

100% whole wheat pasta: any shape, 16oz size.Corn tortillas: yellow corn, white corn, or soft corn.100% whole wheat bread: loaves, rolls and buns.Colorado WIC offers many whole grain options to participating families to give them the best start! Whole grains have a place in any healthy diet. Iron is an important part of hemoglobin that carries oxygen in the blood and zinc is important for immunity. Vitamin E and good fats are important for healthy eyes and skin, and B vitamins help provide energy. Fiber has many health benefits including stabilizing blood sugar, preventing constipation, and lowering blood cholesterol levels. They naturally contain vitamins (B and E), minerals (iron and zinc), fiber, and healthy fats. All of our food packages include appropriate whole grain choices whether you are pregnant, a breastfeeding mom, or child between 6 month and 5 years old. The paper demonstrated the potential impact public policy such as increasing whole grain requirements for WIC food packages could have on the nutrient intake of at-risk populations.Colorado WIC offers many whole grain options to participating families! The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025 recommends half of our daily grain intake be whole grains. The NASEM report noted that children participating in school lunch and breakfast programs saw an improved intake of whole grains since these programs began requiring more whole grain-rich foods. However, the health economic research concluded that the health care savings may more than offset those prices.Īnother concern raised was that allowing only whole grain cereals could limit the availability of culturally relevant corn or rice cereals, but the panelists concluded that such a requirement could enable the inclusion of whole grain corn and rice cereals. In the panel discussion, experts discussed how shifting WIC food packages to only whole grain-rich cereals could raise costs. Such a move to offer only whole grain breakfast cereals would bring WIC food packages in line with requirements already in place in other federal feeding programs such as the School Breakfast Program and the National School Lunch Program.Ĭurrently 93% of children and 100% of women in the WIC program do not meet the recommended intake of whole grains, and WIC food packages require only half of the breakfast cereals to be whole grains, despite NASEM recommendations. The paper highlights several key recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report in 2017, such as adopting a whole grain-rich definition for breakfast cereals in WIC food packages. The panel discussion was recently reported in the peer-review journal Cereal Chemistry by Joanne L.
