Whole Grain Goodness Challenge feedback thread - chance to win supermarket gift cards! NOW CLOSED

[PoppyMumsnet]

Here's what WholeGrainGoodness.com, a not-for-profit campaign aiming to inspire people to eat more whole grain, say about the challenge:

“Most of us know it’s important to eat at least five portions of fruit and veg every day. But did you know high fibre foods are also an important part of a healthy, balanced diet? The dietary recommendation for adults is that we should aim for at least 30g of fibre a day; but currently only manage, on average, about 18g. Whole grains are a great source of fibre and so public health advice is to base our meals on starchy carbohydrate foods, and to choose whole grain varieties where possible.

So try something different for your new year's diet resolutions this year – take part in our whole grain challenge, involve your family too if you can, and add your feedback here to be entered into a prize draw."

Here's what's involved:
~ Official testers (those already selected by MNHQ) who add a comment here between Monday 6 February and Sunday 26 February can win a £250 supermarket voucher

~ Non-official testers (open to all UK MNers) who add a comment here between Monday 6 February and Sunday 26 February can win a £150 supermarket voucher

• The challenge is to include whole grains / whole grain foods in at least ONE meal or snack per day for two weeks and tell us what you think by adding your feedback here. Involve your family too if you can.

According to Wholegraingoodness.com:

"There’s so much variety available to choose from, such as wholemeal breads, flours, rolled oats, whole grain breakfast cereals, rye crackers. Even popcorn is a whole grain food! Perhaps try going half-and-half, like mixing white with wholemeal flour in baking, wild rice with white rice or brown pasta with white pasta. If you already eat lots of whole grain, feel free to take part in the challenge too, as we’d like to know what you think also, to help us inspire others to eat more delicious and nutritious whole grains.

"If you have any questions about whole grains go to WholeGrainGoodness.com and check out the Guide to Whole Grain pages and the FAQs, or use the Contact Us form. To help you get cooking with whole grains, try these delicious Recipes created by professional home economists and dietitians, designed to show that healthy eating doesn’t have to be boring – it can be surprisingly good!"

Please add your feedback below on the following:
~ Let us know what you think of whole grains / whole grain foods and if you knew about the benefits already or not.

~ Have you tried out any WholeGrainGoodness.com recipes? How did you and your family find them?

~ Please add any other comments, photos, recipes, tips or ideas you have too – we'd love to hear from you at various stages of the challenge.

Thanks
MNHQ

Closing date: Sunday 26 February. Winners will be selected at random from all posting a comment: one ‘official’ tester and one ‘non-official’ tester – prizes as above.

Please note: posts on this thread may be reproduced by Whole Grain Goodness (AHDB).

The favourite recipie in our house this week has been banan flap jacks :) I also made scones with spelt flour which were lovely 😊

Challenge summary:

Breakfasts: I enjoyed shredded wheat (own brand as I boycott nestle) with cold milk and fresh fruits, wholemeal bread with avocado, and overnight oats with yoghurt layered with frozen raspberries and oats. I had got into a bit of a white toast habit for breakfast and I found these options more filling and also gave me more variety. Starting the day well helped me stay healthier and I've actually lost 2 kg during the trial without watching portions or controlling calories which is good :)

Lunches- have to sing the praises of Sainsbury's multi grain flat breads, they were my favourite new discovery of the trial great dipped in soups or spread with pizza toppings. I also enjoyed wholemeal wraps, and I tried the bread too which took a bit of getting used to but is lush with salmon.

Dinners-
Wholemeal spaghetti and wholemeal fusilli went down well in this house, spaghetti probably being the favourite, we susbstituted wholemeal tortillas instead of our usual white flour ones with fahitas which went down well, I used spelt flour in cheese sauce which worked fine.

The trial has made me think more about how much fibre I'm getting and how easy it is to substitute with wholemeal, I was pleasantly surprised that my daughter loved the pasta just as much as normal and wraps were devoured just as quickly as normal...not sure if it's a good thing to mention but I definitely noticed a positive difference in my poo

The website is informative and helpful but would be great to see more of a range of recipies, I did enjoy the ones I tried :)

Thank you for the voucher and opportunity to be involved in the trial :)

