Nutritional Bang for Your Grocery Buck

by Katherine Gustafson

categories: Food Prices, Health

Published October 22, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

In an economic climate where people are pinching their grocery pennies and a food climate where the unhealthiest food is often the cheapest — or at least the most obviously cheap — it’s great to hear that someone’s come out with a most-nutritional-bang-for-your-buck assessment tool to prevent our thin wallets from killing our health.

Nutrition expert Adam Drewnowski, a professor at the University of Washington, presented his new Affordable Nutrition Index (ANI) at the American Dietetic Association’s Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo this week, Reuters reports. It is apparently the only tool to rate food according to how much nutritional value a dollar can buy.

Drewnowski did research that revealed how experts tend to silo food, nutrition and price considerations instead of regarding them as integrated elements in our eating lives. He is trying to steer the conversation toward addressing the fact that people account for many factors at once in making food-shopping decisions.

Following the guidance of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the ANI takes twelve nutrients into account in its scoring method. Nine of them have a positive impact on the score (protein, fiber, iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium, and vitamins A, C and E) while three of them bring it down (saturated fat, added sugars and sodium). This nutrient score is balanced against the price data to create the final ANI score.

In a world where the food industry does everything it can to confuse people by trumpeting such nutrient claims, the ANI speaks the supermarket’s language. This will help the average shopper feel more confident that being on a budget doesn’t have to mean forgoing healthy eating. Drewnowski found, for instance, that if you only have a dollar, buying a certain brand of canned soup might be a better nutritional bet than picking up a pricey whole vegetable.

Michael Pollan would surely — and rightly — say that in a perfect world the best option would be for shoppers to pick out all the vegetables they want and make the soup themselves. But even if they’re not about to spend all evening slaving over a stewpot, ANI users should indeed beware that a high ranking on the scale does not a balanced meal make.

Of course it’s no magic solution to our food system’s problems, but as a tool of practical guidance and a way of opening up a dialogue on encouraging wise eating decisions and pushing our food systems toward healthier offerings, Drewnowski’s guide is a useful place to start.

Photo courtesy of wharman on flickr