• 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.

  • Sign up for email updates here!

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

  • Contact Me

    I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to email me.

    You can also follow me on Twitter @MelisaNutrition and my RSS feed.

  • Disclaimer

    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.

Trade Up Tuesday: High Scoring Cookies

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 07:00 AM

TT Cookie GiveAway

Welcome to Trade-Up Tuesday, a weekly feature here on A Better Bag of Groceries.  Today I am giving away my favorite dessert:  Cookies!  Not just any ordinary cookies – but cookies that get the best NuVal scores I’ve been able to find so far.  For the grown-ups, there’s Kashi TLC and for the kids, Chocolate Teddy Grahams.

I’m a cookie girl.  I have a very hard time saying no to a cookie.  I can say no to cake, to pie, to candy – but cookies are hard for me to resist.  And dark chocolate – but that’s a blog post for another time!

Cookies, as you can imagine, score rather low on the NuVal scale (1-100, 100 is best).  The median score for cookies (1/2 score above it, 1/2 score below it) is only a 3.  Ouch! 

The Uber-Scorer in the Cookie category is Kashi’s TLC (Tasty Little Cookie) Oatmeal Raisin Flax.  It gets a 40.  Wow!  I buy them, but I do like the other Kashi cookie better:  Kashi TLC Oatmeal Dark Chocolate, which gets a 24.  Still great for a cookie and did I mention that I love dark chocolate?

As for my kids, I try to steer them towards Chocolate Teddy Grahams which get a NuVal score of 25.  The Chocolate Chip Teddy Grahams only score a 12.  Chips Ahoy only score a 6.  And lest you think that you might do better with Reduced Fat Chips Ahoy, think again.  They get the same score as regular Chips Ahoy – a 6!

Today’s GiveAway

I am giving away all 3 boxes of cookies so that you can try them out for yourself.  All you need to do is head on over to the NuVal website to check out the scores.  Find something that makes you go hmmmmmmm.  And come back here to comment about it.  One lucky commenter will win my Cookie Trade Up prize.  The contest closes at 11:59 pm Eastern time tonight!  Good luck!

Posted by: Melissa 43 comments

Posted in: Cookies, Trade-Up Tuesday

Tags: , ,