Forget its signature blue boxes of high-fat macaroni and cheese. Visitors to the 2007 kraftfoods.com website are immediately introduced to the healthier side of the brand, with page after page of information ranging from healthy living and recipe searches to cooking schools and a wide variety of products. You’ll find a lot more than just recipes here – the site more than lives up to Kraft Foods’ stated vision of “helping people around the world eat and live better.”

Anyone trying to lose a few pounds or stick with a specific eating program can take advantage of the site’s meal and fitness planners, interactive nutrition diaries, and special programs for diabetics. Calculators can tabulate your body mass index (BMI) and help you determine a healthy weight for you, while a Food Analyzer allows you to see the nutritional makeup of a wide variety of foods. Counters help you to determine how much fiber, calcium and carbohydrates are in the foods you eat, and how many calories you’ll burn doing a specific activity. Finally, an extensive Healthy Living Library offers free access to articles on every aspect of nutrition and food safety.

A quarterly newsletter, “Nutrition Update,” covers a wide variety of subject matter. A recent issue, for example, included a lengthy article on healthy eating tips for people with diabetes.A special “Brain Teasers” category provides pen and pencil activities to help teach kids about healthy eating. To their credit, this information doesn’t promote Kraft products, but focuses exclusively on nutrition, tidbits and recipes designed to help people of all ages meet their healthy eating goals. Never fear, though – other pages on the site provide plenty of recipes, coupons, promotions and information about Kraft and Kraft products.

The kraftfoods.com website also offers a surprising feature for professionals who incorporate nutrition into their medical or advisory practice. Articles are available on all aspects of managing and preventing diabetes, plus information and easy-to-read materials that can be shared with your clientele. Extensive information is also available about the company’s new Sensible Solution Program. Identified through a special flag on specific products, Sensible Solution items either have a specific nutritional benefit – such as being high in calcium or fiber – or they have a reduced amount of calories, fat and sodium. Items are literally “flagged” based on criteria set in the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, established by the United States Food and Drug Administration, rather than arbitrary company measurements.

A final unique feature on the kraftfoods.com site is information about the company’s Nutrition Research Program, which features the work of nutrition and food science experts working in the fields of healthy aging, growth and development, weight management and performance. Copies of published research papers and other information learned in the Kraft laboratories are available to the public, in an easy-to-understand format.

Visitors to this site will be pleasantly surprised at the volume of information available, and how easy it is to understand.