The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Offers the Following Food Safety Tips for the Holiday.

• Wash hands with warm water and soap for 20 seconds before and after handling any food. Wash food-contact surfaces (cutting boards, dishes, utensils, counter tops) with hot, soapy water after preparing each food item. Rinse fruits and vegetables thoroughly under cool running water and use a produce brush to remove surface dirt.
• Do not rinse raw meat and poultry before cooking in order to avoid spreading bacteria to areas around the sink and counter tops.
• When shopping in the store, storing food in the refrigerator at home, or preparing meals, keep foods that won’t be cooked separate from raw eggs, meat, poultry or seafood—and from kitchen utensils used for those products.
• Consider using one cutting board only for foods that will be cooked (such as raw meat, poultry, and seafood) and another one for those that will not (such as raw fruits and vegetables).
• Do not put cooked meat or other food that is ready to eat on an unwashed plate that has held any raw eggs, meat, poultry, seafood, or their juices.

• Use a food thermometer to make sure meat, poultry, and fish are cooked to a safe internal temperature. To check a turkey for safety, insert a food thermometer into the innermost part of the thigh and wing and the thickest part of the breast. The turkey is safe when the temperature reaches 165°F. If the turkey is stuffed, the temperature of the stuffing should be 165°F.

• Bring sauces, soups, and gravies to a rolling boil when reheating.
• Cook eggs until the yolk and white are firm. When making your own eggnog or other recipe calling for raw eggs, use pasteurized shell eggs, liquid or frozen pasteurized egg products, or powdered egg whites.
• Don’t eat uncooked cookie dough, which may contain raw eggs.
• Refrigerate leftovers and takeout foods—and any type of food that should be refrigerated, including pie—within two hours.
• Set your refrigerator at or below 40°F and the freezer at 0°F. Check both periodically with an appliance thermometer.
• Thaw frozen food safely in the refrigerator, under cold running water, or in the microwave—never at room temperature. Cook food thawed in cold water or in the microwave immediately.
• Allow enough time to properly thaw food. For example, a 20-pound turkey needs four to five days to thaw completely in the refrigerator.
• Don’t taste food that looks or smells questionable. When in doubt, throw it out.
• Leftovers should be used within three to four days, unless frozen.

 Keep Your Family Safe From Food Poisoning…Check your steps at FoodSafety.gov

An enhanced E-book

We  are pleased to announce publishing “Can Santa Find Me on Christmas?”, which is our first enhanced e-book for young readers. It  features animation, narration, and text highlighting to engage and assist emerging readers in developing independent reading skills.

In our enhanced e-book, Santa goes digital, using modern day solutions for the age-old worry of children away from home on Christmas. In “Can Santa Find Me on Christmas?” the “Can Do” Kids learn how Santa will deliver their gifts to them wherever they are.

In the beginning of our enhanced e-book, the reader is offered the choice of reading the book independently or with the enhancements of animation, narration and text highlighting. Animation is used sparingly to prevent distracting a young reader from listening to the story and identifying each word as it is highlighted.

Each of the 22 pages in the enhanced e-book features the “Can Do” characters in full color illustrations.

You can go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NfNHFw2-9I  to view a YouTube trailer of our enhanced e-book, “Can Santa find Me on Christmas?”. It was published on Nov 30, 2016

Our enhanced e-book is the first of new happenings on”Can Do” Street. There is more to come in  2017…stay tuned!

All the best,

Jean

A study coming out of New Zealand found that the more TV children watch before bedtime, the less sleep they get. The study appeared online in Pediatrics 2013.

Children and teens that spent the most time in front of a screen were more likely to go to sleep later than those who were engaged in non-screen sedentary activities before bed.

Sleep duration in younger people has declined rapidly over the past 100 years, researchers noted, adding that not enough sleep is associated with behavior and health issues.

To investigate associations between activities, the researchers used data from a nationally representative, cross-sectional survey of New Zealand children and teens, ages 5 to 18. Participants were interviewed in-person and then follow-up was done through telephone interviews between September 2008 and May 2009.

Baseline face-to-face interviews gathered information on participant characteristics and 1 to 2 days of data on use of pre-sleep time. The follow-up gathered 2 additional days of data. Younger children’s parents would assist with recalling activities when necessary.

