.

Caffeine is far from harmless even in limited doses (otherwise, why would we bother to drink coffee?) And it’s definitely a drug–I had to work with it in the lab way back in my radioactive youth. And it’s really inexpensive.

Why the “dietary supplement” label is still allowed to cloak quasi-drug and drug products from FDA control is a mystery to me. It’s a bad deal for everyone eventually, because as more of the supplement compounds are discovered to have harmful effects–think anabolic steroids or some of the “smart” drinks and relaxants added to “energy” drinks over the past decade–Congress ends up having to legislate against them one by one, and the FDA has to go through a torturous combination of warning letters and negotiations with the companies involved and attempt to draw up new regulations–a very expensive and drawn-out process. And it’s usually piecemeal and illogical–caffeine levels in soda are regulated, pure powdered caffeine is not.

In the meantime, hospitalizations from caffeinated energy drinks and other easily abused products have doubled since 2007, and there have been a number of deaths from caffeine overdose, including the Indiana teenager whose parents had no idea he was buying and consuming powdered caffeine when he died at the end of May, and whose case spurred the FDA’s attention this time. The state of Oregon is also currently going after 5-Hour Energy in a lawsuit over false advertising claims about ingredients that actually do nothing much, when the real stimulant effect is due to a dose of caffeine.

But even if you’re not a naive teenage boy, the whole caffeine-laden environment has expanded beyond anything that makes sense. More and more people are finding themselves overdosed (not lethally, usually) but with the shakes or dizziness. Between the Starbucks venti and proliferation of 20-ounce sodas as the new normal serving size, there’s a new source of trouble, because caffeine is showing up in foods we don’t expect to contain it.

Food companies are adding caffeine to candy and snacks these days as never before–even in oatmeal and pancake syrup. The FDA is taking the “negotiate with the companies and hope they back down” approach, as they did with Wrigley for its Alert caffeinated chewing gum a year ago. They don’t currently have the impetus to forbid adding caffeine to foods as they did with alcoholic caffeinated beverages a couple of years ago–the “blackout in a can” as Charles Schumer put it–but they’re at least making noises about getting it back out of foods that children and teenagers are likely to eat. I like the coffee cup graphic up on their Q&A page about it, but will it really change anyone’s mind or make them look harder at the ingredient lists if they’re already buying these products?

Why put caffeine powder in non-coffee foods in the first place? It doesn’t taste like much or stimulate the tastebuds, exactly. But the combination of mental stimulation via caffeine with eating a particular snack food is probably intended to make lackluster processed foods more attractive and even addictive in either the literal or marketing sense. Given the price of caffeine powder compared with almost anything else the companies could add, I’d be willing to lay odds on who’s going to be even more addicted to caffeine than the consumers. Cue the Pavlov effect.

Filed under: breakfast, Food Politics, kid food, Odd food, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on FDA warning on powdered caffeine

Paying the piper too young

Posted on January 20, 2013 by DebbieN

This winter break we traveled east to celebrate with friends who are as close as family. Our daughters hit it off immediately as they do every couple of years when we manage to get back together. But the contrast between them had become striking in only two years away: our daughter, although (or perhaps because) she’s Type I diabetic and has to pay attention to what she’s eating, is growing up basically healthy. Our friends’ daughter, a few months older, is shorter but 25 pounds heavier and her mother told me she’s spent the past year taking her to a slew of medical specialists to figure out why she’s suddenly having so much pain in her legs and feet.

This girl is wonderful and energetic, full of beans, a live wire, and smart as a whip, but she doesn’t last long on the the gym floor at school, and worse yet, she had to leave the dance floor at her own celebration just as the dj was getting started because her feet and legs started hurting so much she had to sit down within minutes. The night before, she’d taken four ibuprofens for pain in a single day–just from walking around at school and later at the hotel.

So far nobody’s found much except low vitamin D and iron. The spine guy, the neurologist, nobody’s found anything they think could be doing this. The pain clinic is apparently all too ready to dish out a laundry list of pills nobody should be taking at age 13–among them antidepressants, despite the fact that they haven’t found a cause for what is obviously physical pain, and that nobody’s actually diagnosed major clinical depression. My friend is beyond worried for her daughter and exasperated at what is looking like the classic runaround from an otherwise very highly regarded medical system.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Diabetes, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Big Food mobilizes against child marketing guidelines

Posted on July 10, 2011 by DebbieN

This Washington Post article isn’t the absolute clearest–looks like it was written as a last-minute rush piece, actually, but it’s worth getting to the end.

