New food ratings coming to the supermarket: Will they help? *

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Trying to eat healthfully but flummoxed by the choices at the supermarket? Look out for new food-rating symbols at the store that will clarify matters -- or maybe add to the confusion.

The American Dietetic Assn. examined five of these in a new article.

Four of the rating systems, ‘Guiding Stars,’ ‘Healthy Ideas,’ ‘Nutrition IQ’ and NuVal,’ are developed with help from advisory panels at various medical institutions. One of them, ‘Smart Choices,’ was developed by a coalition of food manufacturers with input from a consortium of nutrition-interested folks. That’s the main one we’re going to be seeing in L.A. supermarkets.

Much toil and number-crunching went into these systems, some of it tip-top secret.

Two of the systems rely on proprietary mathematical algorithms that compute the desirable stuff in a food (vitamins, minerals, fiber) and compare it with the less desirable stuff in a given food (trans fats, added sugars, etc).

One of the systems (Guiding Stars) spits out a star if the good prevails over the bad -- a food can get even more stars -- up to three!

The other system, NuVal, assigns a food a number between 1 and 100 after its score is ‘manipulated by a series of mathematical weighting coefficients based on the positive and negative health impacts of each nutrient in the food,’ according to the ADA article.

Head spinning? Too complicated? Prefer something nice and simple, like some color-coding?

Then perhaps you’d prefer ‘Nutrition IQ.’ According to the ADA article, foods can get tags that are orange (for fiber) blue (good source of calcium) dark green (low in sodium), purple (low calorie), red (low in saturated fat), dark orange (first ingredient is a whole grain) and yellow (source of 10% daily value of protein).

Got that? Dark green -- low sodium. Dark orange -- whole grain as first ingredient. (No, dark orange. Light orange is fiber, remember?)

One striking result: In dummy tests on a few food items, Frosted Flakes qualified for a healthful label in one of the five systems -- Smart Choices.

Frosted Flakes may not quite be Satan’s breakfast, but really, a health food? Come on! Doesn’t the very fact that this can emerge as a result suggest the algorithm needs some tweaking?

Smart Choices divides foods into categories, 19 in all, then selects the best choices within each category, as long as they reach certain nutritional minimums. That seems a bit unhelpful -- perhaps there are some categories of foods we really don’t need to be encouraged to eat more of in any way, shape or form -- like the ‘snack’ category?

Hats off to the industry for trying, but this all seems a bit too complicated. I’d say the easiest thing to do is continue to shop around the edge of the store and ignore the middle, for the most part -- making, of course, the occasional foray into the interior to carry away a giant bag of limon-flavored potato chips.

-- Rosie Mestel

*P.S. Nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle takes issue with the Smart Choices program in her blog, Food Politics. She said she feels that ‘some of the standards overly generous, particularly the upper limits of 25% of calories from added sugars and 480 mg sodium per serving.’ She also said she is troubled by the fact that the American Society of Nutrition is partnering with the program, as she feels this is a conflict of interest for the society.