NuVal

     Eating Healthy is as interesting as a sack of potatoes.  Eating healthy means that you have to give up old habits of unhealthy food.  Eating snickers and drinking coke must stop as you exchange them for water and carrots.  At first, nobody wants to eat healthy.  The human body is trained to love sweets and “junk food” because you can put on weight.  In the past, keeping weight and having energy was a big problem.  Any source of fat or sugar tasted really good because it provided the body with energy.  Now, most people consume more calories than their body uses.  The body stores it as fat.  People don’t use the stored fat energy because they eat more at the next meal.  Eventually, people become overweight and unhealthy because they have stored too much fat.  In this case eating healthy can actually make you feel better.  It will better nourish your body and improve your standard of living.

     Last month I was with my Youth Leadership group for Five Seasons.  We were given a talk about nutrition and a way to calculate food you buy at a grocery store.  Hy-Vee bought the rights of NuVal to test all of their foods.  The foods were given a number from 1-100 based on nutrition.  There were a lot of interesting results that came from the NuVal testing.  Most cereals scored below 30.  Pure foods with no added sugar or chemicals scored much higher than those foods that were healthier with influenced sugar.  The NuVal system preferred nature foods as more healthy than vitamin rich or protein rich foods.

     I asked the nutritionist at Hy-Vee if they had a specialized NuVal scale.  She said no. Men and women need different things from their food.  Generally, men need more protein and more calories from their food than women do.  Generally, women need more iron and calcium than men do.  I brought the point up to the nutritionist and she quickly dismissed my idea.  She then continued to praise the NuVal scale for how accurate and helpful it can be. 

     Here is a link for the NuVal website.  (here)

     Look at the website and leave a comment.  If you could, address some of these questions.  One, do you think the NuVal system is accurate?  Do you think the Nuval scale works for people?  Would knowing the NuVal scale of every item make you change your eating habits?  What would be a better design for the NuVal scale so stores across the country can implement the scale?

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