The Nutritious Value of Food

As a follow up to the wonderful animation What It... , the hilarious piece depicting the impact of fast food on African wildlife, comes the news NuVal is generating in evaluating the nutritious value of food, something the process food giants are apoplectic about and for good reason.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly's, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price-per-unit, which I'm used to, but little blue and white linked hexagons marked on a scale of 1 to 100 -- a "NuVal" score.

NuVal [3] scores don't tip you off to a bargain. They tell you how good or bad a food is for your health.

Yeah, right. The idea that a food store would admit -- would explicitly declare, on the spot, as your hand is reaching for it -- that a product it's selling is nutritionally crappy: that violates every principle of Marketing 101, not to mention Ayn Rand 101.

This is different from the labels that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has required since 1990. Those are well-intentioned marvels of confusion, containing so much information (are you getting your minimum daily requirement of magnesium?), so much disinformation (calculating calories per serving, when a serving is half the amount a runway waif would eat), so much incomprehensible information (I forget -- is tripotassium phosphate good or bad for you?) that you can get an anxiety attack trying to figure out which granola will nourish you and which will kill you.

But NuVal scores make that simple, and sometimes shocking.

Cocoa Puffs, for example, gets a NuVal score of 26, but so does Life ("you don't have to be a grown-up to benefit from the whole grain inside"), and Kashi Strawberry Fields Cereal ("plenty of whole grain goodness") gets a 10, same as Cap'n Crunch.

An apple gets a 96, which you might expect. But unsweetened applesauce gets a 29, apple juice gets a 15 and Mott's Original Applesauce ("a great tasting snack that's actually good for you") gets a 4.

Nabisco Nilla Wafers ("simple goodness") get a 6, and Keebler Townhouse Bistro Multi-Grain Crackers (multi-grain! surely good for you, no?) get a 3 (no).

You'd expect fresh broccoli to get 100, as does Birds Eye Cooked Winter Squash. Grapefruits are 99, and sweet potatoes are 96. But Vlasic Old Fashioned Sauerkraut gets a 4.

Skim milk comes in at 91, 1 percent milk at 91 and 2 percent at 55. Capri Sun gets a 1. So does Odwalla Pomegranate Limeade with 20 percent juice. Who would buy products like these if they actually knew what poison -- I mean, um, empty calories -- they amount to, and if they had manifestly better alternatives an arm's reach away?

Pushback from the public regarding corporate control over our lives in terms of the harm it has caused, particularly regarding processed food and the deleterious impact it has had on our health, is finally starting to happen and it's about time.