Wednesday, June 29, 2011

NuVal Nutrition Ratings--so excited I had to blog about it!

I read about this system for rating the nutritional content of grocery store foods and I hope it comes to a grocery store near me soon (Trader Joe's, Rainbow and Target)!

The system was developed by a Yale doctor and nutritional experts.  I think any information we can get about our food is good information.  I also think that it is really hard for the average consumer to decide whether something is healthy.  There is hardly any nutritional education in elementary and high school, food ingredient labels require a college chemistry book in order to figure out what anything is and even if someone does look at the label, they might not know what effect certain nutrients have on their bodies.  The things I do know--I only know because I was required to take a science course in college and that course ended up being Nutrition. You have to go out of your way and seek out information in order to really understand anything about the food you are putting in your body.  This system makes it easy!  I know I used to buy light yogurt full of nasty high fructose corn syrup, light mayonnaise loaded with added sugar until I learned that these products do more harm than good. 

I do wish there was more information about how certain foods got the ratings that they did.  It is kind of unfair that certain food companies have no idea why they received the score that they did.  I feel like an explanation might help them make their product better. 

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for this post. We do have a grocery store near us that uses the NuVal score but we shop there rarely. It is so hard to pick healthy food, especially with two active toddlers helping. I would love to see this score spread to other stores.

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