The basic idea is that in 2009 Congress demanded the CDC, FDA, USDA and FTC come up with a coherent set of voluntary nutrition guidelines for what the food industry can market directly to kids.

I’m not a big fan of voluntary nutrition or safety compliance guidelines for the food industry–mostly because industry players generally feel free to ignore or toy with them and then claim some kind of advertising advantage they haven’t earned. Voluntary guidelines also come with all kinds of soft landings and easy outs, and the proposed guidelines here are no great exception.

But in any case, now the four agencies have done it, and the food and restaurant industry is doing the predictable–throwing big lobbying bucks into a disinformation campaign-slash-tantrum.

How big? The campaign manager won’t say, but the preliminary guidelines report that US food industry marketing to kids 2-17 years old is currently something over $1 billion in three key categories (breakfast foods, restaurant chain food, and snacks).

So it probably won’t surprise you that companies like General Mills, Kellogg, and Pepsico have teamed up with ad-carrying media partners like Viacom (read: Nickelodeon) and Time Warner to try and quash the voluntary industry guidelines. Figure on the campaign to be spending in the mid-millions or more. They’d rather “salt and burn” instead of “cut the salt and learn.” And what a waste.

What will probably surprise you is just who this coalition–calling itself the “Sensible Food Policy Coalition”–?!!–hired to handle the campaign: Anita Dunn, a former Obama communications director whose husband, Robert Bauer, is  still White House counsel. Not a really lovely mashup, there.

Why she’s taking on the food industry campaign so they can keep protecting their ability to market garbage to the young and vulnerable is one question. Why the FDA and FTC, which have the power to decide what nutritional and medical claims, among other criteria, are valid and can be used in advertisements to adults, let alone kids and teens, are bothering with a voluntary measure instead of doing a proposed regulation to limit such marketing to youth is another.

In both cases, the answer is almost certainly money. The food and media industries have it, the federal agencies don’t.

[As it turns out, the FDA and FTC don’t have power to restrict Big Fo0d’s marketing to the under-17 crowd after all. They lost that specific ability in 1981–start of the Reagan administration… Reagan’s “ketchup is a vegetable” declaration was the beginning for drastically lowered nutritional standards and branded fast food concession contracts for public school lunches.]

So the right question under these circumstances is, where do you want to put YOUR money? How about this, if the federal agencies can’t get a decent result and the lobbies are buying off everyone else:

Boycott the Boxes. Hit ’em where it hurts.

Box 1–TV: If you have kids, limit their access to TV, and teach them to turn off the sound during the ads. Do it yourself. Treat the ads like the silly nuisance they are from the minute your kids are old enough to watch. Tell your kids the truth: most of the products advertised on kids’ shows are too shoddy–and overpriced–to market to grownups. The companies make them bright and loud and cheesy because they think kids can be fooled easier (your kids should be beautifully insulted at that if they’re about six or seven years old).  Go with PBS and videos you approve rather than commercial TV as much as you can.

Box 2–Packaged stuff parading as food: Skip almost everything that comes in a cardboard box or a plastic overwrap, or in a can. You can do this. You’ll save an awful lot of money by buying store brands only and cutting out the most pernicious items–sugared and high-salt packaged breakfast cereals, bags of starchy snack extras, and sodas, at least on an everyday basis. Save sodas and chips for parties, not for school lunch or part of dinner.

You’d do even better to go with fresh vegetables and whole fruits for most snacks and make a good habit for relatively cheap. They taste pretty good, don’t take long to fix, last at least a week in the fridge, and your kids won’t get sick overeating them.

There’s a reason the Pringle’s slogan is the very smug  “Betcha can’t eat just one.” No one says that about carrots or broccoli, or even about apples. Ever eaten too many of those in one sitting? Didn’t think so. Vegetables and whole fruits keep you satisfied longer, don’t hyperstimulate your appetite for snacks, and they don’t put on pounds that take a long time to work back off. They don’t promote cavities, either. Even nonsweet junk foods do–all that processed starchy stuff sticks to your molars like glue.

