Saturday, December 1, 2007

Is It Healthy? Food Rating Systems Battle It Out


As a follow-up to our Overall Nutrition Index post, here is today's expanded New York Times article covering a full array of competing private Food Rating Systems.
As pointed out: The ratings systems under development all use government dietary guidance as a starting point. Then they consider various nutrients and give them scores to compute a single rating that is supposed to reflect the aggregate nutritional value of a food.
Because so many scientific studies disagree with some of the current official dietary guidelines -just take a look at Gary Taubes' long compilation- we are left wondering at what to do with yet more confusing (and simplistic, as nutrition is graded with a single rating)information, let alone not even standardized.
What all these systems don't seem to take into account is the level of processing undergone by each ingredient in the final product. When highly processed, what is left of the original individual nutrients? Then what does the final rating really mean?

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