I’m not sure how many people out there read the Guardian now on a daily basis, but one article that I just read which caught my imagination was an article on how confusing our nutritional labels are now – and what could be done to improve them.
The article basically states that food companies are making it as difficult as possible to understand what’s good and what’s bad for you and listing them on their box or packaging isn’t really helping. For example, all of a sudden I started hearing about all these foods which contain ‘no trans fats’.. well, I didn’t know wtf a trans fat was, nor did I know that there was an opposite to trans fat. How much trans fat is bad for me? How much is healthy? Any? *sigh*
I never really thought about it, but even when I was on Weight Watchers.. they really only take 3 nutritional ingredients into play – calories, fat, and fibre – the combination of which combine to equal a point score. In truth it wasn’t that hard to follow – but you had to keep track, etc..etc.. kind of a pain, and it’s not like I’ve ever heard of any crash diets that work either.
Anyhow the article proposes a new system for measuring the nutritional value of foods into a single number. And yes, the critics say that you can’t really do that accurately, however, I believe it’s a great idea to implement that system. I know if I was staring at two different cereals for example.. and cereal a had a value of 50 and cereal b had a value of 65 or something.. well I could tell you which one I was going to purchase. And don`t I have that right? To know which foods are healthier for me? Which foods I should be eating? I think so. The system is called the NuVal system – and the article centered on Dr. Arya Sharma`s recommendation of the system. The article can be found here at drsharma.ca.
Worth a read for sure… really, how hard would it be to add a number into that box of nutritional information?