Food News Today Transcripts for the week of October 31st, 2011

The jiggling jell-o app, teens clueless about food and the latest on chocolate and your heart for Today November 2nd 2011. This is Food News Today.

Good Morning, we are now streaming both on our SupermarketGuru Facebook fan page and on Food News Today -dot- com. Today's show is pre-recorded, so if you have any thoughts or comments on today's show, tweet me -@phillempert- or send me a note on Facebook.  Food News Today is sponsored by ConAgra Foods, who shares with me the desire to provide the most current, interesting and unbiased food news.

Let's start our first November show with today's useless food history fun facts!  Wow, I can't believe it's Novemeber already which is National diabetes month and you might not believe that today is national deviled egg day, and on Nov 2nd, 1995 The Soup Nazi first appeared on ‘Seinfeld.’  No soup for you!  Do you have any food fun fact you'd like to share? Let me know.  For more interesting and fun food tidbits check out www.foodreference.com.  

>First up, a new app that really lets you get loose and jiggle it! Yes, I’m talking about the new app from Jell-O (and Crispin Porter + Bogusky) called Jiggle-It for iPhone and iPad.  As you can imagine the app includes a wiggling or jiggling cube of Jell-O – but of course there's more.  The Jell-O cube is customizable and dances and jiggles along to the beat of music from your iTunes library or your microphone – yes you can sing to it. Even more, you can swipe your finger on the screen to activate special moves and create new dances by linking your moves together.  Over 20 designers and developers are said to have contributed to the free app; moreover, the dance moves were designed in collaboration with a professional choreographer.

>Up next looks like we’ve found a perfect audience for the Jiggle-it app, well only if they would dance along with their jell-o cube – a new study found that teens are totally clueless about the nutrition content and vastly underestimate the calorie content of their fast food.  Which could easily lead to weight gain – in the ever increasingly sedentary youth.

 An ethnically diverse group of teens were surveyed outside of fast food chains in four US cities, 80 percent underestimated the actual calorie content, and 30 percent misjudged the amount by at least 500 calories!

 And yes fast food eateries do post nutrition info but only 14% of the participants noticed any nutritional information in the restaurant.

The average actual calorie content of the meals was 746 calories, while the average estimate was only 464 calories. The underestimation was consistent across restaurant chains.  Moreover those who consumed more calorically dense meals underestimated the calories underestimated their meal by an average of 350 calories. For those who consumed 1,500 calories, the estimate was short by 700 calories.

Looks like we need a significant makeover on teaching kids about portions, calories and general nutrition.

>Teens may be underestimating the caloric content of their eats but most everyone else is often underestimating sweets.  Sweets often get a bad rap, and for good reason, but there are some sweets that are worth a second look; not surprisingly chocolate is one of them. A recent study of over 33,000 Swedish women found that the more wombed women said they ate chocloate, the lower their later risk of stroke. The results of this study add to a growing body of evidence linking cocoa consumption and cardiovascular health. Other studies have demonstrated a blood pressure lowering affect as well as LDL lowering affect of consuming cocoa - both risk factors for strokes.

Chocolate comes in many different packages, combinations, formulations and as expected all chocolate products are not created equal.  The best choices include those with over 70% cocoa and less sugar and other ingredients that are typically found in chocolate bars at the checkout. The higher the percentage of cocoa, the higher the flavanols, antioxidants and nutrients the chocolate bar contains.

So, don’t feel too bad if you overdid the chocolate this Halloween…And hey! It’s not too late to enter the annual SupermarketGuru Halloween costume contest- all you have to do is post a picture or video of you dressed up as food or a food related costume on our SupermarketGuru Facebook fan page.  The contest ends this Sunday November 6th and we will announce the winner, live here on Food News Today, Wednesday November 16th!

To join this discussion and more check out SupermarketGuru on Facebook.

That's it for today's show, thanks for watching!  Be sure to tweet me @phillempert or visit our SG Facebook page and post your comments on any of today's segments.  You can also send me an e-mail - Phil@Supermarketguru.com.  Have a terrific food week.