Natural Selection
Written By Catherine Newman
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How do you choose nutritious snacks for your kids? The questions just seem to Sno Ball.
We're in the thick of the Great Cheese Puffs Blind Taste Test, with eight brands ranging from the "organic" to the fluorescently unwholesome versions from our own debauched, orange-fingered childhoods. Six children sample away, reflecting aloud on such elements as appearance, crunch, and flavor. "Yummy," one 5-year-old repeats gravely, after every single bite. "A little bit wheaty," observes a 7-year-old about the corn-based snack, and then, about another, "A lot wheaty!" The 2-year-old grabs a fistful and says simply, "More," then clarifies — "More, more, more!" — and gets led, screaming, away from the testing area.
When we ask them to predict, by looking, which might be the healthiest cheese puff, almost all of the children pick the most garishly colored — the very ones with the shoddiest nutritional profiles — on the grounds that they appeared the cheesiest and, of course, cheese is healthy.
It's a brave new world in the junk food industry, and with more children suffering from weight problems, and the planet awash in chemicals, I really don't know what to think. Is so-called healthy snack food a good thing for our kids? To find out, I asked a series of bracing, hardball questions.
If it's in a natural foods store (or aisle), it's gotta be good for you, right?Um, no. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think and director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, worries about what he calls the "health halo" at work here. He means those wholesome words and bucolic scenes on the packaging (a phenomenon called, cynically, "greenwashing"). "Low fat, organic — people end up believing they have a license to overeat" is how he explains it. In a study by Wansink and his colleagues, one group gobbled 49 percent more of the same granola than another group simply because their bags were labeled "low fat." If your child's (or, ahem, your own) fingers are a blur between cracker bag and mouth, the fact that those crackers are baked — or that the cheddar came from Happy Holstein farm or that 1 percent of the company's profits are donated to homeless armadillos — is a moot point. Eat too much of something marginally more wholesome, and you cancel out its benefits.
So if we eat sane-sized amounts of this stuff, then it's okay? Not according to Marion Nestle (it's pronounced "Ness-el"), professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of What to Eat. "Everybody knows what junk foods are. They're once-in-a-while foods," she says impatiently. "Bananas. Grapes. Carrots. Apples. Oranges. Those are good snack choices. You know — food!"
If you do go for a packaged snack, though, Nestle suggests you scout out short ingredient lists, whole grains, and as little sugar and salt as possible. Then let your kids eat it occasionally. And don't imagine it's good for them. Fruit flavored snacks are often glorified gummy bears, for instance. And one must beware such wolves in whole grain's clothing as Dunkin' Donuts' Wheat Glazed Cake Donut with its heart-stopping 19 grams of fat. Better to get your kids an eclair instead (with a slightly more modest 15 grams of fat), enjoy its frank lusciousness, and agree that it's dessert.
What about the happy absence of artificial flavors and colors? The lovely lack of MSG, chemicals, and preservatives? Margo G. Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, thinks parents like me can focus too much on what isn't in snack foods and not enough on what is. "Parents can get distracted by details when they should be focused on the overall health of the diet. Are the kids eating healthy, balanced diets, low in fat, with lots of whole foods, fruits, and vegetables?" Struggling to figure out which cheese puff is best for your child is a bit like fretting over the ugly chandelier in your cabin while the Titanic is sinking: preoccupying, sure, but off point. Am I missing the forest for the (organic) trees? Did you catch that New York Times story about the county fair that advertised "no trans fats" in its deep-fried Oreos? I laughed all the way to the supermarket — where I smugly bought a bag of organic Oreos.
Organically grown foods are inarguably better for the planet. And the larger the company using organic methods, the greater the environmental gain. As Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, put it in an interview with ABC News: "That is tens of thousands of acres of the American landscape that will not have chemicals like atrozine poured on them and pollution of the water and the cost to farm workers that comes from exposure to those chemicals." Plus, it may be healthier for your body — especially cumulatively — not to ingest the pesticide residues of conventional farming methods. But for the exposure to gain critical mass for my kids, they'd need to be eating a lot of organic sandwich cookies. Which they shouldn't be. Because they're not actually healthful. How's that for a nutritional catch-22?
Surely one measly package of all-natural Twinkie-style cakes doesn't make me a bad parent, right? Right. It's not that healthy brands of sandwich cookies (or cheese puffs or crackers) are inherently so terrible, it's that they're hogging caloric space. Think of it this way: If your child's nutritional requirements are a train, junk foods are taking the seat of rightful passengers. Kale, say, or grapes. Stephen Daniels, pediatrician in chief at The Children's Hospital in Denver, explained it like this: What's left after all the nutritional requirements are met are a hundred or so "discretionary calories" to be used like dietary funny money. Junkily speaking, that's a pretty tight caloric budget. Two cookies, maybe, or a handful of chips.
Is it just me or, in a world of high fructose this and hydrogenated that, does the humble old potato chip start to seem like kind of a healthy snack? It's just me. I thought Marion Nestle might be on my side, since she makes a case both for foods that don't pretend to be something they're not and for snacks with short ingredient lists (potatoes, oil, salt!), which suggests they're closer to whole foods. Instead she sees potato chips as capitalist alchemy: a way to convert wholesome, inexpensive potatoes into something greasy and costly, from 22 calories an ounce and 79 cents a pound to 153 calories an ounce and up to $10 a pound. (Tip of the day: Throwing a party? Put out a bowl of baked potatoes!)
When you look at food, explains Karen W. Cullen, a pediatrician from the Children's Nutrition Research Center, you should "see nature." The stem on an apple recalls its attachment to a tree. The rough brown flecks in a cracker recall rippling fields of wheat. The neon orange of an artificial cheese puff recalls clown wigs, costume jewelry, Rit dye. Likewise, ask your child if she's ever seen a puffed food, like a marshmallow or cheese puff, hanging from a vine. As Cullen says, "The more it looks different from nature, the more it's been processed, the less healthy it is."
Now we're full: the kids of cheese puffs, me of information. I'd planned to make them a big chart, comparing all the brands and their grand claims, their nutritional profiles, their plain or fancy packaging. But you know what? I'm not sure it makes that much difference. Sure, the kids were wrong to think the neon ones were healthiest. They were onto something, though, in a way — these are all cheese puffs, and if nutrition is my biggest concern, I should choose a different snack.
I will tell you a little secret, though: Cheetos Natural White Cheddar Puffs had as sound a nutritional profile as any of the groovier brands, with real cheese and organic corn meal. And they were the blow-out winner in the tasting, even up against the MSG- and color-dusted "real" Cheetos (and even with the grown-ups). Who knows how to make a "healthy" cheese puff that tastes like a Cheeto? Cheetos does.
In sum: If your kids like to occasionally munch cheese puffs (or chips or cookies), then it makes sense to switch to the healthier ones. But if their organic street cred seduces you into buying them all the time? Well then, stick with the bad ones and buy them only occasionally. (A lite beer may have fewer calories — but you'd never mistake it for a healthy snack, would you?) Kids need lots of snacks. So feed them fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy foods, like you already knew you were supposed to. Use junk food (organic or not) to teach your children moderation. And the strange pleasure of eating something wonderfully — but terribly — delicious.
Plus: 10 Ideas for easy and nutritious snacks