Gosh the two weeks has come to an end. Have to be honest and say wholemeal flour, pasta and whole grain rice haven't gone down well with DC or DH. I make soup a couple of times a week and have been adding barley to the pot, this has gone down very well and seems to keep us fuller for longer. Also made pearl barley risotto which the whole family loved, they prefer it to traditional recipe. I've also popped a mountain of corn this week which has been really easy and very popular. I've finally mastered slow cooker porridge, 1 part jumbo oats to 2 parts water and no milk works for me, serve with a splash of milk etc. My DC aren't keen on potatoes by really enjoy quinoa and bulgur wheat. Wholemeal flour does come into it's own in tea breads, I make Bara Brith and the family devour the loaf. Also use a mix of wholemeal and white flour to make soda bread which the DC love. I was pleasantly surprised to learn from the Wholegrain Goodness web site that whole grains offer useful amounts of vitamins and minerals including Vit B, calcium,protein, magnesium, iron etc really handy when you have a DC who doesn't touch dairy and prefers vegetarian options. Overall I discovered there are a huge variety of whole-grains and many of them are inexpensive and stretch meat dishes out so offer excellent value for money. I really intend to carry on including wholegrain foods in my menu planning. Thank you.

Loving this challenge. Have improved our diets so much. Am using half white & half wholegrain pasta for pasta dishes (not gone the full way due to the costs of wholegrains!).

One of my favourites for lunch are the sainsburys wholemeal pitta breads I bought with houmous & grated carrot/celery &/or red pepper! Yum. My daughter loves this too. Husband not so keen.

We are all eating sainsburys wholegrain bran flakes most days too.

Thanks for this opportunity to help improve our diets. Much appreciated!

Breakfasts: We normally have cereal or toast for breakfast, so it's been easy enough to incorporate wholegrains there as a lot of cereals are wholegrain anyway. I'm not a big fan of wholegrain bread so will probably be sticking to white bread in future.

Lunches: I usually take packed lunches to work but tend to get bored quickly so I like to have various different dishes on rotation. Pasta is a common one and was easy to change as I just swapped to wholegrain pasta. I couldn't taste any difference, and once cooked it didn't look any different either, but it's about 5 times the price of the normal pasta I buy so I can't say I'll be sticking with it. I also often have sandwiches or rolls which again were easy to swap for wholegrain bread, rolls, sandwich thins, etc. I will probably continue with these sometimes as there isn't much of a difference in price, but I much prefer the taste and texture of lovely soft white bread, so I won't be giving these up completely.

Dinners: We tried a few different recipes with various degrees of success. I made my normal lasagne but substituted wholegrain lasagne sheets - it tasted just as good as normal but given the price difference I wouldn't buy it again. We also tried the savoury mince crumble recipe from the wholegraingoodness.com website, which I found very dry and a bit tasteless. I may try that again using my normal mince recipe and about half of the amount of crumble on top. Wholegrain pizza bases went down well with chorizzo topping, so that's another one that will probably stay.

Snacks: We substituted our crisps with wholegrain alternatives which tasted okay but wouldn't be my first choice. Popcorn, on the other hand, was a big hit and nice for a little treat in the evening.

We've had mixed success but I appreciate the push towards thinking about this again. Brown rice was a definite 'no' and whole wheat spaghetti got a mixed reception. More success with wholemeal pitta bread and we already ate wholemeal bread. One of the children has been converted (at least for now) to Fruit and Fibre for breakfast. It has reminded me that generally things made with wholemeal flour are more filling.
I am sure the recipes are very improving but the children didn't really fancy any of them so I just cooked as usual but introducing more whole wheat ingredients.
Thank you for letting us take part in this trial, it has prompted a review of our eating habits even if concrete change has perhaps not very great.

Day 13: I made a lovely wholemeal loaf today with a mix, rather than from scratch with flour. It worked (surprisingly) well and was very very taste, so nearly all gone now! Really, really nice!

Non-official tester.

I've found a few recipes on the website I'm going to try.

The DC won't eat wholemeal bread at home, but will happily eat it if we get, for example, supermarket sandwiches and they'll share granary toast if their grandparents are eating it. After a bit of experimentation I've discovered they like wholemeal wraps, pittas etc. So it's only when it's sliced bread at home that they think they don't like it.

The next step is going to be introducing wholemeal pasta. I'm pretty sure that if they don't see it before the sauce goes on, it'll be fine. (That's worked before).

i have tried to eat more healthily with this challenge and also to encourage my boys to do the same. It has been good because it makes you more aware of what you eat. My sons eat golden pops for breakfast which say they contain wholewheat. we have changed to wholemeal pitta and bread which they both like. I am not so keen on brown rice or wholemeal pasta but i will try it now and again. I want to make some of the banana flapjacks as i think they will be a hit. i will also try some of the other recipes. my son wants to make wholemeal bread so we will give it a try. Thanks for letting us participate in this trial.

