Welcome! I am a mom of a busy 7 year old and an adventurous 5 year old. I also happen to work for a great new 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.
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.
Welcome to Trade-Up Tuesday, a weekly feature here on A Better Bag of Groceries where I tell you about Trade-Ups I’ve made since learning about NuVal and I give away free stuff. Today, I have a fantastic giveaway! In honor of Fat Tuesday and the Winter Olympics taking place in Vancouver, Canada, I am giving away pancakes and Canadian maple syrup! Oh, and the winner gets a NuVal T-shirt too! Good times!
Sorry, the skis are not included!
To learn more about why I traded up to Aunt Jemima’s Whole Wheat Blend Pancake mix, check out my Youtube video.
To Enter Today’s GiveAway:
Leave a comment and tell me something that you learned on the video, such as:
The NuVal score for Aunt Jemima’s Whole Wheat Blend Pancake Mix
The NuVal score for regular Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix
The NuVal score for the frozen mini pancakes that I used to buy
What I do now so that I have easily accessible pancakes during our busy weekday mornings
What it says on the back of my T-shirt
What my son’s drawing is on the front of my refrigerator (you get bonus points for that one!)
My favorite brand of chocolate chips
Don’t cheat! No fair if you just look at the other commenters. However, if you are at work and can’t really watch a video right now, I’ll take a comment on your favorite Winter Olympic sport!
One winner will be randomly drawn from all the comments. The contest closes at 11:59 EST on February 16th. Be sure to check back here tomorrow to see if you’ve won!
There’s nothing like a 3-day weekend. This Columbus Day was special because the whole family either had or took the day off. My plan for the Monday holiday was to drop the kids at my gym’s babysitting and take a great cardio class while my dear husband spent some time at home painting the bathroom that we’re remodeling. Well, that plan was dashed when we all slept until 9 am! I guess we all needed our beauty sleep. We also needed a lazy, quality-time family day since I’m now headed into an 11-day work week that includes a trip to the American Dietetic Association conference in Denver this coming weekend. So instead of exercise and home improvement, we spent some fun time in the kitchen trying a few new things.
The kids wanted pancakes so it was the perfect time to try out the Aunt Jemima Whole Wheat Blend Pancake mix that I picked up on a recent shopping trip. I figured that it must get a better NuVal score than the Original and I was right!
I also will confess right here that I used to give my daughter Aunt Jemima Frozen Mini Pancakes – until I found out that they scored a 6! I’m still getting over the guilt.
Here’s what the pancakes looked like. You can see that they are pretty wheaty!
Somehow the kids could sense that Mommy & Daddy really wanted to hang out, read the paper & drink coffee. The sight of Mommy & Daddy relaxing on the couch is foreign to my children. Mommy & Daddy must be busy, busy, busy. So, they next asked for fruit smoothies. No problem. I got out my old blender (a 12-year old wedding gift that my sister makes fun of) and put in the following ingredients:
some plain Greek yogurt (Score of 91)
some skim milk (Score of 91)
a banana (Score of 91)
some strawberries (Score of 100)
some frozen blueberries (Score of 100)
That was one healthy fruit smoothie. And somehow, everything is more exciting when you put a straw into it.
The kids loved the whole wheat pancakes so we made a whole bunch and put the extra in the freezer for quick heat-ups during this crazy stretch of work that I have ahead of me.
In the meantime, I’ll be preparing for my absence from home for four whole days. Thankfully, my mom will come to the rescue, my DH is SuperMan, and my BFF can’t wait to take by daughter to ballet (she has 2 boys!). The bad news is that I will be away for my daughter’s School Picture Day. Horrors! I mean my DH is amazing, but his talents end when it comes to doing my daughter’s hair. One of my friends suggested that I cancel my business trip. Oh well, there’s always Picture Retake Day!
After my blogpost about My Top Ten Favorite Foods, I thought it would be fun to blog about my kids’ Top Ten Foods. I wanted their list to really come from them, so I pulled out my flipchart from Staples that we sometimes use to draw big pictures, put it in the living room, and had a brainstorming session with my 6-year-old and 4-year-old. They thought that this was pretty cool. I took a picture to prove to my readers that this really is THEIR list. Notice the wrinkled paper and the kindergarten and pre-school penmanship. We were too tired to bring the easel up from the basement and we propped the flipchart up on the couch, so you can see that the the handwriting is quite slanted.
So, I asked my kids questions like, “If you could eat a food every day, what would it be?” I was surprised to see that their list was so healthy! I truly expected Cheetos, Kit Kats and cotton candy ice cream to make the list since they beg for these items at our Pool Club’s snack bar. Maybe they chose real foods because we were in our own house? Like most grown-ups, they tend to eat well at home and not so well when we are at a restaurant, vending machine, convenience store, etc. We took turns (of course!) with this list, so my six-year-old son chose the odd numbered items and my four-year-old daughter, the even.
