But We Don't Know All the Aspects
Excuse me? Since when do we know everything there is to know about nutrition? Humans are still learning about food. I suspect there will be many new vitamins, enzymes, bioflavonoids, phytonutrients, etc. that will be discovered in the years ahead.
A few years ago, I listened to a CD from a whole foods vitamin company (Standard Process) where the speaker mentioned there was a "vitamin B4". Ever hear of it? I certainly had not! Why? It turns out that scientists are not able to isolate it but they have determined that it exists.
Edited April 11th: Check here for some info on vitamin B4
They cannot yet measure it, and nobody knows much about it. Maybe someday researchers will discover how to isolate vitamin B4, how to measure it, and determine what it does. Maybe it is important to health. Maybe not. But to think that we know "all aspects of nutritional quality" is absurd, arrogant, or at least ignorant.
NuVal Does Have Some Value
Now to be fair perhaps the system will be helpful to alert people to the idea that there is variation in quality of one processed food over another in the same category. For example, if you are buying crackers, and you know that crackers are not a food that you should be eating a lot of, you might consider choosing a product with more known nutrients than some other cracker product. But hopefully you will not just go for the high scoring crackers, while cheating yourself out of other food such as whole grains, fruit and vegetables, seeds and nuts, and quality proteins that may have lower scores.
NuVal is Missing a Banquet of Factors
There is a banquet of factors that this system does not address: promoting a good balance of proteins, fats, and carbs; organically vs. conventionally grown; raw vs. cooked; seasonal foods; portion control; food energy (grounding, upward, warming, cooling, etc.), and just plain special qualities that particular foods possess.
Not all Strawberries are Created Equal
For example, not all strawberries are created equal. Seasonal availability, distance it has traveled to your plate, whether it was lovingly grown in rich soil or mass-produced with pesticides and herbicides in depleted soil makes a critical difference what its nutritional value is going to be. (Also, it could be that one variety is more nutritious than another.)
Sure, I can buy strawberries here in upstate New York in February. However, they cannot compare to the strawberries that are grown at a local farm, without chemicals, and picked hours before eating in June when the strawberry season is at its peak. The local ones will likely be significantly more nutritious. They will taste better. I will enjoy eating the local ones much more than the February versions. It makes no sense that the NuVal system gives strawberries a score of 100, regardless of whether or not they are in season, locally grown or have been picked several weeks ago, 2000 miles away.
Individuals have Different Food Needs
Further, individuals have different body types that are best served with different types of food qualities. Some food is alkaline, some acid: you must obtain a balance that is right for you. Are you an alkaline producer or an acid producer? This will influence what are the best foods for you.
Some food has grounding energy, and some has more upward energy: some days you need more of one type and less of the other. Some food has cooling properties, and yet other food has warming tendencies: what is right for your body on a given day? No general scoring system is going to help you with these decisions. You must listen to your own body and choose the foods that will maintain the balance you need.
Your Body Needs Variety
Another thing that the NuVal system ignores is the importance of variety. One score per food item does nothing to encourage eating a variety of fruits and vegetables. I think it would be a mistake only to pick fruits and vegetables based solely on high scores. Vegetables like garlic or radishes may not have high scores (they are not currently listed) yet garlic is flavorful, supports detoxification, and has antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral properties. It is one of my favorite remedies for staving off a winter cold. Raw garlic has helped me numerous times avoid a seasonal cold if I eat it at the first indication that I'm coming down with something. Similarly, radishes may not seem to be of much value, yet they are known to help bust up fat cells. Who knows, they may have other valuable properties that have not been discovered.
Food is abundant in qualities: NuVal oversimplifies too much.
To summarize, my overriding concern is that the NuVal system takes some known nutritional information, ignores plenty other considerations that influence how "healthy" a food is, and tries to come up with a measurement that is only partially useful. The result is just too one-dimensional. I believe foods are gifts from God that have multiple properties to support our health. I really do not see the sense of trying to squeeze all that abundance of nutritional support into a single number between 1 to 100 without considering so much more that truly matters.
Learn about food. You will be blown away how amazing it is!
Copyright ©2009 Ruth S. Sheets. All rights reserved.
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1 comments:
Your analysis is absolutely right, but I think the key to evaluating Nuval is to look at its impact on consumers in our reality today, and in that context it's a fantastic development.
I am constantly amazed how people of perfectly capable intelligence and a desire to eat better will make bad choices at the grocery store. At least now when someone grabs a bottle of soda off the shelf and sees a Nuval score of 1, they know they are consuming candy, not food. Someone else can see the difference between wheat bread, and whole grain bread. Or see that their "nutritious" frozen meal, is woefully inadequate.
This really could be an incredible boon for people's eating and buying habits.
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