Educator's Idea File: Fooducate

Fooducate.com -- This blog is outstanding - and they have a new tool online with a database of foods that help you decide if the food is good and it is not then they offer alternatives. You can find them at www.fooducate.com. Their alpha.fooducate.com tool helps consumers rate their favorite foods by nutritional value. For example, we clicked on cream cheese and the red lights went off for fat and saturated fat. The yellow lights went off for sodium. The green light came on because it doesn’t have too much sugar. And it gets a white light for calories, which we deem as neutral - they are showing as 100 or about 5% of the daily value. It has an overall nutrition meter that is between 1 and 5 apples (cream cheese is ranked as 1 for low). It does list better alternatives - they show cottage cheese and ricotta cheese as being better than cream cheese but we disagree. We would rather see a fruit spread of course. But most importantly, we feel that this website is a great idea for a presentation and why we are listing it here.By Heather Stinson, Child Nutrition Specialist, Indiana Department of Education, Office of School & Community Nutrition, Indianapolis, Indiana  www.doe.in.gov/food