If you’ve read my bio or the mention on the left-hand side of my homepage, you know that I work for a company called NuVal LLC.  NuVal is a nutritional scoring system that scores foods from 1-100, the higher the score the better the nutrition.  One of the things I love most about this tool is the myths that it busts.  Today, I want to share a few of these busted myths with you.

It’s amazing and true all at the same time.  The “SnackWells Diet” – the phenomenon when people believed that as long as it was fat free you could eat as much of it as you wanted – happened in the 1980s, but this belief is still hanging on.  Case in point – pretzels and sorbet.  Neither of these product types score very well on the NuVal scale.  Most pretzels hover around a score of 11 and sorbets around a score of 2.  Not what you expected, right?

But this is the beauty of NuVal.  When you look at the full nutrition profile of pretzels, you’ll find that most are fat free.  Most don’t have sugar.  Most are somewhat manageable in calories.  But they also don’t have any positive nutrients – where’s the fiber, the good fats like omega-3s, poly- and mono-unsaturated fats, the calcium and vitamin D for strong bones. . . Essentially, most pretzels are enriched, white flour with some salt added.  Take sorbet.  The visual is of freshly pureed fruit, quickly frozen to preserve all that natural goodness.  In reality, most sorbets get 85-90% of their calories from sugar.  Yes, fat free, but all sugar.  Again, there are very few positive nutrients in sorbet.

Is the message that you should no longer include these foods in your eating habits?  No.  But I challenge you to think of more nutrient-dense foods that you could eat in their place.  Filling your body with foods that include a variety of all the nutrients it needs help in a host of ways, so focusing on nutrient-rich foods just makes more sense.

Visit www.nuval.com to find a myth about food that you can bust.