Healthy Outlook Blog

NuVal Nutrition Labels: Quick Guide to Healthy Eating

By Paula Dranov | Posted November 16 2010

grocery food scoring, Healthy Behaviors, innovation, Lifestyle, Nutrition, NuVal, Wellness

Scoring System Takes the Guess Work out of Grocery Shopping

When I heard that a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton struggled to figure out which breads or cereal or crackers are most nutritious on the basis of the information on package labels, I could only wonder what hope there is for me.

We all think we’re at least modestly nutrition savvy, but comparison shopping does require reading all that stuff on the labels and remembering how much fat or sodium or sugar is too much so we can make informed and healthy choices. David Katz, M.D., an adjunct associate professor of public health practice at Yale, and a nationally known expert on nutrition, weight control and prevention of chronic illness, is married to that neuroscience Ph.D. who had the same problem we all share in figuring out which product is healthiest.

So Katz and a team of medical experts set out to devise a system that would show at a glance how to make the best food choices. The aim was to come up with an innovative system that assigns products a number on what they now call the NuVal scale: the higher the number, the healthier the food. Devising the scoring system was no easy task, says Dr. Katz. “We needed to come up with a formula that can distinguish natural from processed foods; deal with artificial sweeteners; account for fortification; give credit or penalty for nutrients based on their actual health effects, and be at-a-glance easy,” he says. What’s more, the team wanted a scoring system that could predict health outcomes. In other words, could eating foods with high NuVal scores actually keep you healthy?

So far, so good. Hundreds of stores nationwide are now posting NuVal scores to help customers make healthier choices. Better yet, a study at the Harvard School of Public Health found that those who most often ate foods that received high NuVal scores have a lower risk of chronic disease.

That’s good enough for me.

CONNECT THE DOTS

If you want to see how nutrition-savvy you are, you can take a test called nutrition by the numbers on the NuVal website. And if NuVal hasn’t come your way yet, here’s where you can learn to decipher the nutrition labels now required on our foods.

Mel Silver

Learned a lot from the article and am sure nutrition consultant Lisa Shanken would be on the know for this kind of information. There is so much to learn from these nutrition experts. Thanks.

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