New Web service ranks grocery items on nutrition
Published 12:00 am Tuesday, October 28, 2014
An environmental research organization Monday introduced one of the most comprehensive online databases of food products, containing information on more than 80,000 items sold in U.S. groceries. It offers details of ingredients and nutritional information as well as an attempt to assess how processed the food items are.
“We know that consumers care a lot about what’s in the foods they buy, and we also know that if foods are highly processed, that can have an impact on nutrition in ways that don’t always show up on the information panels on labels,” said Renée Sharp, director of research at the Environmental Working Group, the nonprofit that built the service.
The Food Scores database, compiled largely from information supplied by food companies through voluntary and mandatory labeling, combined with the group’s research on pesticides and additives, allows consumers to find information like how many products contain brominated vegetable oil as an ingredient or whether a specific product contains added dyes and preservatives.
The Environmental Working Group aims to assign a score from 1 to 10, with 1 being the best, to each product based on how nutritious it is, how many ingredients are in it or if its packaging raise concerns and an estimate of how processed it is.