NuVal Rebuts Consumer Group’s Complaint

BRAINTREE, Mass. — NuVal responded with a vigorous defense in www.HuffingtonPost.com to a formal complaint filed this week by the National Consumers League, a private, nonprofit consumers group, with the Food and Drug Administration.

The NuVal system, used in about 1,600 stores nationwide, rates products’ nutritional value on a scale from 1 to 100 (the higher the score, the more nutritious the food).

“The NuVal rating system is fatally flawed and should be discarded,” said National Consumers League Executive Director Sally Greenberg, in a statement. The FDA, she added, should “not allow NuVal or any other flawed nutritional rating system to further confuse consumers who are trying to make healthy decisions for their families.”

NCL’s letter to the FDA cites a myriad of “mind-boggling” NuVal scores, including 10 for Raley’s Diced Pears in Light Syrup and 20 for Doritos Tortilla Chips.

In its rebuttal, David Katz, chief science officer for NuVal, thanked the National Consumers League for “very ably demonstrating exactly how NuVal does just what it was intended to do: Tell the surprising truth about the nutritional quality of foods.”

Katz pointed out that diced pears in light syrup scored only a 10 in the NuVal system because it contained 15 grams of sugar in a 70-calorie serving, with 60 out of 70 calories coming from sugar, most of it added. By contrast, regular pears score a 96.

“It strikes me as odd that some 30 million consumers encounter NuVal in the nation's supermarkets every week, and far from complaining, they overwhelmingly love the system,” Katz wrote.

He added that the algorithm upon which NuVal is based “has been described in detail in peer-reviewed publications accessible to all. It has been made available in its entirety to research groups throughout the U.S., Canada and the U.K.; to federal agencies in the U.S.; to the Institute of Medicine; and to private entities that have requested such access.” The National Consumers League, he said, did not ask to review the algorithm.