• Choosing the Healthiest Foods for Your Family

    Welcome! I am a mom of a busy 8 year old and an adventurous 6 year old. I also happen to work for a great company called NuVal. NuVal is a nutritional scoring system that rates foods on a scale of 1-100, based on how nutritious they are. We are implementing NuVal in grocery stores around the country.

    NuVal may not be in your area yet. But I see the scores while they are "hot off the press" and because of that I am able to make better decisions about what to feed my family.

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    I am not a registered dietitian. I am just a mom who happens to work for NuVal. I am also an AFAA-certified Group Exercise Instructor. NuVal is a system designed to lead customers to the most nutritious food choices. It is not a diet or weight-loss plan. Before starting a diet, you should always consult your personal physician. The opinions expressed in this blog are the opinions of the writer and not the opinions of NuVal LLC.

C is for Cookie

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 01:11 PM


Happy 40th Birthday Sesame Street! It is scary that I am almost as old as you! It has been wonderful these past 6 1/2 years, getting reacquainted with the Street. And yes, your Platinum Hits collection is on my Ipod. My Dear Son, now 6 1/2 and sadly Way-Too-Old for Sesame Street loved Oscar’s “I Love Trash” and Ernie’s “Put Down the Duckie.” My daughter, now 4 1/2, still wakes up wanting her Elmo’s World fix and sleeps with the one stuffed Elmo I could find that did not have some sort of speaking unit in it. I love watching her wake up, groping for Elmo’s eyeballs so she can give him a hug. Any parent who has had a love/hate relationship with Elmo should read Joanna Weiss’s column from the Saturday’s Boston Globe: Six reasons why Elmo went from being horrible to adorable.

I am looking forward to the big Sesame Street special tonight (Episode #4187!), with Michele Obama, Elmo and the White House vegetable garden. I love that Cookie Monster now gobbles vegetables along with his cookies. But still, C is for Cookie makes me want, well, a cookie! I haven’t talked much about cookies on my blog yet. Nutritionally, there’s not much to know. The median NuVal score for cookies is a 3. Ouch! You can see some of the NuVal scores for cookies on our newly designed website here.
There are a couple of superstars in the Cookie category. Most notable are Kashi’s TLC Oatmeal Cookies. They get a NuVal score of 40 – the best we’ve seen in Cookies to date. Of course, I prefer Kashi’s TLC Oatmeal with Chocolate cookie (it’s all about chocolate) which score a 24. Still, that’s a great score when it comes to cookies. If I wanted to forget about the scores, I might have a Nabisco Chips Ahoy instead. They score a 6. I might try to be a little healthier by choosing the Reduced Fat version of Chips Ahoy. I wouldn’t bother. They get exactly the same score as the regular version – a 6! I’ll just be sure to have my cookie with a big glass of skim milk, which gets an almost perfect NuVal score of 91.

I probably only have a very small window of Sesame Street Love left in my household. You know Hannah Montanna is going to be knocking on my door soon. My son now knows that there’s more to life than PBS. He’s quickly teaching his sister how to find Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. So tonight, I’m going to have my cookie and eat it too, as we all Sing A Song. Enjoy!

Posted by: Melissa 4 comments

Posted in: Cookies

Tags: ,

4 Comments on “C is for Cookie”

  1. #1 Caryn
    on Nov 10th, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    Great blog Melissa. Sesame Street is such an iconic name, symbol, and memory in many households, including mine. The saddest part is that the kids grow out of Sesame Street way too fast. It would be fun to see Cookie Monster and Oscar do a segment on NuVal scores. Thanks for the memories and enjoy your cookie.

  2. #2 Mom on the Run
    on Nov 10th, 2009 at 4:42 pm

    I have been loving the google and Seasame Street immersion. So cute!!

    I am loving the NuVal updates.

  3. #3 Joanna Sutter
    on Nov 12th, 2009 at 8:18 am

    I try to avoid the cookie aisle at all costs…but it's good to know that I can pick out the healthiest choices at a glance when I'm tempted!

  4. #4 Tweets that mention C is for Cookie – A Better Bag of Groceries -- Topsy.com
    on Feb 3rd, 2011 at 5:53 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by NuVal, Melissa Schlenker. Melissa Schlenker said: Happy Birthday Elmo! To honor you, my C is for Cookie blog post! http://bit.ly/g1zgDN @NuVal [...]

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