Welcome! I am a mom of a busy 7 year old and an adventurous 5 year old. I also happen to work for a great new company called NuVal. NuVal is a nutritional scoring system that rates foods on a scale of 1-100, based on how nutritious they are. We are implementing NuVal in grocery stores around the country.
NuVal may not be in your area yet. But I see the scores while they are "hot off the press" and because of that I am able to make better decisions about what to feed my family.
I am not a registered dietitian. I am just a mom who happens to work for NuVal. I am also an AFAA-certified Group Exercise Instructor. NuVal is a system designed to lead customers to the most nutritious food choices. It is not a diet or weight-loss plan. Before starting a diet, you should always consult your personal physician. The opinions expressed in this blog are the opinions of the writer and not the opinions of NuVal LLC.
Indeed, this is Breaking News. General Mills Cheerios, which previously received a NuVal score of 34, now get a 37! While a three point difference might not seem like much to some, it is a great step in the right direction for children’s cereal. Cheerios has been the shining star of the Cereals that Kids Will Eat Without Complaint. No other children’s cereal got quite such a high score – with one exception: Cinnamon Toast Crunch with 75% Reduced Sugar gets a score of 40. However, I have yet to find that cereal in any of my local supermarkets. So, Cheerios has been the most-quoted children’s cereal.
This score change is a big deal to us at NuVal. We have score changes all the time because manufacturers change their recipes and we re-score their products so that consumers have up-to-date information right there on the store shelf. However, there is not an employee at NuVal who can’t rattle that Cheerios score off the tip of their tongue. We use the Cheerios example all the time when explaining how the system works. This means that this week I will be making changes in lots of our educational and promotional materials. Find 34 and replace with 37!
So, why did Cheerios get a better score? Because the smart folks at General Mills reduced the amount of sodium in their product. Those are the kind of steps that we at NuVal are hoping the food manufacturers will make: reduce the bad stuff, increase the good stuff and make more nutritious food products. You can read more about the less salty Cheerios in this blogpost from one of my favorite blogs, Fooducate. Hooray for General Mills for making this change.
Now, I am off to get working on editing all those presentations. I should start my day with a bowl of Cheerios!
Welcome to Trade-Up Tuesday! Every Tuesday, here on A Better Bag of Groceries, I talk about a Trade-Up I’ve made since learning about NuVal and I give away something for free. Today’s Topic: The Best of the Cereal Category.
I love it when magazines have their “Best of” lists. Every summer, you will find me on the beach with my nose deep into the Best of Boston from Boston magazine or the Best of Rhode Island from Rhode Island Monthly.
As the weather gets warmer, my household becomes All Cereal for breakfast. We put away the oatmeal and while there is an occasional toasted item first thing in the morning, it is more likely to see four bowls and a glass bottle of our favorite milk at the breakfast table.
People ask me about NuVal scores for cereal often and so today, I am giving away the most notable high-scoring items in the Children’s Cereal category and the Adult Cereal category (that sounds a little risque, doesn’t it?)
If you have kids, there is almost nothing better than a box of Cheerios. Cheerios score a 34 on the NuVal scale. There is a Cinnamon Toast Crunch with 75% reduced sugar that scores a 40, however, I’ve yet to find it here in New England. My kids are big Rice Chex fans. I think my husband feels good knowing that he is giving them cereal that does not have a cartoon character on the front of the box, but Rice Chex pale in comparison to Cheerios. They only score a 24. In fact a LOT of kids cereals score in the 20-24 range. My advice? Try to keep the favorite finger food of most toddlers on your table for as long as you can. The score is better than the rest.
Now, when it comes to adults, the Rock Star Cereal that we at NuVal often mention is Post Shredded Wheat. It was a standout early on when we began scoring the cereal category. It gets an amazing 91! There are other cereals that score a 91 as well, including Barbara’s Shredded Wheat, Arrowhead Mills Organic Amaranth Flakes, Price Chopper Puffed Wheat, Meijer Shredded Wheat, and Bear Naked Fit Triple Berry Crunch. The cool thing about NuVal, is that when grocery stores put the scores on their shelves, you can easily see when a store brand gets the same or better score than the National Brand – and it’s usually cheaper.
So, these days, we do have both Cheerios and Shredded Wheat on the morning menu, usually topped with banana (91) , blueberries (100), or strawberries (100). Sometimes, I even top with nectarine (93). Yum!
Today’s Giveaway
One lucky commenter will win a box of Shredded Wheat and a box of Cheerios. Sorry, I can’t send the skim milk through the mail! Just leave a comment below telling me your favorite cereal. (No worries if it’s not nutritious!) I’ll choose one commenter at 7 am EDT on Wednesday so check back to see if you are the lucky recipient! Good Luck!
Welcome to Cart Confessions, a new feature here on A Better Bag of Groceries, where I confess my grocery sins. Today’s topic is Frosted Flakes with Reduced Sugar.
It all started with regular Frosted Flakes. I’m really not sure how they landed in my grocery cart. My husband and I tend to buy food and hoard it. We have shelves in our basement that are loaded with canned goods and unopened boxes of crackers, pasta, and, of course, cereal. If we ever have a natural disaster or national crisis, we could probably survive a month or two with what we’ve got stored. Cereal has a pretty long shelf life, so it is quite likely that my initial Frosted Flakes purchase pre-dated my start date with NuVal. Anyway, at some point, my children (ages 4 and 6) got their first taste of Frosted Flakes and fell in love. Who wouldn’t? I remember loving them as a kid too.
