Hello there, I'm Monica Reinable, and you are listening to the Nutrition Diva Podcast

Welcome.

There has been a lot of buzz in the food and nutrition industry lately over a newly-released

food scoring system was developed by researchers at Tufts University and it's called the Food

Compass.

We've seen nutrition scoring systems like this come and go in the past.

Maybe you remember seeing cards with star ratings or stoplight colors attached to the shelves

in your grocery store.

And the goal of these systems is to give consumers a quick and easy way to assess the healthfulness

of foods.

Of course, simplicity always comes at a price, right?

Food is complex stuff and the ways in which it affects our bodies are even more complex.

Getting to reduce all of those impacts to a simple score is always going to end up

being, well, reductionist.

In any event, I'm not that sure that these scoring systems have ever made a lasting impact

on people's buying behaviors.

According to the developers, though, the food compass score improves on these past systems

in several important ways.

It incorporates a broader range of food principles.

It applies consistent criteria across multiple food categories and, unlike some of the other

systems, the methodology used to produce the ratings is completely transparent.

The algorithm assesses foods in nine different areas, including the nutrient content, nutrient

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