NuVal - Overall Nutritional Quality Index (ONQI)

So there's this thing called NuVal that is a pretty complex nutritional scoring system which has started to trickle into supermarkets and seems like it's aimed to be available at every supermarket in the country, eventually. The NuVal system was created by a team of independent nutrition, public health, and medical experts and scores food on a 1-100 scale (100 being healthiest) to try and help people learn how to eat healthier. This score will be located directly on the shelf tag to be easily viewable.

Considering the fact that currently, 34% of Americans are obese, and that number is expected to hit 43% by 2018, I honestly think that something like this is very much needed right now to help people to make healthy choices at the grocery store. Most people don't go through the stores analyzing everything located on a food label before they purchase it, and a lot of people don't know everything they'd be looking for even if they had the time to compare every single label. It's a good quick way to see the relative healthiness of what you're picking up and putting into your cart.

Anyway, some science behind the whole NuVal thing... Their scoring system looks at more than 30 different nutrients and nutrition factors to make it a very comprehensive rating system. I'm sure their whole algorithm is really complicated, but essentially, nutrients with favorable effects of health are placed in the numerator (higher value = higher score), and nutrients with unfavorable effects on health are placed in the denominator (higher value = lower score). If you want to get a quick idea of the numerator and denominator nutrients, just look at the image I've attached... I think it makes it very easy to understand.

In addition to these good and bad nutrients, the NuVal system also takes into account other key factors that measure the quality and density of nutrients and the strength of their effect on your body (i.e. trans fat). Since trans fat is very much associated with heart disease, foods with trans fat get a weighting coefficient which is aimed at lowering the overall score. Other things that factor into the score: fat quality, protein quality, glycemic load, energy density, etc.

On their website, you can find a store near you that has already implemented the NuVal scoring, check out the scores of your favorite foods, look at their trading up tips (kind of like an eat this, not that type thing), and read a whole lot more of background on it than what I gave you. I was reading up online about this (off of their site), and there was one discussion I saw where someone was complaining about how yogurt with fake sure had a higher score than yogurt with real sugar, and the Dr. who was the lead on this NuVal score thing wrote a very detailed response. He started off by saying that he doesn't like eating things with fake sugar, and how you should think of this rating system as you would a GPS... if you don't know where you're going, it will guide you, but if you do know where you're going, you're obviously going to make those choices by yourself. Then he went into the science about it and how it has not been proven that fake sugars harm you, so foods don't get penalized for containing it. So I guess the main point of why I shared that story is that NuVal scoring only takes into account things that have been scientifically proven, so just keep that in mind, and use the number as a guide in your healthy lifestyle.

Oh, also, they have A LOT more foods to rate. On their website they say they've rated about 100,000, but they don't list very many at all.... so I think it's going to be a very gradual thing.

Foods scoring 100: blueberries, broccoli, green beans, and Hodgson Mill unprocessed wheat bran...and the only food on their website right now with a score of 1: Glutino pretzel twists gluten free. See...obviously they don't have everything on here yet, I mean where are the Reeses Peanut butter cups??

NuVal website