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Healthy Habits Preschool CD Launch: Boston FNCE 2010

November 16, 2010 in American Dietetic Association, From the Desk, Jill & Jam, Local Media, Professional Speaking by Rockstar Nutritionist | No comments

What a launch! We sent our new tunes into official orbit this past weekend at the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo, held in the lovely Boston, MA. The CD, officially titled Goin’ on a Journey: Songs for Every Body, CD joins our fleet of healthy habits musical offerings that now include both preschool and elementary. It is now available on Amazon and iTunes!

Jump with Jill

Jill & Jam

Dietitians from around the globe enjoyed a photo opp with “The Jills,” featuring the real Jill Jayne, MS, RD– creator of Jump with Jill– and the new avatar Jill. Avatar Jill represents our expansion of the show to improve our reach and vision as we tour multiple casts of Jills around the country.

The Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo is a conference specifically for the Registered Dietitian and Diet Technician. Most RDs have 5-7 years of training, separating us from your average health nut. The interest is beyond nutrients, but to how food helps and hurts our bodies and the world we live. This conference is our profession’s Christmas, the event a dietitian’s entire year revolves around. We rally our healthy messages all year long, and arrive to the conference ready for professional development, to connect with colleagues and to check out the latest in food trends dancing in our heads.

Exhibitors like myself share the show floor with giants like Frito Lay, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nestle and Hershey’s. These companies are also sponsors of the conference, so you can imagine how the foods they produce are positioned to us.

*Have you heard that there is now more whole grains in chips?
*Did you know that kids will eat more carrots when dipped in a moderate amount of ranch dressing?
*Did you know that high fructose corn syrup is now called corn sugar?
*Have your heard about Hershey’s new “Moderation Nation” that promotes moderation, not depravation, as the key to a healthy life?

Dietitians walked away with totes filled like Santa Claus, with samples to spread the good product cheer, but the hope has to be that this new wave of marketability of “health” can continue to transform items we still can call food. Just like Christmas, it’s not about the presents. It’s our continued vigilance in educating our clients and customers about how to cut through this stealthy new food PR. After a day on the show floor with so many pastes, fortification and selling points, all I want is a salad.


When Healthy Becomes Profitable: Tracking Trends in Making Junk Food Healthier

June 14, 2010 in American Dietetic Association, From the Desk by Rockstar Nutritionist | No comments

Special Delivery for a Registered Dietitian!

There are many little perks to being a dietitian– friends look to you for sound advice on navigating a restaurant menu, chefs want to impress you and companies send you free stuff in hopes that you will recommend it. I have noticed an interesting trend in the free stuff I have recently received. Junk food companies are jumping on the healthy bandwagon, producing potato chips with actual potatoes, using less salt, and incorporating whole grains. It becomes a game of lesser evil; if you are going to eat it, eat the real stuff.

The change in production speaks to a larger trend. Healthy, whole foods and transparency about ingredients has become popular, and profitable. Perhaps the largest counter argument made by big business to continue making such a low quality “food” (dehydrated potatoes preserved with an unpronounceable list of chemicals fifty ingredients long) is that consumers keep buying it. It’s our choice if we want to be fat… right? Little did we know just how terrible our food was, and as more and more is uncovered about our food, consumers are raising their standards and the resulting healthcare costs have caused policy changes, too. Some recent examples include posting calorie counts on restaurant menus and mandating an industry reduction in salt. Food companies are answering, and when giants like Frito-Lay get involved, this is big business creating supply for the demand. Healthy food is gradually becoming profitable. And while there may be no such thing as a free lunch, this is the best bag of free chips I have ever had.

The Research Continues on the “Advertised Diet”

June 11, 2010 in From the Desk by Rockstar Nutritionist | No comments

This month’s Journal of the American Dietetic Association, the publication for the my dietetic profession, highlights yet another example of the skewed view of food commercials present. We live in a culture of unhealthy food messages that undermine our ability to make healthy choices.

Nutritional Imbalance Endorsed by Televised Food Advertisements by Mink, Evans, Moore, Calderon, and Deger looked at commercials during 84 hours of primetime television and Saturday-morning cartoons. If a person ate the diet recommended by these commercials, their diet would consist of:

  • 2,560% of the recommended daily servings for sugars
  • 2,080% of the recommended daily servings for fat,
  • 40% of the recommended daily servings for vegetables
  • 32% of the recommended daily servings for dairy
  • 27% of the recommended daily servings for fruits

…and would oversupply “protein, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium, while substantially undersupplying carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins A, E, and D, pantothenic acid, iron, phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, copper, and potassium.”

The bombardment with negative messages about what to eat has created “The American Diet,” which more closely resembles what is advertised, than what is recommended:

MyPyramid: How the Government Recommends We Eat (USDA, 2005c; Contento 2007)

Food Marketing Pyramid: Advertising Expenditures by Food Manufacturers (Gallo 1999; Contento 2007)

Food Consumption Pyramid: Average Servings Consumed by the U.S. Population Compared with MyPyramid Recommendations (Community Nutrition Research Group, 2000; Contento 2007)

This type of research is vital to supporting a more comprehensive approach to childhood obesity. Childhood obesity is more of an issue than weight; it’s an issue of overconsumption.

Addressing the childhood obesity epidemic means changes at the personal level (getting kids to be more active, decreasing their exposure to media, teaching them about nutrition and ways to interpret what they see in advertising) and policy level (adding more activity time to the school day, regulating advertising, subsidizing farming and healthy food options). This type of research helps build the case that is is more than just weak-minded people that become obese.

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