New Nutritional Ratings Attempt to Save Americans from Our Fat Selves

If you weren't yet aware, there's a new nutritional value guide for the U.S. consumer which has already begun its roll-out into every national grocery store called, "NuVal." For those of you not savvy to commercial linguistics, "NuVal" is short for "New Value." Actually, I'm going on a limb and guessing that's the case. Maybe it's actually an acronym. Or maybe it stands for something much more sexy; like the NuvaRing birth control product that keeps coming to mind. Either way, I went to the source, their website, and got the lowdown directly from the NuVal people themselves. They even, conveniently, have a YouTube video there.

According to the creators of this new breakthrough system, Topco Associates LLC in conjunction with Griffin Hospital of Connecticut, food consumers to-date have been confused by all the information available on food packaging; and thusly were heretofore unable to make the healthy shopping choices which would prevent them from gaining all of that unhealthy weight and becoming a burden on our healthcare system due to obesity-related disease. So, the Topco/Griffin alliance apparently got a bunch of scientists together who developed an algorithm to simplify the process of choosing good food at the grocery store. That's right. They used an algorithm; and that algorithm supplants the long list of nutritional specifics that we're used to ignoring on the back sides of our grocery products.

The new system applies a number from 1 to 100 in order to show, NuVal scientists assert, the sum healthfulness of the food you're eating. They call it the "Nutritional Scoring System," and it actually quite reminds me of the point system which the Weight Watchers diet program uses. Except that I assume the Weight Watchers point system essentially deals with sugars and fats in relation to overall caloric content; the things which directly affect weight gain. The NuVal system, on the other hand, encompasses everything nutritional to do with your food, they say.

The Nutritional Scoring System sounds good to me so far, since I strongly believe that people are, in fact, largely idiots, on whom most information is just so many wasted letters and numbers. Like the video at their website says, NuVal "cuts through the nutrition clutter;" and nobody likes clutter. Also, I had already long been suspicious of that exhaustive list of vitamins, minerals and other food content which we supposedly needed in very specific amounts on a regular basis in order to live. I've often wondered how we as a species survived in regions where, say, fruit doesn't readily grow; or climes wherein we could only get grains, but no meat or legumes. How did we make it so far without our "daily five?"

But now, as I am apt to do, I've hit a little speed bump in my thinking.

The problem with the new point system is that it addresses eating "healthy" food, but not eating fewer calories; a simple thing which will actually make you less fat and lessen your risk of getting that pesky type II diabetes or other obesity-related disease. If you're looking to reduce body weight, the best way to do it is by cutting calories. You will become just as fat and unhealthy by eating too much "healthy" food. So, I am not really sure what the point is in having a system intended to, as the NuVal people suggest, reduce the impact of obesity related illness, when it isn't designed to make people conscious of their caloric consumption. Is there a "healthy" fat person? Maybe that person is me: I'm in all actuality a healthy, thin fat person.

Also worth mentioning is that if you use a single number as your guide for purchasing food, as in this and other new labeling systems, then you are left with the very real possibility of overloading or depriving yourself of any particular nutrient present in food. Vitamins and minerals can be toxic in large doses, and can cause infirmities such as scurvy if you don't get sufficient amounts of them. The NuVal system provides no information to help you monitor these levels.

But it doesn't look that the traditional labeling will be going anywhere, so why should I care if somebody is putting yet another piece of information on a box or shelf label? Like anybody else, I will buy a brownie when I want a brownie, and a sandwich when I want that. I will look past the NuVal sign, next to the American Heart Association tag, next to whatever else is on the front of the package, turn the item over and read the actual nutritional content. Perhaps I have been lucky to receive the most important of consumer protections: An intellect, the will to apply it to my shopping decisions, and the desire to not be fat.

But maybe I am not as smart as I thought; as even after perusing NuVal's website and watching the video, I was still not entirely clear on how the system worked. At first glance, it appeared that I could live healthily on nothing but a diet of Silk brand chocolate soy milk and Alvarado Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread. But then I thought, "Wait. The goal is to only to eat things which are 100 points." That made a little more sense, and would be great, since then I could live on just one item of 100 point food such as blueberries or broccoli, eaten all the time, in lieu of anything else. That really does simplify things!

NuVal eloquently and repeatedly posits at their website that people need things dumbed down for them; and this is one of over a dozen attempts at front-package labeling with the ideal of guiding the U.S. consumer towards healthful shopping choices, so they must not be alone in thinking this. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the NuVal system has very little real benefit for the public.

However, I do believe that with slogans like, "The higher the score, the higher the nutrition," and a simple 1-100 points system, most U.S. consumers will feel good about the new labeling by NuVal.

They will certainly feel better about sitting in bed and eating the gallon of 15-point ice cream instead of the 14-point one.