Online Media Nutrition Calculator Helps Parents Track Foods

5aday.gifFresh from our living lab’s counter-marketing success at Allen Elementary (our pilot program we wrote about here) we thought we’d share some of our interactive nutrition data tools that YOU can easily use to curb childhood obesity in your home or school.

This weekend, we showed peninsula PARENTS (and the greater Bay area community) our media-based reality show format using our Dare to Compare: Gross Out Game for Good Nutrition at Allen Elementary School’s Health Fair. (the kids had so much fun, our 2 month outcomes gleaned 82% retention, yay!)

Representatives from the feds’ 5 A Day program were there (with a California Latino 5-a Day Campaign-bilingual recipe slant) along with Kaiser Permanente’s “Thrive” program for healthy living, the Dairy Council of California, the 4H-Expanded Food & Nutrition Education Program, dentistry, diabetes prevention, blood pressure checks, you name it.

There were countless others, but I lose track…Shaping Youth (yeah, yours truly) was the guest speaker and dog & pony show presenter, explaining how we taught kids to Eat Like an Ape and Dare to Compare using our counter-marketing methodology.

Kit Cosgriff (Principal) applauded our “Fear Factor Foods” approach to using media, film, and reality show formats to make nutrition fun…

Our video shows how we put kids through the paces of blindfolded taste tests (introducing new foods) Shaping Youth’s “Switch Pitch” (substituting healthier alternatives) and “Sim City” (simulation and hands-on demos of unhealthy outcomes)…

Our dvd pilot demo is distributed throughout the district to get teachers to implement a fun and effective media/marketing spin on wellness. It was a hoot!

Here’s one of the most thorough interactive calculators we use to prepare some of our content and add ‘label literacy’ to whole foods gleaning data quickly. (note the “fast food” calculator on the right hand side, too)

Kids are just as apt to have high cholesterol, sodium and heart health issues as “seniors” these days so this online tool can give you a hand preparing healthier meals for all.

For example, pop in an “ape food” like bananas and see where the fruit stands in terms of fancy-shmansy graphic depictions of the caloric ratio pyramid, nutrient balance indicator, target map, not to mention the fullness factor, better choices options and protein and glycemic load.

Kids are eating about three times the amount of sodium they should be, embedded in processed junk foods and such, so now you can look at whole food offerings to customize a nutrient search to find what’s “highest in this, lowest in that” to make better choices for them at home.

Use the food category explorer to find the best foods for adding protein or fiber, limiting cholesterol or sugar, then gauge your child’s ‘sedentary vs. active’ lifestyle levels with the daily needs snapshot.

These cool tools will give you “at a glance” deconstruction of your whole food faves to see how you “Dare to Compare” with the processed junk being marketed to you daily.

AND…here’s another fast food fat calculator that’s handy for dissecting the drive-through teen scene of the major franchises too.

We’ll be back atcha soon with Shaping Youth’s dvd for all to download and give kids healthier alternatives to what they’re being ‘spoon-fed’ via the marketing machine.

Viva la counter-marketing! Bueno! 🙂

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