Silly me. I became a nutrition expert by way of 4 years of college, 2 years of grad school, training programs, qualifying exams, continuing education and decades of experience. According to the Kind Soopers TV ad there's a much easier way: just read the NuVal labels on the grocery shelves and anyone can become a nutrition "expert".
NuVal is yet another eat-by-numbers scoring system that attempts to quantify the healthful qualities of food with numbers. There are lots of these systems floating around, while lots of previous ones have already faded into nutrition history. There is no officially sanctioned way to score foods based on nutritional value, so any scoring system is completely dependent on the whims and personal agendas of whomever is on the committee. As a result, there's no way to compare systems.
Is NuVal useful? Here's my professional expert opinion: any system that scores iceberg lettuce vastly higher than cashews (healthy fats, protein, minerals, vitamin E...), or eggs (high quality protein, choline, which is important for brain function and seriously lacking in our diets) or 2% milk (protein, calcium also seriously lacking in diets) is 100% worthless. The website says "Nuval scores make it easy to shop like a nutrition expert". I know of no real nutrition experts who use a scoring system to choose foods. I would never ever use this myself, and will never recommend it to my clients.
A King Soopers spokes person claims NuVal is well received by customers. Meaning, when accosted by interviewers in the store, the customers give the "right" answer: "oh sure, I always use the healthy food scoring system. I only eat healthy foods." Research shows over and over that consumers talk a good talk about health behaviors, but rarely actually engage in those behaviors. People want to appear to be "good" and compliant, especially when some official-looking person is questioning them about health behaviors. A recent study compared what consumers claimed to be doing -- reading nutrition facts on food labels -- to what they were actually doing. An eye tracking device measured what they were looking at, and it wasn't the nutrition facts panels.
Marion Nestle, an actual nutrition expert and professor of nutrition at NYU, summed it up nicely:
... she sees little value in learning whether one potato chip is "slightly better for you" than another. "I think their purpose is to sell food products," Nestle said. "If you want to encourage people to eat healthy, you want to encourage them not to eat food products. You want them to eat real food."
Real food doesn't need a scoring system. But if you want to be convinced that one potato chips is "healthier" than another, King Soopers has a system for you.
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