1. Carrots How excited was I that this healthy veggie which scores a 99 on the NuVal scale was the first thing out of my son’s mouth! I buy the smallest baby carrots I can find for the kids because they are not choking hazards. Sometimes, during the school year, I splurge on the small baby carrots that are pre-packaged.
2. Spaghetti This was when I knew that my daughter was taking this exercise very seriously. Spaghetti is definitely her favorite food and she loves to eat it just like the dogs do in Lady and the Tramp. Now that I know the NuVal scores, we eat Barilla Plus Pasta Spaghetti Multi-Grain at home because it scores a 91. I had tried whole grain pastas years ago and did not like them, but this one tastes just like regular spaghetti. It’s a great alternative when you realize that Prince Spaghetti gets a 49.
3. Apple Slices These get a 96 and they make a great accompaniment to a sandwich. When you can get your kids to eat something that gets a 96, why would you ever give them chips?
4. Pancakes Now my daughter must have been thinking that by putting something on this list, we could get is back in our household because we stopped buying Aunt Jemima Frozen Mini Pancakes when I found out that they score a 6! This same child loves Quaker Old Fashioned Oatmeal which scores a 57, so I make it in large quantities and reheat leftovers for a quick hot breakfast.
5. Cinnamon Toast Crunch My son begged for this cereal last week because Ice Age 3 Return of the Dinosaurs was on the box. We were shopping in Roche Brothers at the time and they do not have NuVal yet (although I wish they would get it), so I wasn’t exactly sure of the score, but I was in no mood for a melt-down in the cereal aisle, so I relented. I got home and looked it up and found out that it gets a 27, which is not bad when you consider that the median score for cereal is a 25. The key would be to get my son to switch to Cinnamon Toast Crunch with 75% reduced sugar because it scores a 40. That is even better than Cheerios (one of the best scoring Children’s cereals at a 34). The question is: Does the 75% reduced sugar have Ice Age 3 on the box? I hope so.
6. Ice Cream Sandwiches My daughter, who does not like chocolate (crazy!), loves Hood Ice Cream Sandwiches. They score a 2. She also loves plain vanilla ice cream. As I discussed in my I Scream post, Breyer’s Extra Creamy Vanilla ice cream scores a 45. I will work on migrating her over to that choice. “Sorry, honey. The store was all sold out of ice cream sandwiches.” That will only work when I get to go grocery shopping alone – which is like a vacation!
7. Pineapple Another award-winning pick from my son. Fresh pineapple gets a 99. The canned versions only score a 25. So, while it is more expensive and a huge pain to cut up, I buy the fresh. I admit there are weeks that it sits on the counter and the leaves get all dried out and it starts to grow a little mold on the bottom and then I feel guilty that I blew $4 on a fresh pineapple. But actually that is usually when it tastes the best, so it works in our busy house.
8. Orange Juice This surprisingly healthy shout-out came from my daughter, Miss Spaghetti-Pancakes-and-Ice Cream. As I mentioned in Keeping Kids Hydrated – Guiltfree, Tropicana 50 Pulp-Free with Calcium scores a fabulous 81. That is amazing when you compare it to Minute Maid Orange Juice Pulp-Free which scores a 30. Before I knew about Trop 50, we were buying our juice from our milk man because I’m on this glass bottle kick right now. Sorry Milk Man! As I mentioned in My Top Ten Favorite Foods, be sure to buy the one with added calcium and Vitamin D, because the other one scores much lower.
9. Plums My son must have thought there was a prize at the end of this because his last choice scored a 99 also. My colleague and friend is a dad of 2 and he has a “fruit before anything else at breakfast” rule in his house. I liked that, so I started giving the kids cut up plums or peaches with little tiny seafood forks that came with my everyday flatware (what else are you going to do with those?) at breakfast time. It’s a great way to squeeze in another fruit. I put the plums in paper bags until they get nice and ripe.
10. Soup And on the hottest day of the year, my daughter chooses soup! She has always been a big fan of this hot and salty favorite. We love to sing the old Tom Jones favorite, “She’s a Lady” when she drinks the remaining broth right out of the bowl. She’s such a class act, my four-year-old. Unfortunately, I don’t have any scores on soup as of yet because NuVal is scoring that this fall. It will be interesting to see how they do. It was also interesting to read this morning that Campbell’s will be removing 25% of sodium from soups. Maybe they heard about NuVal?
Try this with your kids and see what they choose. I’d love to see your lists in the comments!
The NuVal Nutritional Scoring System gives nutritional guidance to consumers frustrated with complicated nutrition labels and misleading packaging promises. Under NuVal, all foods and beverages are rated on a scale between 1 to 100. The higher the score, the higher the overall nutrition.
