How Many Twinkies Are Too Many?

Michelle Obama spoke about obesity Wednesday at a forum sponsored by Newsweek.  (The full transcript can be found here.)  If you read the whole thing it sounds pretty sensible, but the part about Twinkies seemed a little silly.  It started when the interviewer asked her if she thought Twinkies and Fruit Loops should come with warning labels. 

You know, that strikes me as extreme, because a Twinkie is not a cigarette, you know. And what -- what parents need is just information about what's in the Twinkie and how much of this can we eat. It's not that we can't have a Twinkie. And our kids would be pretty upset. And I am not supporting that.

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I'm all in favor of good snacks. We grew up with snacks and chips. We did. But we have to exercise more, parents have to understand what's in the Twinkie; again, how does it fit into the overall diet. So we don't need a warning, we need information. And we need information that's easy to understand. That's something that I said yesterday in the speech. You read labels now and it's like the small print and it's all "oleosutomay" -- or I don't -- the chemicals, you can't even pronounce them, and the portion sizes compared to one, and you've got a small one and a big one. And then, before you know it, you don't know what to buy and how much to give to your kids and in what amounts. That's the kind of information that families need.

I'd like to know how she proposes we make the ingredient list on a Twinkie wrapper easier to understand?  In order to do that you'd have to take out all of the unpronounceable chemicals and then it wouldn't be a Twinkie anymore, would it?  If she wants labels to be understandable, what she really wants is for foods to be all-natural.  A Twinkie will never be that.  So she's really sending a mixed message.

My opinion:  from a health perspective a Twinkie is probably more like a cigarette than Michelle Obama is willing to admit.  I'd recommend she check out Steve Ettlinger's book, Twinkie Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats.  How do Twinkies fit into the overall diet?  They just don't, not at all.  The proper portion size?  Zero servings.

She makes a good point that we need to understand portion sizes better, but I wish she would have argued that sometimes the portion size should be zero.

We've really lost our ability to understand sensible portions and I think that came about because we quit growing our own food and started eating processed junk.  With processed junk you really don't know what you're eating, so how can you ever gauge what is a sensible amount?  When you grow your own food you understand what's sensible to grow, to store, and to eat and you understand how to create balance among a wide variety of foods.  It's all right under your nose.  You see it all, you know how much work is required and how many resources are involved in creating the food.  You will naturally create a diet that is sensible and has sensible portions.  And you won't have to mine anything to create it.

I think it will be a long, hard journey to get people to return to that kind of knowledge.

Junk Food

At the library recently I overheard the woman who runs the little coffee shop talking to a patron. She was talking about her kids and in a totally exasperated voice said, "Every night as soon as the dishes are put away, OUT come the chips, AND the cookies, AND the pretzels...!" And I thought to myself, But who is buying all of that? If you're so exasperated, just quit buying that junk. Seriously. We can't control what our kids are eating when they're out with friends, but at home we certainly can. If there are no chips and cookies and pretzels to be found at home, guess what? You're kids aren't going to be eating them. It's amazing how that works.

Now I can't totally sit on a high-horse here and lecture. I don't buy junk food, but I do bake sweets. So there's junk in the house. It's free of chemicals and artificial ingredients but still loaded with too much sugar and refined flour. So yes, I'm feeling all superior to this woman because I don't have store-bought junk in my house, but I can't ignore what I do have here.

At least with savory snacks we're in good shape. We've always got nuts, seeds and fruit for snacks (okay, so fruit isn't savory), sometimes popcorn, and I personally like to cook a big batch of chickpeas and snack on those at times. Collin has never complained that we don't buy junk food. And frankly, we don't do all that much snacking. When you eat nutrient-dense foods at mealtimes you just don't get very hungry between meals.

There was a time, back when Collin was small, when I did buy junk food--Goldfish and Cheez-Its and pretzels and so on. I'm not sure how we made the transition. We just shifted slowly away from that habit. And that's the thing, it is a habit. If you try to give it up suddenly, you're going to miss it and have cravings. You'd probably have better luck making gradual changes, slipping in a few substitutions here and there, and working up to a total change of habits over time.

As I've said before, Collin is allowed to buy junk food with his own money. Mostly he buys soda, the cheap two-liter bottles at the dollar store. Recently he made an interesting discovery. For awhile he'd been having issues when he was at my house. Intestinal issues, shall we say, after mealtimes. We kept trying to figure out what food might be causing it, but could never come up with one ingredient that was common to every meal. Plus he wasn't having any issues at his dad's house. For awhile I was getting paranoid that it might be my cooking! But then he figured it out--it was the cola. Every time he had a glass of cola he would have problems. I think it's awesome that he worked this out on his own. He's at that age now where kids seem to start having a degree of body-awareness and health-consciousness (he's thirteen) and have enough self-discipline to make positive changes. I'm so impressed that he figured this out. In order for change to be lasting it has to come from within. He's now planning to have a finite soda budget for 2010--once it's used up, no more soda, even if it's only May. I'd rather he just give up soda entirely, but at least he's moving in the right direction.

P.S.--If drinking soda causes the same troubles for you as it does for my son, check out my post on Corn Syrup. It covers fructose malabsorption syndrome, which is most likely what you're suffering from (scroll about a third of the way down the post to reach the part about fructose malabsorption).