ontario schools junk free

Ontario schools are removing Junky food from their cafeterias and vending machines

Things like chocolate, french fries, energy drinks, candy, chips and pop will no longer be available for students to buy while on campus.

This is huge step forward in the fight against obesity in Canada.  Currently, 28% of kids between 2 and 17 are either overweight or obese.  This is leading to higher levels of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, ect...

"Fully 80 per cent of the new school menu must include products with the highest levels of essential nutrients and the lowest amounts of fat, sugar and sodium."

There is still a lot of work to be done in the fight against obesity but this is a step in the right direction.  Managing portion control, calories, and further reducing calories are just some of the things that still need to be address..

But I hope that more provinces and school districts will follow along and re-evaluate the food they are serving the countries youth.

Healthy Food? Dinner Edition

Veggie Burger

Subsituting vegetables for beef isnt necessarily a bad idea.

But veggie burgers are often bound together with cheese, and packed with sodium for flavor.

They also tend to be huge throwing your portion size out of wack

Add a white bun, sugary ketchup, and some mayo and you just might be getting more than 1000 calories

Juice

While 100% juice is an easy way to one of your daily servings of fruit

a 16oz glass or apple or orange juice contains about 55g of carbohydrates... mostly sugar.

(about 12 spoonfuls!!!)

And juice lacks the fibre that is in fruit that fills you up.

Try to stick to one 8oz glass of 100% juice a day or less (thats one fruit serving)

Frozen Diet Dinners

When you take out high calorie fat and sugars... you also take out flavor

To make these dinners taste good they replace this lost flavour with sodium

Which means major water renetion for you

Skip the prepackaged dinners and instead, freeze home made meals into single-portion size dinners.

Use glass containers to avoid any harmful chemicals that can leach out of plastic when it gets heated.

No more toys in SF

A new law in San Fransisco has been passed that will stop McDonalds from adding toys to Happy Meals.
The toy has long been the lure behind getting a McDonalds happy meal - and hopefully this will cut down on how many of these unhealthy meals are fed to kids.

In order for a meal to qualify to get a toy it must meet the following criteria:

-Less than 600 calories
-Less than 35% of the calories come from fat
-Less than 640 milligrams of sodium
-A fruit or vegetable

while this doesn't guarantee a healthy meal it is a least a step in the right direction
The adequate intake of sodium for kids 1-8 is between 1000-1200mg - so this qualified meal could still contain more than half the sodium your child should get in a day.

found on foodfitnessfreshair.com

Sodium

Most people are getting somewhere between 2 and 3 times the recommended daily intake of sodium.
For people ages 9-50 the RDA for sodium is 1500mg. However - the average Canadian man gets  4,100mg and women are consuming 2,900mg.
This is BAD. While some sodium is needed for normal cell function, and it needs to be replaced because sodium is lost through urine and sweat, Canadians are getting way too much.

Most of the sodium comes from processed packaged foods. Even things such as milk, and pop has sodium. Make sure you are checking the labels when buying processed foods - and the labels can be deceiving because of the serving size  -so read carefully.

This huge amount of sodium can cause a huge amount of health problems. Sodium causes water retention, which no only leads to bloating but also causes high blood pressure. High blood pressure is hard on your kidneys, your heart  and your blood vessels.

Try to reduce your sodium intake by taking the salt shaker off the table, not adding much or any when preparing food. And always read the labels!

read an article from CBC news here