Tester - coming to the end of the challenge and will stick with most of the changes though my dd still won't eat brown pasta no matter how I try to disguise it! Have felt healthier and fuller so this has been a real positive for me and my family and has made me try new recipes to change things for the better - thank you Mumsnet.

Tester here, coming to end of the challenge now.
Let us know what you think of whole grains / whole grain foods and if you knew about the benefits already or not.

I already ate whole grain foods such as bread, rice, pasta and oats because of the health benefits that I knew e.g. Lower GI and higher in fibre. I have family history of diabetes so the GI thing is important to me. However I am so boring with recipes and variety that I really enjoyed the challenge as it highlighted new whole grain foods and new recipes. I bought some wholewheat flour, quinoa and cracked wheat with my voucher.
Have you tried out any WholeGrainGoodness.com recipes? How did you and your family find them?

We made a few recipes over the weeks, a fave of DD1 who is 3, was the whole meal pancakes, she loves pancakes and I felt they were more nutritious for her being made with the wholewheat flour.

We made the quinoa tabouleh recipe and had it with salmon and it was unbelievably tasty.

Also we had the cracked wheat pesto pilaf recipe and it was again lovely.

I do feel like I will use the website in future as the recipes are good and quite simple to use. A recommendation for the website would be to add a 'what grain' option to the filter as I wanted to search recipes with only quinoa in for example.
Thank you

Tester coming to the end of the challenge.
It was so easy to make lots of small changes and we have tried a few new things too. We are going to carry on as it was no hassle at all to make a few changes to eating more healthily.
The trick was to not go ott, we had the odd white loaf (with bacon, fresh white is still best) and didn't put ourselves under lots of pressure, but but adding wholemeal at least once a day, I also planned a bit better and made other changes as part of the challenge.

We love whole grain foods. My other half controls the breadmaker, and he makes fresh granary bread for the family every couple of days. He's very anti sugar, so we have museli and wheatabix for breakfast (he makes the museli too), and we have whole grain flour in meals.. our two girls love them. Plus, they've never had any different.
I suppose I grew up pretty similar, and I'm not really into processed foods (apart from pizza, which I love on a Friday night!) so I tend to mass cook on a Sunday before work, then we know what we're eating all week. I'll check out the recipes though, as they sound great.

Day 14 and last day of challenge :(
We had our (now) usual wholemeal bread today, and for dinner we had sweet potato and black bean chilli with zesty quinoa. It was really nice and went well with the quinoa- although, on the last day of the challenge, I have found a wholegrain the children don't like. Boo. But DH and I enjoyed it very much!

Wholegrain challenge summary: before the challenge, I know that wholegrain was "better" for you than white rice and bread, but not really why. I had also been put off wholegrain bread by eating slightly stale basics wholegrain bread before in the past. The challenge made me revisit wholegrain bread again as well as discovering new wholegrains such as rice and pasta. It also made me realise that other foods are wholegrain, such as quinoa, couscous and weetabix which I hadn't really thought of before.

Substituting food was fine, although we were caught out once with the extra time needed for cooking the rice. Amusingly, my children did not notice that their food had gone from white to brown and quite happily ate everything (bar the quinoa tonight) so the good news is that we can continue to make changes without any worries.

The feeling fuller for longer bit is true, but hasn't been helping me with weight loss because hunger isn't the reason for my over eating. I have actually put on weight (too much enjoyment of the wholegrain foods?!). I am also not sure about the 'benefits' of wholegrain on my digestive system or that of my family - TMI warning- the children's poos have been sloppy for the last week and I have been a bit constipated .

After the challenge, I plan to continue using wholegrain wraps, pittas, bread and rice. I may continue with the pasta too, but I'm not sure. Quinoa and couscous were already in our diet so we'll continue with them!

Thank you very much to Wholegraingoodness.com for giving me and my family the chance to take part in your challenge. It has been a very interesting experience!

I've been using certain wholegrain items now for quite a while, I actually prefer them to the white alternatives. I love wholemeal pitta breads, with cheese and mint sauce yum!, wholegrain/wheat pasta I think has a better taste than white pasta. I love wholemeal/grain bread with seeds etc in.

I love the website, great ideas which I've written down, Fat free fruit tea loaf and the rye hot cross bun loaf( perfect for easter), can't wait to try that I have a sweet tooth, .never thought of having a pitta for brekkie with scrambled eggs in, good idea, I've signed up for news alerts

More people need to get on the Wholemeal wagon, have a month named after it like stop smoking/drinking, should be a food swap month too!

