As attentive shoppers might have noticed, one of the city's larger grocery store chains is now scoring certain food items -- on a scale of one to 100 -- based on healthiness.
The dozen metro Hy-Vees have adapted the NuVal nutritional scoring system, one of several systems slowly being introduced around the country to help shoppers make more informed decisions.
Each system has its own grading scale. In the fall, Osco plans to introduce Nutrition IQ, which ranks food into color categories -- i.e. foods with a yellow tag are a good source of protein. The Guiding Star system in place at the East Coast chain Food Lion simply assigns a food one to three stars, with the rankings being good, better and best. Kroger, which owns the Dillon's chain popular in Leavenworth and Lawrence, is also considering the NuVal system.
Labeling certain foods as healthy has been a popular idea for years.
The NuVal system is one of the first to systematically rank all
foods against each other, which it does using a complicated algorithm
looking at 30 positive factors and 12 negative ones. It was developed
by doctors from the Yale School of Medicine and is still being tweaked,
with new products scored all the time.
The
higher the score, the better a food is for you. Lay's classic potato chips
score a 23 -- better than Cheez-Its, which only get a 13, as do Fig Newtons. Cereals are all across the scale, with Post Original Shredded Wheat scoring a 91 while Cap'n Crunch gets a 10.
Even if you shop at a grocery score that doesn't use the NuVal system, you can still check out scores at its Web site. And it won't be long before one of the above systems releases an iPhone app.
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