TNC Review: School Lunchbox Snacks

this is not a sponsors segment. If we ever do a sponsors segment, we will absolutely let you guys know and be fully transparent. So Susie's chosen one of her favorite products this week, which is the Messy Monkey's Whole Grain buttes beautiful.

are much better than others. So I thought today, rather than perhaps target ones we're not that much of a fan of, because so many mums listen and we know that you're looking for healthier options, I will really focus on two of my favorite ones because I think there's plenty of things to talk about with them. So the first is a brand you'll all be very familiar with.

It's the Messy Monkeys Whole Grain Bites. So Messy Monkeys have a range of bars and breakfast cereal, but I've specifically chosen the whole grain bites, which come in the individual packets because inevitably, in my experience, kids are looking for things in little packets, even though that's not great for the environment. Let's again preface by saying that, and I've chosen the ones that are Burger flavor because the reason I've done that is that, in my experience, you

can't just replace a diesel with something boring. It's got to be similar in taste, in texture, Otherwise the kids just won't eat it and you waste your money. So the Messy Monkeys, after several formulations, have come up with a whole grain bytes, which nutritionally are pretty goodly in and definitely recently when we had the Healthy Food Guide Awards, they did very well in voted by several different independent dietitians. The ingredients, so they come in a pack I think

of ten of individual twenty grams serving sizes. Nutritionally, that's less than one hundred calories, which is always my reference for a package snack food for children. It's got to be less than one hundred calories. So these are eighty five, which is three hundred and fifty eight killer jaws one point seven grams of protein, so they're not getting a huge amount of protein, a little bit from the whole grain.

No gluten, so no detectable gluten in this product, so suiting gluten free people less than three percent saturated fat, so only three point six grams of total fat one less than one gram saturated, so very good. They're minimal added sugar is none, so zero point two grams and just eleven point five grams of carbohydrate per serve, which is a good good amount. Two grams of fiber which

is not insignificant for children, and sodium seventy nine milligrams. Now, people get quite confused with sodium because seventy nine they think that sounds high. But we've roughly got about two thousand per day to play with, so in the scheme of kids snacks, this is pretty low per serve. That's being helped by the fact it's a small serving size. Admittedly, they're gluten free, wheat free, thirty six percent whole grain,

which is where our fiber is coming from. They classify for a source of fiber, no artificial color, s flavors, preservative, and it's a four health star rating. Now, if I look at the ingredient mix, the flour mix is whole grain sorgum twenty four percent maize, rice whole grain quinoir, followed by canola oil, chickpea, fiber, natural flavors, a little bit of sugar, salt, vegetable powder for the flavor, cocoa powder,

a multifier. So again, Leanne, you could look at that ingredient list and say, oh, it's got extra oil added, it's got extra sugar. But what we know nutritionally is is because this is a very small packer. This is twenty grand. This is like literally a tablespoon worth of weight. Even though there is a little bit added sugar, a little bit added salt. In the rand scheme of diet, this is very small and certainly it's up the top

of what's available for children. So I would describe this, for want of a better description, one of the best of what we would describe is a bad bunch in the sense of being a processed food. So the best of something that we want to include minimally and the diet.

But for me Lea, and most importantly, when you give the kids these, they eat them and they like them, because there's plenty of snacks out there a similar format that the kids just won't eat because they don't taste grape and they don't taste like what they're expecting from a chip. They're crunchy, they're very small. As I've described before, with my twins, I won't give them a whole packet of these. I'll break it open and give them a few at each of their lunchboxes, and they're very happy

with that. Because they're any little, they don't need to be eating buckets of snack food. But in general, I think there's about four or five different flavors. There's a sour cream, there's a cheese, one, a barbecue, there's several salt and vinegar, so it's lots of different flavor profiles.

They're child friendly, they're in a bright colored bag. They're sold in generally the healthy section of supermarket, and I often get them when they're on sale because they're often coming up as half price, and I'll have a quick look now because I haven't actually put it in here what they retail at per packet normally, but I tend to with all kids snack food, wait until it's on sale because it's often half price, and let's be honest, we we all like to save a bit of money.

