Consumer Reports: store brand chicken nuggets on top
By Dani Friedland on 5/5/2010
Consumer Reports Health has named two chicken nugget “Best Buys:” Target’s Market Pantry brand and Costco’s Kirkland Signature Disney nuggets.
The ratings considered both taste and nutrition, focusing on fat and sodium content. Tasters included both children aged 6-17 and trained adults.
The top three brands, including Bell & Evans Breaded as well as the Target and Costco lines, got high marks for flavor but received “Good” marks for nutrition. Market Pantry’s flavor bested all the others, and it costs 53 cents per serving. Bell & Evans actually came in second for taste, but costs much more than the two others at $2.18 per serving. One serving of Kirkland’s nuggets cost 48 cents.
Testers rated 14 brands in all. Perdue Baked nuggets scored a “Good” for nutrition, while Tyson came in “Fair.” One serving of Tyson nuggets contains 17 grams of fat and 470 milligrams of sodium, compared with Market Pantry’s 10 grams of fat and 500 mg of sodium. Only the Health is Wealth brand received a “Very Good” for nutrition, but it fell flat on taste.
“Busy parents who are trying to get dinner on the table really do have their work cut out for them,” said Gayle Williams, deputy editor at Consumer Reports Health. “You want to feed the kids something they’ll like—and kids do like chicken nuggets—but you don’t want to overwhelm them with fat and sodium. The best you can do is keep an eye on those labels and try to round out the meal with some fruits and vegetables.”
Looking for humane food? There’s an app for that
By Ann Bagel Storck on 5/5/2010
The World Society for the Protection of Animals announced it has launched its first iPhone application, the Eat Humane Food Guide, which aims to make it quick and easy for consumers to find food products from animals that were “humanely treated” which was described as: not given hormones or unnecessary antibiotics, not continuously confined and allowed to engage in natural behaviors.
The free app allows users to search the WSPA database by grocery store or restaurant. The app will display all “animal-friendly” foods in a given grocery store or list restaurants by city with links to pages that detail each restaurant’s “humane menu options” as well as contact information and other relevant information, WSPA said in a news release.
