An Important New Way to Rate the Nutritional Quality of Foods

Abstract

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that diet and activity patterns cause about 400,000 premature deaths annually due to chronic diseases. The dietary culprits include fatty animal products, sugar-laden soft drinks, and countless packaged and restaurant foods high in calories, saturated and trans fatty acids, refined sugars, and sodium. The other culprit is inadequate consumption of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes, which tend to be rich in dietary fiber, potassium, and other necessary nutrients and possibly beneficial phytonutrients. At the grocery store, health-conscious consumers scrutinize the detailed Nutrition Facts labels, but it isn’t clear what they discern. Even for nutritionists and dietitians, evaluating the dozen-plus nutrients listed can be confusing: Are they equally important? Does a hefty dose of vitamin C cancel out an equally hefty dose of sodium? When I first delved into nutrition in the early 1970s, I was one of the confused consumers. My solution to the confusion was to devise an algorithm that assigned positive or negative weights to some of the important nutrients, and then I (and an intern) used our trusty slide rules to calculate the scores of several hundred foods. The staff of the Center for Science in the Public Interest subsequently spent years urging Congress to pass a law that required manufacturers to print clear lists of nutrients on all packaged foods. The resulting ‘‘Nutrition Facts’’ labels provide valuable information for the more conscientious shoppers, but may overwhelm the typical shopper. Now, as discussed in an article in this issue of the journal, leading academic nutritionists have greatly refined and commercialized a system for rating the nutritional value of foods. Katz et al.’s sophisticated algorithm dubbed ONQI— Overall Nutritional Quality Index—incorporates some two dozen parameters. The more ‘‘good’’ nutrients and the fewer ‘‘bad’’ nutrients, the higher the score. The raw scores are adjusted to between 1 and 100 for presentation to consumers. Those scores should make it easy to compare the nutritional quality of different foods in a given category. So, for instance, fat-free milk has a score of 91, while chocolate milk rates only 24. The researchers are further developing the algorithm to also rate meals and daily diets. Several American grocery chains are using the ONQI approach under the name NuVal. Scores for most foods in the supermarket are provided on shelf tags, although not on the packages themselves. NuVal should be helpful to harried consumers, including those for whom nutrition is not the highest priority. As Katz et al. point out, NuVal is only one of several foodrating systems found in grocery stores.