Participants reported time of sleep onset, sedentary behavior, physical activity, and self-care during the 90 minutes before sleep by selecting from a list of roughly 250 activities. Activities were given energy costs and psychometric properties, and were recounted with time spent engaged in each activity.

Times of sleep onset were categorized as very early, early, late, and very late. Participants were grouped by ages 5 to 12 and 13 to 18.

A total of 2,017 survey participants were included in the current analysis. The mean age was 11.6, just over half were male (52.9%), and most were of New Zealand European ethnicity (71.4%).

Overall, younger participants went to bed earlier than older ones. The most common activities before bed were watching television while sitting (47.8%), dressing/undressing before bed (41.8%), and brushing one’s teeth (41.5%), and all were considered low-intensity activities (metabolic equivalents ranging from 1 to 2).

“In New Zealand, a maximum of 2-hours of screen time per day is recommended for young people,” the authors noted, adding that the roughly half hour of screen time before bed accounted for one quarter of a child’s daily recommended screen time.

Researchers also found that participants who reported later sleep onset also reported up to 13 more minutes of screen time before bed than those who went to bed earlier. Additionally, early sleep onset was associated with significantly less time in screen-based sedentary activity versus later sleep onset.

Those who went to bed earlier also spent more time engaged in non-screen sedentary behaviors, “The largest time differences between those of early and late sleep onset were for screen time, which suggests that this set of activities may be an appropriate target for interventions to promote earlier sleep onset and subsequently improve sleep duration in young people,” researchers concluded.

At a recent meeting of the Obesity Society Jason Block, MD, of Harvard Medical School and fellow researchers reported that parents often underestimate the calories their school-age kids are consuming when they eat large meals at fast food restaurants.

According to the study, the average meal purchased  in four New England cities contained 733 calories, and 21% contained more than 1,000 calories, But the parents estimated an average of only 562 calories per meal, with 72% underestimating the actual content. “There was an association between larger meals and larger underestimations, which may hold some promise for menu labeling,” Dr. Block said. He noted that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandates that restaurants with 20 or more locations nationwide post calorie information on their menus.

The researchers found that only 15% of parents saw nutritional information in the restaurants and fewer still (4%) used that information when ordering. “So they may not use it even if it’s more accessible,” Block stated.

Last year at the society’s annual meeting, Dr Block reported that 80% of adolescents in Boston, Springfield, Mass., Providence, R.I., and Hartford, Conn., underestimated the amount of calories their fast food meals contained and 86% did not notice any nutritional information in the restaurants.

In the current study, Block and his colleagues visited 10 restaurants in each of the four cities… three McDonald’s, three Burger King, two Subway, one KFC, and one Wendy’s. Each restaurant was visited six times at dinnertime.

Those participating in the study included parents or legal guardians of children and teens, ages 3 to 15 (mean age 7.9). The analysis included 330 families, representing 45% of those who were approached.

Most of the children (57%) were overweight or obese. The sample was ethnically diverse — 33% black, 30% Hispanic, 19% white, 3% Asian, and 15% other or multiracial.

The researchers collected receipts when the parents left the restaurants and administered a short survey about the calorie content of the meal and awareness and use of the nutritional information. The actual calorie content of the meals was calculated using the receipts and information on the restaurants’ websites.

Many of the parents purchased large meals for their children and most underestimated the calorie content. Nearly one-quarter (24%) underestimated the calorie count by at least 500.

Those who underestimated the daily requirement tended to also underestimate the calories in a meal, a finding that “supports an anchoring statement on menus,” Block said. The federal regulations require that, in addition to calorie information, menus must include an anchoring statement describing the typical daily calorie requirement.

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Seed Grant.

Source: The Obesity Society

The United States Department of Agriculture,USDA has an extensive site for parents of preschool and elementary school age children featuring comprehensive nutrition plans, daily meal and snack plans for parents to reference and games that children can play that stress good eating habits. Go to:

http://fnic.nal.usda.gov/consumers/ages-stages/preschool-elementary-kids

Got a picky eater? The USDA has extensive information that can help parents get the picky eater to eat food necessary for good nutrition at

http://wicworks.nal.usda.gov/children/picky-eaters

Another great USDA site to visit for a personalized nutrition and physical activity plan, the  ability to track your foods and physical activities to see how they stack up and to get tips and support to help you make healthier choices and plan ahead is:

https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/default.aspx