Here’s a classroom activity we ran across recently for teaching kids the difference between tooth-friendly and not-so-tooth-friendly foods. See a problem anywhere?

It’s not so much exaggeration to say that Wheat Thins aren’t a whole lot better than those cookies on the left – even before you look at the ingredients. Refined grain products like this are digested as sugar. They also tend to stick to the teeth, giving oral pathogens even more opportunity to feed on the sugars they crave.

Then there’s the actual, added sugar in the product – 3 kinds, to be exact, and the most abundant ingredient after flour and oil. More than 1/5 of its total carb count comes courtesy of the stuff – twice as much as fiber.

A great opportunity to teach kids about health halos and the hazards of judging food products by just their labels…

---

Comments are closed.