Nutritionist Mom Gets "D" from Snacker Tracker

This nutritionist mom was excited about a new product called the Snacker Tracker, that is, until I used the magnetic wipe-board to mark how many fruits, vegetables, dairy, protein and grains my kids ate in a day.

Day one, I graded myself, and got a big fat "D" for my kids' intake of nutritious foods. As usual, I'd encouraged my six-year-old twins to eat "something colorful" at each meal and snack, yet it wasn't enough to fill up the fruit or vegetable columns and, much to my chagrin, I needed to draw extra boxes in the grains column. I was frustrated.

From my extensive nutrition research, I know that grains, even so-called whole grains, are the least nutritious of all foods. I try to use them as a condiment, yet here I was, outed as a grain-pushing mom. Wheat is known as the "staff of life" not because it's so healthy for us, but because it stores well.

After our ancestors began farming wheat ten thousand years ago, it saved us from starvation during long winters. Today, factory farming of wheat, government subsidies, and its long shelf life makes it a cheap way to feed our population.

Who can blame us for making it a dietary staple? Wheat is damn tasty, has some protein, and holds together our baked goods quite well. However, we overconsume it. It forms the bulk of the USDA Food Pyramid, which Harvard MD Walter Willett considers a main cause of many diseases. For example, consider that diabetes, heart disease and obesity hockey-sticked up in prevalence after this "Pasta Pyramid" was introduced thirty years ago.

Wheat flour, even when baked into whole wheat bread, has a high glycemic index (higher than sugar!) and we eat it in place of more nutrient dense-foods, so it contributes to the onset of chronic illness. If you think about it, we've robbed Peter to pay Paul - trading starvation for chronic illness. My relatives have experienced their share of disabling chronic illness, and most have improved through diet, so suffice it to say I'm motivated. In my house we mainly eat gluten-free, substituting wheat flour with rice flour. I'll spare you further detail, but this will explain what I did next with the Snacker Tracker.

The Snacker Tracker got my kids' attention as well as mine. They became excited about filling up the squares, but all the squares were the same to them. So, try as I would, grains kept coming out higher than I wanted. So, this mom thought back to her organizational behavior classes from graduate school and assigned points to each category. I needed incentives to match the behavior I wanted.

I clicked the cap off the marker and began writing on the Snacker Tracker. Vegetables were worth 3 points per serving; fruits 2; dairy, protein, and water were 1 point each; and grains, well they got a big fat zero.

Day one with the new weighted system? A huge success! I don't actively encourage competition between my kids, but they were competing for how many Snacker Tracker points they could get. It was easy for them to see that if they ate what mom considered a healthy diet, they could get 25 to 30 points per day. The easy way to get halfway there? Eat four servings of vegetables for twelve points. You wouldn't believe how fast they ate them.

The kids began to track their own point tallies each day. They started to get mad at me if I forgot to score them on a meal, bragged about how many points they'd eaten, and calculate how many more they needed to beat their sibling or to get to 25. After a couple weeks, habits had changed and greenery was much more welcome. We didn't have to use the board every day.

Sure, we slip back to our old ways, but whenever grains take over like weeds in our diet, I get out the Snacker Tracker and the high score challenge is on.

Alix gives lively Vitamin Vampires nutrition presentations, showing parents where the nutrients went and how to get (most) of them back again. She also writes for www.mednauseum.blogspot.com, a blog devoted to research supporting dietary and environmental causes of chronic illness.

An original Silicon Valley Moms Blog post.