So I'll buy a few when they're on sale, and probably at the moment, there's quite a few on sale because they're being marketed at supermarket.

three or four days. And that's the thing I think a lot of parents and so giving kids snack foods and not just one packet, like it's routine to open a lunch box. When I used to work as a public house nutrition a SUSI, we used to do lunch box audits of the daycare and the primary school, and you would easily like you'd open a lunch box up and you'd see three, four, five, six package snacks in

those lunch boxes. So I really do like your sort of formula of opening a packet and sort of splitting it up either between kids or just splitting it up, you know, over a couple of days for the one child, because as you said, like it is it is a processed food. Is the better of a bad bunch, but it is, you know, nutritionally, is actually quite strong. And I like the fact that there's two grams of fiber

in a small packet as well. That's actually quite a lot of fiber for twenty grams, and we're not getting in a whole bulk of that. They're not adding in a ton of extra probotic fibers or it's not like

it's sort of artificial type of fiber either. It's really the fibers coming from the fact that they've got a good blend of whole grain flour mixes plus the chickpea fiber in there as well, which is which is ideal because a lot of kids they're just not simply eating enough veggies, which means that they're not getting in enough

fiber as well. So not the way saying you should definitely get your fiber from package products, but it is a little bit of a benefit of something like these snacks to be whole grain based and contain a little bit of fibers. So I think the brand overall is quite good, and it does market it under Freedom Foods, isn't it, which we know is quite a strong brand

health wise for a lot of their products. So good to see that they've come up with something that's, you know, somewhat nutritionally high compared to other products in that market, and also appeals to kids as well.

vegetables and cut up fruit. So that's a really good take home message. The other thing I'll say about a lot of these products is You've got to check because some do have added MSG, which we've spoken about previously, additive six to one, and even though they may look healthy, some of the pea snaps and flavored products still contain it in kids snacks. So one of the reasons I'm a fan of this Messy Monkey's brand as a whole is that they're only using natural flavors, so really check that.

You definitely don't want to see flavor enhancers in any kid's snack food in general. So that's a big reason that I'm not a big fan of some of the flavored packets of biscuits and sneak pea snaps that are out there at the moment. So the other product I've chosen, Leanne, is actually a rice based snack. Now, as a rule of thumb, historically myself, as a dietitian, I don't like

rice based snacks. And the reason I don't like them is that it's often the most highest glycemic index carbohydrate we can find in rice crackers in particular, So as a reference, ten rice crackers is the equivalent of about two slices of bread worth of carbohydrate, and it's really rapidly digested carbohydrate, and they're often historically being flavored also

with MSG. But there is a lot of kids rice snacks out there, and this one we've chosen today, the sun Rice Mini Bites, is one of the ones that I don't mind actually compared to the ones we've often had out there, because it's made from a whole grain brown rice. We know that white rice is a refined grain, very high gied, lacks the nutritional density of brown rice, so these are a whole grain brown rice eighty five percent.

The next ingredient ones I've chosen the salt and vinegar, but there is actually plain as well, which are eliminating some of these flavors that come with it. The next ingredients vegetable oil, seasoning with some molded extra and food acid, salt, sugar, mineral salts, yeste extra, It may starch, vegetable oil. If you wanted to get rid of all of that, you could choose the plain blue packet, so there's definitely options

for that. Again, it's a twenty gram pack size, which comes in at less than that one hundred calorie per serve or three fifty six kilogels one and a half grams of protein, which is coming from that brown rice saturated fat. Very low, again, very similar to the Messi monkeys at point zero three per serve, fourteen point five grams of carbohydrate, minimal sugars zero point four grams wouldn't even count, not as much dietary fiber as the whole grain variety of Messi monkeys at less than a gram.

