Update [Wednesday morning 10/27]: General Mills has thrown in the towel as well. Just last week, at the annual ADA conference, Susan Crocket, PhD, RD the company’s Senior VP of Health and Nutrition defended the program’s integrity with deep fervor.

Update [Monday night 10/26] : Unilever just announced that it will be phasing out the Smart Choices logo from its food and beverage products now that the Food and Drug Administration plans to standardize criteria for food nutrition labels.

The Smart Choices Program will cease Front of Pack food labeling effective immediately. Bowing to pressure from the public as well as warning letters from the FDA and Connecticut’s Attorney General, the industry led organization announced

it will voluntarily postpone active operations and not encourage wider use of the logo at this time by either new or currently enrolled companies. more…

The American Society for Nutrition, which served as the “objective, scientific” cover for the nutrition criteria set by the food industry, sent out a letter to its members:

ASN commends the FDA on its announcement of intent to develop standardized criteria on which front-of-pack nutrition and shelf labeling could be based. In addition, ASN fully supports the decision of the Smart Choices Program Board of Directors to postpone their active operations as FDA works to address both front-of-pack and on shelf labeling. “ASN will continue to provide nutrition science expertise within the dialogue on front-of-pack labeling in order to best serve the interests of the health of Americans,” said ASN President Jim Hill in a statement to media.

Interestingly, the statement by the Smart Choices Board of Directors does not appear on their website homepage. It was also issued late Friday afternoon, a time slot usually reserved for bad news by PR professionals, assuming the upcoming weekend will help soften the blow.

What you need to know:

This is a great piece of news to kick off the weekend.

Despite explanations by top nutrition experts and as to why the Smart Choices program was scientifically sound, anyone with a bit of common sense will tell you that Froot Loops cereal is not a “Smart Choice”.

What to do at the supermarket:

Make your own Smart Choice by learning to read nutrition facts panels and ingredient lists. Here’s an easy piece of advice to follow: in many cases, the shorter the ingredient list, the better the product.

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Connecticut’s Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, is not happy with the Smart Choices front of package labeling system. He too cannot understand how such a system, designed to help consumer choose healthier foods allows Froot Loops to be considered nutritious. He wrote on Wednesday to several large food manufacturers participating in the program that he was concerned it was “overly simplistic, inaccurate and ultimately misleading.”

“As a matter of common sense, these sugar-laden or fat-saturated products seem very questionable as so-called ‘Smart Choices’ nutritionally,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “We’re ratcheting up pressure for truthful answers to these issues.”

The Connecticut investigation will seek to determine if the labeling campaign violates the state’s consumer protection law, which bars misleading or false product claims, he added. read more…

This is not surprising. In fact several other state attorneys may be joining this investigation in order to protect their constituents from marketing “fraud”.

Froot Loops, for reference, contains 3 teaspoons of added sugar, trans fat, and several different artificial colors. If there was any doubt, it contains zero fruit.

What to do at the supermarket:

Our best advice is to count “Smart Choices” as just another marketing claim, rather than objective health information. As such, simply ignore it. Always read the nutrition label and ingredients list to get the facts. When it comes to cereals, you’ll want to see a low sugar count (6 grams per serving or less) and a high fiber count (5 grams and up) from whole grains.

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Price Chopper introduces NuVal

Northeast supermarket chain Price Chopper, is rolling out NuVal, a nutritional scoring system today. The 114 store chain operates in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.

The aim of NuVal and other nutritional scoring systems is to simplify the task of choosing healthier foods at the supermarket.

The NuVal approach is especially easy to understand – each product gets a score from 1 (lowest) to 100 (highest) based on the presence of “good” and “bad” nutrients. The system, originally known as ONQI (Overall Nutritional Qulaity Index), was developed by a respectable team of scientists led by Dr David Katz.

We posted a detailed analysis of NuVal’s pros and cons, as well as its competitors, a few months ago.

NuVal and Price Chopper have been testing the system out for some time, and today is the official launch. Another chain currently implementing NuVal is Hy-Vee.

Regional Price Chopper competitors have also boarded the health wagon, with Hannaford Brothers’ intorduction of Guidign Stars in 2006, and Stop & Shop’s Healthy Ideas launced earlier this month.

What to do at the supermarket:

While a quick glance score can help you get an idea as to the healthfulness of a specific product, some aisles are going to rank much better than others. As always, your best bets are minimally processed foods, which are usually found in the supermarket perimeter, not the inner aisles.  Also look for foods with short ingredient lists that you can actually understand.

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