NuVal System Separates the Good From the Bad

Yogurt: full of calcium, vitamins, and candy

A new online site called the NuVal Nutritional Scoring System gives you the skinny on your favorite fatty snacks, using  an easy 1 to 100 scoring system to rate those Pringles and the YoCrunch cookies and cream Oreo yogurt you've been stuffing your face with lately. It's all done with an amazing new patented algorithm that calculates the complex relationships between transfats and bioflavonoids or something. There's a mysterious "team of experts" involved and also a hospital. Clearly it's a good idea to eat as much as you can from the top of the list -- say anything above 80 -- and avoid the numbers bottoming out in the single digits. Not surprisingly, there aren't many surprises here, but among the highlights:

Fruits and Veg
The good: Apricots, asparagus, beans, blueberries, broccoli, cabbage, kiwi, lettuce, mustard, okra, orange, spinach, squash, strawberries, and turnips.
The bad: Coconut. The only fruit that scores below 78, comes in at 24.

Crackers
The good: Ryvita, of course. Scores 87.
The bad: Keebler Townhouse Bistro Multigrain Crackers. Scores a 2. Note the sly inclusion of the health buzzword "multigrain" sandwiched into the rest of this nonsense name. It's a townhouse! No, it's a bistro!

Milk
Anything fat free scores a perfect 100. From there, it's downhill fast.

Pasta
The good: Barilla plus multigrain gets a big hug with a score of 91. Expect your value to plummet once you add butter and cheese.
The bad: Any wide-ribbon egg noodles, unless they're "yolk free."

Eggs
NuVal definitely does not like eggs. Real eggs score no higher than a 33, soundly trounced by Papetti Foods Better'n Eggs Healthier Real Egg Product (68) and Egg Beaters Egg Substitute Original (57). Personally, I never eat anything with the words "substitute" or "product" in the title, so you're on your own here.

Fish
Another nonsurprise: The fish we all love best is riding the low numbers. NuVal doesn't have anything to say about farm-raised fish or endangered species, and their algorithm obviously doesn't measure PCBs or mercury. What we're encouraged to eat verges dangerously close to drudgery: sardines. catfish, Atlantic salmon. And guess where our cherished lobster meat ends up? Right at the bottom with a score of 36.

For the rest of the story, visit their website or watch the scintillating video below.