Stop and Shop Unveils a New Nutrition Rating System

"Healthy Ideas," like other food nutrition rating systems, is as good — and as trustworthy — as the entity rating the food. Best bet? Just ignore the labels and choose minimally processed foods, like whole fruits and grains.

January 4, 2009 at 8:34PM by Marion Nestle | comment

Thanks to blogger Hemi Weingarten for telling me about the new scheme from Stop and Shop to help you pick out the thousands of foods it identifies as better for you.

As you know from my previous postings on these schemes, I don’t have much love for food rating systems. They depend entirely on who devises them. It is very much in the interest of Stop and Shop, PepsiCo, Kraft, Unilever, and all the other companies that are doing this to devise criteria that allow lots of their products to qualify. Hannaford example: when the supermarket chain recruited independent nutrition experts to devise criteria, less than one-fourth of the products in the stores qualified even for a one-star rating and most of those were fruits and vegetables in the produce section.

The moral: eat minimally processed foods and you don’t have to worry about such things.

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tags: food, stop and shop, nutrition

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Marion Nestle

Noted author Marion Nestle is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She is the author of What to Eat.
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