I’m speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival: Health. I’ll be interviewed by Helena Bottemiller Evich of FoodFix from 9:00 to 9:50 a.m.. Topic: “Making sense of nutrition science.”
On Monday this week, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) announced that it was releasing Food Scores: Rate Your Plate.
This is an astonishing interactive food database that rates 80,000 (!) supermarket foods on their nutritional value, ingredients as well as contaminants, and level of processing.
The database awards scores ranging from 1 (terrific) to 10 (really bad).
Feeling unimaginative this week, I typed in “Apples” and found 13 products, scored at from 1 to 6 points. You can click on the product to get EWG’s breakdown of how and why each product is scored.
Some of the EWG findings are amazing and, in some cases, alarming:
The average food in its database has:
Play around with the site. You will learn plenty about what’s on those shelves. EWG has performed a great public service in making this information accessible.
Here are the relevant documents:
And just for fun, here’s the USDA’s Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies 2011-2012 with its searchable version of foods, portions, and nutrients.