Shaw's Helps You Shop Smarter

Shaw's Supermarkets has rolled out a new program in their New England based stores that color code thousands of items in their supermarket based on their nutritional information.  The aim of this system is to help shoppers identify healthy items faster and easier.  For example Dark Orange is for whole grains and Purple is low in calories.  I think this is a fantastic idea and I hope it gets adopted in some form or another in grocery stores across the country (hell, world!).  It can be very tedious walking around the store looking at countless nutritional labels.  This way if I see something new I might want to try, I can know before I even get to it if I should really be eating it or not.

Are Beauty Products Making Us Fat?

According to doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, yes.  They claim that 70% of cosmetics and household cleaners contain a chemical known as phthalates.  This chemical is absorbed by the body and proceeds to disrupt our glands and hormone regulation, thus leading to obesity.  This is news to me, but if this turns out to be true it will throw the beauty and cleaning industries on their heads!


Read the full article here.

Wisdom For Your Holiday Weekend

I thought this blog post over at Huffington Post was quite good.  It talks about the behavioral and psychological issues that can be behind humans having a difficult time losing weight.  As a tease, here is the first line of the blog...which I'm in love with right now.  Enjoy your weekends!

If you gave a test to a million people and three-quarters of them flunked, would you attribute their failure to a lack of willpower or laziness?

Can You Spot 100 Calories?

Take this fun little quiz from Women's Health and see if you can guess which serving size of each food or snack is 100 calories.  They asked which 'Healthy Snacks'...but some of the items you guess are french fries, a whopper, pizza and doughnuts.  I think they should  have stuck with which FOODS are 100 calories.

Post your scores!

Get Spark*D!

The folks over at SparkPeople have rolled out a new program just for diabetics called Spark*D.  I think this is a great addition to their already comprehensive site.  I myself use SparkPeople to track and gain support from other users.  Now maybe I can get my husband, who has diabetes, on the site as well.  If anyone has used this, let me know what you think of it!

Choose My Plate

The new graphic replacing the USDA's pyramid has been revealed today along with a (new?) website, http://www.choosemyplate.gov/.  I really like the new look of the graphic.  It's simple to understand and visually appealing.  I browsed around the site and they also have some really useful tools like a food tracker, foodepedia and meal plans for the likes of preschoolers, moms to be and the general population.  Now, they don't give you recipes, but they do tell you how many cups/ounces/etc you should be getting of a particular food group each week.  This is based on your age, gender, height, weight and physical activity.  I will definitely be checking out the food plan for moms-to-be when I get pregnant.

Your One Stop Recipe Shop

I just found out about this great new recipe search engine called Foodily.  This search engine aggregates recipes from all over the web from tiny little blogs to giants like Food Network.  They then not only spit out the recipe but their own nutritional calculations based on each ingredient.  You can search by ingredient, vague food term (i.e. Mexican dish) and also refine your search with things like 'low-fat' or 'low-carb'.  I think this is fantastic.  I have so many recipes bookmarked all over the damn place that I lose track.  So you can also save favorites or even 'Like' a recipe on Facebook.  I will definitely be utilizing this new search engine, how about you?

Jenny Craig For The Win!

It looks like Consumer Reports has ranked the most popular and doctor approved weight loss programs and Jenny Craig has come out on top.  It looks like the rankings are determined by nutrition, weight loss and the dropout rate.  An astounding 92% of participants stayed with Jenny Craig for 2 years.  Of course, as they warn and I do as well...that doesn't mean it's right for you.  If you like to cook, then eating prepackaged meals isn't going to be something you will stick with.  I, however, might give it a try.  I'm very good friends with my microwave.

In case you were wondering here were the top rankings overall:

1. Jenny Craig
2. Slim Fast
3. Weight Watchers
4. The Zone Diet
5. The Ornish Diet
6. The Atkins Diet

The Soda Tax: Yay or Nay?

Obama tried to tax sodas as part of his health care reform package, but it got destroyed by lobbyists.  Now some states are debating putting a tax on soda.  Honestly, at 1 cent per ounce it's not going to break anyone's bank (an extra 12cents per can...go check your couch!), but it could bring in millions of dollars to help fund various healthy initiative programs.  I, for one, think this a great idea.  Some naysayers think this is a slippery slope, that we could start taxing bread and milk next.  But really, soda has absolutely NO nutritional value.  In the scheme of our daily nutritional needs, soda is a luxury...and not a particularly healthy one.  What do you think?

Yeah, There's An App For That

I would say that now I've seen everything, but with the way technology is advancing into new and innovative products for the masses, I'm sure tomorrow I'll see something else that's new and shiny.  But for today I bring you Meal Snap.  Now here's an app that lets you take a picture of your meal with your smartphone and then like magic, Meal Snap with give you an approximate calorie range!  As the article notes, it is a range and not anything exact.  It also doesn't necessarily take portion size or extra ingredients into consideration.  Despite all of this, I think this is a great tool to use when you're eating out and you need to have some idea of the damage you're about to do!  It looks like this is only available on the iPhone, but hopefully they'll expand it to work on Androids and Blackberries as well.  If any of you happen to have an iPhone and try it out, let us know how you like it!