Nutrition Rating Systems – the problem and a solution

The Situation

There has been a lot of attention given to nutrition rating systems of late, fueled by the launch of the controversial Smart Choices rating system.  The controversy of the smart choices program, in brief,  is that the criteria for what gets labelled a ¨smart choice¨ seem somewhat flimsy.  For instance Marion Nestle examines the ¨smart choice¨ Froot Loops in this post here.

In fact there is no shortage of concerned debate about this program, least of which is the fact that manufacturers pay for the smart choice tick.  Below I have provided links to some of the recent top hits.

NYT: Industry Backed Label calls sugary cereal a ¨smart choice¨

Letter from the FDA to Smart Choices Program

Marion Nestle: Reply from the American Society of Nutrition

In this post we explore the existing rating systems, the problem with these systems and propose a solution.  We are keen to hear your perspective on this.

Nutrition Rating Systems

Smart Choices is not the only rating system out there.  There are several and below I have provided a summary of the most popular rating systems sourced from mayoclinic.com.

• Guiding Stars. This system, developed by Hannaford Supermarkets, uses one, two or three stars to represent good, better and best nutritional value.
• Healthy Ideas. This system, developed by Giant Food and Stop & Shop, uses the Healthy Ideas logo on products they deem healthy.
• Nutrition IQ. This system, developed for the SuperValu chain of stores, uses colored bars to highlight an item’s main nutritional benefits.
• NuVal. This system, developed for Price Chopper and Hy-Vee stores, rates products from 1 to 100, with higher scores signaling greater nutritional value.
• Smart Choices. This system, developed by a coalition of food companies and health professionals, is available for use by any food manufacturer or retailer. Foods that pass muster carry the Smart Choices check mark logo.

source: Nutrition Rating systems – Mayoclinic.com

The rise of the Nutritional Rating system has developed in response to the increasing complexity of food labels and an growing interest by the public to understand food labels.  As most of us are aware, food labels can be very difficult to interpret and often there is just too much information to process, let alone if you wanted to compare products.  The general aim of the nutritional rating systems is to simplify this process and to provide a quick visual icon to help you to interpret whether a product is good or bad.  To this aim most of the systems above achieve this successfully.

The Problems

There are a variety of problems inherent with the rating system solution which I briefly explore below:

1. Hidden Criteria: Often the rating systems hide the criteria by which they rate or approve foods.  In the cases where they don’t it can be difficult to understand the criteria by which a product is rated.
2. Largely Nutrition Only: Most of the rating systems above only take in to account nutritional properties of products.  It is important to know the nutritional content of foods but it is a limitation particularly when people are increasingly wanting to know more about the actual ingredients, additives and allergens in foods.
3. Ignores Specific Needs: The existing rating systems don’t  take in to account your particular dietary needs.  Furthermore, in many families across the US there are a variety of different dietary needs, it is not often that within one family everyone has the same requirements.   You can imagine a family where the parents are on a low sodium diet, low fat diet, the children need to avoid preservatives and other additives and one member has a food allergy.  In this situation the rating systems don’t really help.

It is not the mandate of the existing rating systems to address the above issues and so therefore it may be unfair to outline these as problems but I do feel they are real issues that exist and are worth discussing.

Proposed Solution – Custom Rating System

I propose that a possible solution to these problems is a custom rating system.  One by which a person, or a family can create their own personal dietary profiles and compare all the foods in a store by those criteria, finding lists of foods sorted by the most appropriate and create lists of foods that they want to purchase.  This system would have no hidden criteria, as the user owns and manages the criteria.  It would include the ability to create nutritional, ingredient, allergen and additive criteria and more, such as product origin, Kosher and other marketing claims, as well as the possible inclusion of rating system data.  And finally it would obviously be a custom system with the ability to create and easily switch between any of a number of custom profiles – you could have different profiles for different food sets.

In this day and age, with the technology available to us I believe this will be the solution of the future – food rating system 2.0 if you will.  It will be accessible online, on your mobile phone to access your lists whilst in store, and available on in-store kiosks.  This is the future and the future is here.

We at FoodEssentials hope to be the leaders in this area.  We are launching our first generation of custom food tools in November 2009 with a leading east coast grocery and look forward to working to make this proposed solution a reality.  In the meantime you can check out a demo of our basic system at foodessentials.com

What do you think of food rating systems?  Is this the future for these systems?

I welcome any thoughts, comments, or criticism on our proposed solution.  Let us know what you think.

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