Filed under: breakfast, Eating out, Food Politics, Food TV, kid food, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Big Food mobilizes against child marketing guidelines

Bravo to LAUSD

Posted on June 16, 2011 by DebbieN

Some actual good news on the school lunch front appeared in the LA Times  yesterday:

L.A. Unified removes flavored milk from menu

The Los Angeles public school district, one of the largest in the nation, had to vote its bigger contracts for things like milk early, so they made the announcement yesterday. They’ve also announced they’re going to drop breaded, fried wastes of space like chicken nuggets and offer more vegetarian options, more farm-to-school contracts for actual fresh produce, all the good things we’ve been waiting decades to see again.

This is all in deep contrast with the frosty reception Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” show has received from actual LA schools in the past few months. And there’s a reason for it that you don’t have to dig too deep to get to. A lot of the fine upstanding revisions to the LAUSD school lunch menus and cafeteria revamps have not actually gone through for budget-crunch reasons. Some of the salad bars were never installed and implemented. As with many pieces of legislation, the intentions were good, or sounded good, but the money never showed up. Benefit: zero.

And a friend of ours who’s a school principal says the federal food subsidy program for poor students–there are an awful lot of them in his school, as in many of the LA area schools–is woefully underserving those kids. Some wouldn’t get a meal at all if they didn’t eat at school, and the food they get today is barely worth the name.

If the LAUSD can actually manage this year’s resolutions right, it’ll be a big step forward. The chocolate milk wars in the city board offices have been surprisingly intense–proponents of keeping the sugared chocolate and strawberry-flavored drinks argued that if they were pulled, most kids wouldn’t drink milk at all, 60 percent drink the flavored milks when available and that there’d be a big drop in milk consumption.

Proponents of going to plain (and Lactaid, and soy, to accommodate everyone, this is California after all) countered with the ugly fact that  the amount of sugar in the flavored milks puts them just about in the range of Coke, and argued that if fast food choices weren’t waved so constantly in the kids’ faces and the cafeterias offered real food instead, rather than alongside, the kids would eat more real food. And they’d get used to plain milk quickly enough.

I can attest to this phenomenon. We don’t keep fast food or junk food in the house, and I’ve been serving fresh vegetables and whole foods rather than prepared or processed things out of a box most of my adult life. I don’t get too many complaints, not only because my husband’s no cook, but because that’s what there is to eat and it’s the way we grew up eating at home.

Our daughter came along and started out with plain unsweetened yogurt, vegetables, bread and plain oatmeal or the lower-salt store brand versions of Cheerios. Also, for reasons that aren’t particularly clear even now, she had a thing for Indian food, spices and all. The maitre d’ at our favorite restaurant laughed when he saw this two-year-old kid tucking into a hot cauliflower dish and saag paneer. He remembered me coming in for a serious feast with my husband when I was very, very pregnant and hoping it would either induce labor or at least last me until I was in shape to come back. I’d never considered that she’d like to eat what I ate while pregnant–I’m still not sure it’s true, but I figure Indian families would have more experience with seeing how their kids develop a taste for vegetables and varied spices. Even now, she likes a wider variety of non-sweet flavors than her friends. I like to think it’s because she’s gotten to taste them, and because we like to experiment.

Part of the comparatively low-sugar diet for her was self defense–she was an up-like-the-rocket, down-like-the-stick kind of toddler if she ate many sweets at a time, even then. Years before, my sister’s older son had gotten stuck in a serious chocolate milk habit at that age, because my sister had given it first as a treat, then as a regular drink, then for comforting him or to appease temper tantrums, then to get him to do the things he should have been doing with or without milk. She had a hell of a time getting them both back out of the vicious cycle. I’m not as organized and can’t fool myself, so I took it as a warning.