Last week, on our usual shopping trip, my daughter clamored for Frosted Flakes. It was then that I spotted the Reduced Sugar variety. Cool! Now, I do not yet have NuVal scores in a grocery store in my area, so I have to shop blindly. But I figured that a product with reduced sugar must be better.
I was curious to see if my kids would prefer the regular Frosted Flakes or the Reduced Sugar. So, we held a little taste test.
So, interestingly my kids found that they taste exactly the same. My daughter was pretty adamant about it, in fact. How can a product with reduced sugar taste the same as the regular version? Simple. They need to add something else. Since I am not a dietitian (and I don’t even try to play one on my blog), I turned to Rachel Rodek, MS, RD, LDN, Manager of Nutrition Communications for NuVal to give me the answer.
Rachel says: “When manufacturers reduce an ingredient in a food to make it “more nutritious”, the taste changes. So what do they do to have people still like it and buy it? Add more of another ingredient! And in this case, the culprit is sodium. Reduced Frosted Flakes has 140 mg sodium whereas Reduced Sugar Frosted Flakes has 180 mg. Interestingly enough, the difference in sugar is only 3 grams.”
That added sodium affects the NuVal score. Reduced Sugar Frosted Flakes actually score lower than the regular version.
Regular Frosted Flakes: 24
Reduced Sugar Frosted Flakes: 22
And that is one of the many, many reasons that Dr. David Katz and his team of scientific experts founded NuVal!
Question of the Day
Do you have any cereal sins you’d like to confess?
When I started blogging, back in July of 2009, one of my first posts was about Cereal for Grown-Ups. I wrote about it because one of the most frequently asked questions I get, once people learn that I work for NuVal, is about cereal and how it scores. People want to know about Kashi, Shredded Wheat, and other popular brands of cereal that adults tend to eat. This is true for kids’ cereals too. A lot of moms ask me about brands that they choose for their children, most notably Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Kix. Let’s face it, most of us mothers start out by feeding our kids Cheerios but by the time the kids are 5 and they are walking the grocery store with us and they are beginning to read words (like Lucky Charms!) they start asking for more than just plain old Cheerios. Add one of their favorite movie characters to the front of a box of cereal and it’s Meltdown In Aisle Five.
So, yes, I admit. We’ve been experimenting in the cereal department. In our cabinet right now are the following brands:
Frosted Flakes
Golden Grahams
Cheerios
Shredded Wheat (mine)
Cinnnamon Toast Crunch
Honey Nut Cheerios
I can tell you that the Golden Grahams and Cinnamon Toast Crunch made it into the basket because they had Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs characters on them. I have no idea how the Frosted Flakes made it into our cart and then into our cabinet. No idea. Perhaps one of my kids threw it in when I wasn’t looking? No idea.
Last week, my son had a half-day of school, so I brought him along on a Price Chopper visit that I had scheduled. We met up with my new colleague, Tina, to walk the store, to see some scores on the shelf and to try out some tools that we’ve developed at NuVal for teaching store employees about the system. I gave my son a Scavenger Hunt to do. He had to write down his favorite cereal and then go find it on the shelf to see what the score was. What did he pick? Frosted Flakes, of course. He found it on the shelf and wrote down the NuVal score: 24. Then I told him that he could go find another cereal that scored better than Frosted Flakes and that we would buy it. He was so excited about this little game. He is so used to being at our local grocery store with me (where they do not have NuVal), asking me to buy sugary, colorful cereals and getting the big NO. It was his big chance to show me that those Kid Magnet cereals really were healthy, Mom!
So, my son quickly found Lucky Charms (nope, NuVal score of 23), Fruity Pebbles (uh uh, NuVal score of 24), Apple Jacks (no, sigh, NuVal score of 24), and Cap’n Crunch (no, no, no, NuVal score of 10). My poor son! He was so deflated! It reminded me of A Christmas Story, when Ralphie so deperately wants a Red Ryder BB Gun, but everyone, including Santa keeps shooting him down. ‘You’ll shoot your eye out kid.”
Finally, my son found a colorful cereal that had a NuVal score better than that of Frosted Flakes: Fruity Cheerios. NuVal Score: 28.
Notice that he does not look overjoyed. It wasn’t that exciting. Fruity Cheerios have been resident in our cereal cupboard in the past. However, it was cool to see my son empowered with the NuVal scores to choose his own cereal – as long as it was above a certain number. In case you’re curious, Cereal scores range from 4 – 100 on the NuVal score, but the median score (half are above it, half are below it) is a 25.
Last week General Mills announced that it will be reducing the sugar levels in its cereals marketed to children. That’s great news. After the reformulations, NuVal will rescore those cereals and I will be sure to blog with an update.
On a bright note, the kids have been asking for Fruity Cheerios as a snack. The good news is that they’re munching on a little baggie of O’s which score a 28 while watching PBS Kids. Hey, it’s better than Cheetos. The bad news is that they have very sticky hands. This week, I’ll be sure to throw more hand wipes in my cart!
The NuVal Nutritional Scoring System gives nutritional guidance to consumers frustrated with complicated nutrition labels and misleading packaging promises. Under NuVal, all foods and beverages are rated on a scale between 1 to 100. The higher the score, the higher the overall nutrition.
