Tag: "healthy"

Get Some Healthy Ideas from Stop & Shop

I live near a Stop & Shop. For almost ten years it has not been my primary grocery store, but rather the grocery store I ran in to if I needed something at the last minute. With RB having been looking for a job for a while I have been trying to shop smarter, less often and more efficiently. After hearing about some changes to the store from Mom Central, I decided to pop in and check it out. Not having been in my nearby Stop & Shop for a little over a month, I was surprised when I recently went in and discovered they’d redone the store and were going with a new look and were even getting rid of the old colors and going with new ones – yellow, purple and green.

One of the new things you’ll see on shelves throughout Stop & Shop stores is the “Healthy Ideas” symbol. The symbol is there to call your attention to products that fit well into a healthy lifestyle. The Healthy Ideas symbol is a result of research by physicians and dietary experts. The selection of the foods that bear the label was based USDA and FDA standards defining healthy, the USDA Food Pyramid and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Some of the things that were taken into consideration were the amounts of fat, sodium, fiber, whole grains, calcium and minerals.

I think it’s great that a grocery store is offering a time saving way to help busy shoppers find healthy products. The Stop & Shop website has a lot of helpful information as well. There’s a recipe section full of tasty sounding dishes that teaches shoppers how to make simple swaps, or changes, to familiar recipes to make them healthier. My favorite thing about the recipes, besides the fact that they’re simple, is that you can add ingredients to a printable shopping list right on their site.

My son has Celiac Disease and requires a gluten free diet. It can be very time consuming to read through every ingredient on a label, as a result I often stick to the same foods and the same dishes over and over again because it’s just easier. The Living Well area of the Stop & Shop website has a food allergen sectionthat contains a list of all of the gluten free products that Stop & Shop makes. I can’t tell you what an awesome and welcome resource this is.

Jan 31, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

Get Snacktivated

We all snack a little in my house. Oh, who am I kidding? We snack a lot in my house. Growing up my brothers used to come to my house because “Mommy has nothing good to eat”. (Actually, that one hasn’t changed.) I’ve been trying to buy less junk and more good foods. Always up for some new ideas, I was glad when Mom Central emailed me asking me to check out the new Kellogg’s Snacktivate website.

Snacktivate is about forming healthier, more nutritional snacking habits. Think snack, active and motivate. Deb Geigis Berry, a leading family activity planner, and Rachel Brandeis, a nutrition counselor, are the two experts behind this food philosophy. The four principals of the philosophy are plan it, pick it, make it and move it. Plan it means that snacks should be scheduled as part of an every day routine. Pick it means that parents should be mindful of the foods they pick when grocery shopping. Make it means that parents and children should make snack time a quality, fun, family time activity whenever possible and that everyone should be involved. Move it means that everyone should be physically active.

The Snacktivate website has helpful tips and suggestions as well as recipes, brochures, tips and all the nutritional information you could ever want. There’s even suggestions on getting your children involved in cooking. The site is easy to navigate and everything on it is written so that it’s easy to understand. Snacktivate recipes are broken down by season, and each one has a picture showing the final outcome. Wait until you see the Teddy Bear Pancakes, the Butterfly Quesadillas and the Sassy Sunpops!

The nice folks at Kelloggs were gracious enough to send us two boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats, the Sassy Sunpops recipe and a Cereal To Go Cup. This is the neatest cup! The top part of the cup has a lid and operates as a bowl. The bottom part of the cup has nontoxic freezer gel inside it to keep milk cold. And there’s a spoon in the lid. (Since I’m not giving you mine, you can buy the cup from the Kelloggs website store.) Until I received this bowl here’s how I took my breakfast to work. Cereal was put in a baggie. Milk was put in an empty water bottle. At work cereal was poured into a paper coffee cup and then milk onto the cereal. I’d have to do this twice. Usually by the time I was ready for the second half of my cereal my milk was getting warm. This cup makes it so much easier to bring breakfast to work and keep it tasting fresh. Thanks Kelloggs!

The idea for Snacktivate is a good one. We all do need to eat healthier. And quality family time is always good. So take some time to learn about Snacktivate and cook up some fun with the kids.