The article on the top of the most emailed list in the NY Times today is quite unusual. It is customary when an organization is selling something to say anything they can to get you to buy it. Yet, this article entitled The Package May Say Healthy, but This Grocer Begs to Differ reports on a New England grocery store that instead gives its products a health rating devised of using various stars to convey the nutritional value of the food item. Read below.
The chain, Hannaford Brothers, developed a system called Guiding Stars that rated the nutritional value of nearly all the food and drinks at its stores from zero to three stars. Of the 27,000 products that were plugged into Hannaford’s formula, 77 percent received no stars, including many, if not most, of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you.
These included V8 vegetable juice (too much sodium), Campbell’s Healthy Request Tomato soup (ditto), most Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners (ditto) and nearly all yogurt with fruit (too much sugar). Whole milk? Too much fat — no stars. Predictably, most fruits and vegetables did earn three stars, as did things like salmon and Post Grape-Nuts cereal.
At a time when more and more products are being marketed as healthy, the fact that so many items seemed to flunk Hannaford’s inspection raises questions about the integrity of the nutrition claims, which are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration — or possibly about whether Hannaford made its standards too prissy or draconian. Either way, the results do seem to confirm the nagging feeling that the benefits promoted by many products have a lot more to do with marketing than nutrition.
Consumers now not only have the product information, but also the FDA information and now the grocery store information to guide them to make truly informed decisions about the food they buy. Will it work? I would like to have the NY Times do a follow up story on this to see how the products change on the store shelves as this star system starts to impact consumer habits. Interesting. A change is in the air, or perhaps in the stars.