Have kept up with the wholegrains this week - our favourite meal was quinoa with lemon grilled chicken and lots of veg. It was delicious. I bunged loads of mint and parsley and lemon juice in the quinoa so it was really tasted - even my 2 year old and very fussy husband enjoyed!

Half term week has been harder, as my kids are fairly anti brown bread! I was extremely pleased with myself giving popcorn instead of crisps at my daughter's birthday party - I hadn't thought about popcorn being wholegrain, but of course it is!
I've enjoyed brown pittas, though I know no-one else would have, and we usually have a wholegrain breakfast - porridge, weetabix or non-Nestlé shreddies type cereal. I eat muesli otherwise, but it's not very popular with the others.
I've enjoyed thinking about my menus in more detail, and certainly I've been more aware of healthy foods, I think - so thank you for this.
The tea loaf recipe was a huge hit, and I think probably the thing I'll take from this is that it's very easy to use wholegrain flour instead of white. It does taste slightly different, but sometimes that's a good thing, depending on the recipe

This challenge has really helped me to plan meals and to think about what I use in our daily meals.
Every day I've used Whole Grain's and some days I've now found myself popping whole grain's into a couple of meals a day. I'm going to from now on keep whole grains in our cupboards because having them there has made me also think about how I can use them in our meals and has made me look at using them / eating them.

Tester here - this challenge has really increased my awareness of where I can bring more whole grains into my diet. We eat whole grain rice, bulgar, quinoa and so on anyway because it brings so much variety into our meals.

I don't think I'm going to stop eating white basmati rice with curries or white risotto rice but whole grains as an accompaniment to our vegetarian dishes are definitely going to stay.

Well my wholegrain challenge went well. I used to regularly eat porridge for breakfast but got out of the habit of it. I forgot just how good it is, how it fills you up and what great variety you can have with flavours etc. mixed in to it. I'm also back to eating popcorn as a snack which is SO good. Simple & easy to make at home, with only a fraction of the calories of shop bought. 😋
Other snacks have included oat cakes with cottage cheese, wholegrain hummus chips and wholegrain crisps (for the OH). I did know about the benefits of wholegrain already but not necessarily to the extent that this testing project has made me.

I haven't yet tried out any of the wholegrain recipes as with others I've also found them slightly limiting. I've been ill recently though so haven't had a chance to look and see if there are possible ways to adapt them or maybe something that will inspire me to create my own version in a slightly different way. That's going on the list for this week!

I unfortunately don't have any pictures to date. One tip would be for those having porridge in the morning like me - those hot chocolate sachets (like the options ones) are great for adding different flavours to your porridge, getting your chocolate hit if needed and being relatively low calorie. Especially if like me you don't use a full sachet. Failing that, you can't go wrong with cinnamon! 😋
For those new to quinoa, I find soaking it in a stock makes for the perfect taste and texture.

Enjoyed the task. Learned a few things. I think I will gradually increase wholegrain into our diet, rather than it become the norm immediately, I'm not sure if my tummy tolerated too much. Reading the recipes on the thread was a great help, so thank you to everyone who put them on. It will change how I eat for the better so a positive experience. Thank you

Non-tester. We've long been aware of the benefited of wholegrains and we often incorporate them into meals. From bread and sweet treats to soups and casseroles etc. There is such a vast array now readily available.

Bought oatbran and wheatbran porridge and love it. We will buying it again. Also, only bought wholegrain for dinners, since doing this have lost 6 pounds. We were lacking fibre in our diet. Seems like our metabolism is up. Just took getting used to the wholegrain goodness taste. My son asks for wholegrains now rather than white bread or sugar snacks.

~ Let us know what you think of whole grains / whole grain foods and if you knew about the benefits already or not.

In our house 3/4 absolutely love wholegrain foods to varying degrees. I prefer most if not all wholegrain variety as it has more taste bite. The big challenge was my boys and husband. Wholegrain bread, pasta, brown rice or quinoa have been welcomed by my boys. In fact my 4yo doesn't want white bread anymore. Porridge has always been a staple but adding oats ground up to fish cakes, crumble topping etc with brown flour has added an new dimension. I think we can stick with that as even hubby eats it. Shhh don't tell him. I have more energy since adding more in and the ryvita with Nutella helps to ward off my chocy craving.

~ Have you tried out any WholeGrainGoodness.com recipes? How did you and your family find them?

The banana bread was very nice indeed. We made the sunshine bars and I wasn't as keen but thumbs up from the boys. We will try more overtbe next few weeks.

Overall this was easier to add more in than I imagined. We will definitely continue with adding more wholegrains into our diet. Bar hubby 😕. I just wish some of the wholegrain foods didn't costs more.