My daughter got sweets occasionally, but mostly she was eating the kinds of foods we ate and now that she’s diabetic AND eleven at the same time (pity me!), I’m extremely grateful that she got the taste for nonsweet foods early in life. She only really wants junk foods if they’re right in front of her, or hungers out loud for what she knows are exaggeratedly high-carb items if her blood glucose is a bit high. When she’s in good shape, she goes for vegetables and fruits and cheese and Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bravo to LAUSD

The Cheap Vegetables–Snack Edition

Posted on May 13, 2010 by DebbieN

A food marketing study released findings a few days ago about the top 10 fastest growing snack food preferences for kids 2 to 17 years old. Yogurt came out as number one, then potato chips, then–very surprisingly to me–fresh fruit. The others down the rest of the list were a soggy but predictable mash of candy, chips, “donuts” [sic], and other junk foods, though I think cheese cubes were in there somewhere. If yogurt and fresh fruit are in the top three, though, the news must be good, right?

Um. Maybe. But both of them are sweet or sweetened (in the case of most flavored yogurts, very heavily sweetened compared with plain)–so they kind of fit in with the candy, donut, carb-carb-carb kinds of snacks in the rest of the list.

What’s missing from the top 10 list? Plain milk, pasta or beans, bread and jam, the simpler unpackaged, unprocessed, or unbranded stuff you could bring from home, are all missing. But most of those are hard to take to school, and none of them are crunchy, which is a big part of the pleasure of snack. Actually, few of the packaged snacks are crunchy any more either. It’s a sad state of affairs, but there is a simple way to restore the full joy of snacktime.

Because mostly what you don’t see on the marketing study list are vegetables. Raw, crunchy vegetables, low in calories, starches and sugars, fats and  sodium, are high in potassium and fiber and vitamins, easy to prepare (another chorus of “just wash and nosh”) and perfect for snack. A handful of red cabbage or a couple of carrot or celery sticks along with a piece of cheese or a few nuts will keep kids from hunger for a lot longer than the carb-laden snacks on that list, and they’re a lot less expensive–on your wallet or your kids’ waistline.

Parents at school complain all the time that vegetables are too expensive, too time-consuming, take too much preparation by hand, and are not convenient to deal with, and their kids “won’t eat them”. But I wonder if that’s true, because whenever I go at lunchtime, I see many of those same kids enjoying the vegetables that come out of the school garden. They aren’t whining and they don’t appear to be suffering, and nobody seems to be sneering at anyone else that their lunch has Brand A taco chips and all the other poor schlub’s mother packed was vegetables. They’re all waving broccoli or lettuce leaves around, holding them up for comparison, and using them as props for one or another comic performance before chomping into them with savage glee.

And I know an ordinary bunch of celery–even a head of cauliflower–is the same price or cheaper than an econo bag of Doritos. Even at the big brand supermarkets. Celery. Carrots. Red or green cabbage. Raw green beans or if you’ve got the extra cash, snow pea pods. Broccoli or cauliflower. Lettuce wedges. Tomatoes. Cucumber. Bell pepper. None of these are hideously expensive, all of them taste good raw, and all of them store well washed, dried gently, and kept in the fridge.

So what’s stopping the parents from packing vegetables as lunchbox fare? The fact that they have to wash them to get the dirt off? Get their hands wet doing it? Maybe peel some of the vegetables? Find a knife to cut them up with? Use them up within a week or so of buying them? I honestly don’t know, but a lot of the parents seem whinier than their kids. Maybe they should all learn to just wash and nosh.

It only takes a minute or two to deal with a full head of broccoli or cauliflower, or a bunch of celery, and it’ll last you several days’ worth of school and work snacks at a cost of under $2. The most prep required is for carrots, if you start with an actual bunch. Not that I’m advocating the prepacked “baby cut carrots” bags, which are more expensive, but if you really hate peeling and cutting up carrots, you could go this way and still do better than chips and snack packs and the like.

All I can tell you is, if the vegetables are fresh and crunchy, most kids will get into them as long as their friends are doing it too, and there’s no great way to overeat them (except maybe for carrots). And some vegetables are just plain fun–red cabbage in particular is handy for revealing secret invisible baking-soda messages, and if your kids eat it at recess they can compare purple tongues with their friends afterward.  Can’t do that with taco chips.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, kid food, nutrition, shopping, top 10, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Cheap Vegetables–Snack Edition