Cheese Crackers

Cheese is healthy and so are crackers, so cheese crackers must be a good snack, right? Yes and no. Ellen Satter, RD, LCSW, BCD, and author of Child of Mine; Feeding with Love and Good Sense says that a snack needs carbohydrate to be immediately satisfying, while it needs protein and fat to give a child's body longer lasting energy and keep him from feeling hungry longer. So, real cheese on 100 percent whole-wheat crackers is a good snack because it contains all three nutrients.

So what do those mass-produced cheese sandwiches with the flaming orange crackers contain? Since they don't require refrigeration you can be sure that's not real cheese in there. It's what's known as a cheese food—part cheese, part water, part preservative. And the crackers certainly aren't whole wheat because real wheat isn't the color of jack-o-lanterns.

Dr. Joey Shulman, DC, RNCP, and author of Winning the Food Fight, says the crackers are often filled with refined flours, which cause the same bodily reaction as sugar, an "energy/mood roller coaster." Dr. Shulman says that foods with high-sugar content (including high fructose corn syrup) and refined flours, such as white bread and cheap crackers, have a high-glycemic index. That means they cause short spikes in energy followed by mental and physical crashes, plus they force a child's body to create excess insulin which she says, "facilitates the excess storage of fat."