I would generally like the kids snack food to have at least two three of either protein or dietary fiber. So this one's coming in a little bit low there. But it's a flavored brown rice product, which is pretty innocent and again in my experience, a product the kids are likely to eat and a million times better than

a rice cracker because of that brown rice base. So yeah, and I think there's flavored options and plain options to mean, if you wanted to get rid of some of those colors and things from that, you'd have a pretty plain snack that's got a bit of flavor to it and the kids are likely to accept.

And so I think when parents are really adding in a couple of these into the lunch boxes, or they're giving the kids a couple of these packaged snack products at the park and they're getting home and expecting a child to eat a lunch or a dinner, and the kid's full, this is probably the reason because a lot of you know, children are just over consuming carbohydrates at

snack times. So that's why your formula from the podcast on Sunday was really really helpful in terms of just you know, making sure they're getting in some veggies and some protein and some you know, salads and a piece of fruit or something versus just too many of these packaged products, which we know parents use more for convenience but also because kids obviously really like them. So I do think that that's an easy way to compare it.

So this is sort of a little packet of this is equivalent to about a slice of bread, which I think for parents to understand that is actually quite a powerful marketing message as well. So I do like your idea of sort of splitting it up and not giving them a whole packet, particularly if they're a younger child, you know, three, four, five, six years old as well. Well. I do like that the sun rice ones are Australian based rice because I think that that's an important concept.

And I've got a little bit off tangent, but stay with me, Susie. A lot of times, when you know a lot of pregnant ladies say to me, oh, can

I have protein powder? If it's a vegan based proteins, they just be very very careful with brown rice protein because a lot of the times we don't know where the rice is grown, and a lot of times it's in countries that are not Australia, and there's a lot of kind of harmful minerals and that sort of thing in the soil, particularly if you know the brown rice is coming from somewhere in Asia or something like that.

So very much the recommendations for like protein powder and pregnancy are and no, go with a brown rice type protein. And I would imagine it's very much the same. You know, you would want the rice in a kid's based product, you would want to know where that's coming from or where that's grown, because there are a lot of harmful chemicals in the ground if it's not sort of an

austrain based product. So for me, one of the big props is is that it is they're sourcing the rice from Australia, so I think that that's very helpful in a kids based product.

But what I will say is that the flavored varieties, the sodium per undergrams is over six hundred, which is actually quite high. We normally recommend snack food or any foods to be less than about three hundred milligrams per hundred. Now it's kind of saved with the serving size being quite small, but just be mindful there is a little bit of added salt that does get sort of slip

into these products to give them some flavor. And the Messy Monkeys is a little bit lower compared to the brown rice sun rice rice snacks, so that is something to be aware of. But the other thing I wanted just to mention before we wrap it uply and is we've spoken before on podcasts about the addition of vegetable oils in the food supply, and if you looked at

these nutritional labels, that's quite high on there. It's not ideal, but as we've mentioned, because it's small serve, that's actually quite little, and if it's a loafat product as these are,

it's not as much cause for concern. So yes, I'm hearing what you're saying when you see vegetable oil on the label, But when you see a product, for example, that's eighty five percent whole grain brown rice, it means that overall the amounts of oils and little bits of sugar and salt slipping it are actually quite small, So it's no need for concerning a relatively low fat food.

portions of in a lunch box every single day. So I will end in that with that sort of tip where these are sort of, even though they're better products, that we still want to consider them as more of like a treat and really do focus on the serving of you know, one or two servings of calcium every single day, one or two servings of fruit, one or

two servings of vegetables every single day. And if your kids are getting home and they're too full for the main meal or they're not eating a proper dinner or proper lunch, probably because you're overfeeding them from a snack based perspective. All as zzi well, that wraps us up for our many little new product segment of the week. So if you guys haven't subscribed you already, please do so to the Nutrition Couch podcast and we're on our

Facebook and our Instagram socials. We're at the Nutrition Couch Podcast and we will catch you guys next Sunday for our brand new episode drop. And don't forget the mini episod jops just like this one, happen on a Wednesday now as well as You're getting a double dose of Sissy and I twice a week from here on out, and