Derby High School took a step toward promoting healthier lifestyles Monday by choosing to be the first school on the East Coast to adopt the NuVal food scoring system.
Developed by a team of health and nutrition experts headed by Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center and a nationally recognized authority on nutrition, weight control and prevention of chronic disease, NuVal assigns scores on different food items to rate how healthy and nutritious they are.
The system has been adopted at middle schools and high schools in Minnesota, Missouri and Tennessee, and now Derby High School has joined the list.
The NuVal rollout Monday at Derby High was treated like a pep rally before a big football game. Ninth and 10th graders arrived for their lunch period through rows of cheering cheerleaders and athletes who wore NuVal and VITAHLS (Valley Initiative to Advance Health and Learning in Schools) T‑shirts and distributed souvenir water bottles.
Principal Greg Gaillard and members of the faculty and staff also wore NuVal t‑shirts for the occasion.
“We’re proud and honored to be part of the NuVal initiative,” Gaillard said.
Dr. Katz was also on hand to launch the new healthy food-rating system in the Derby High School cafeteria. He explained to the students that it wasn’t about telling them what to do. Rather, it was about giving them information to let them make healthier choices themselves.
So the cafeteria still offered the nutritious snacks and meals alongside those that were not so nutritious. But as of Monday, each was labeled with a NuVal score indicating how healthy it was.
“I hope this empowers you to make the choices you want to make,” Dr. Katz said.
In an interview, the doctor said NuVal actually works. He said evidence from supermarkets and stores belonging to 28 retail chains across the country included accounts of how people lost more than 100 pounds simply by making food choices based on the NuVal scores displayed with them on the store shelves.
Locally, Big Y is one of the stores that uses NuVal ratings, and assisted the Derby High event by supplying the T‑shirts.
The Turn the Tide Foundation, dedicated to battling the nation’s obesity epidemic, provided a $23,000 grant that paid for the NuVal licensing fees, labels for the cafeteria, staff training and other expenses.
“Basically, all our food in the cafeteria, provided by Sodexho, is rated by NuVal,” Gaillard said. “High school is all about providing choices to students.”
For example, a student looking for a snack to add to his school lunch might consider the choice between an apple, ChexMix snack or potato chips. The NuVal system will tell him that ChexMix is rated 7, potato chips is rated 15 and an apple is rated 96.
Melissa Schlenker, who is in charge of the school initiative for NuVal, said the scores are based on an algorithm, or mathematical formula, that assigns numerical values to the ingredients on food packaging.
Then it divides the good ingredients that are needed for good nutrition, such as fiber and vitamins, by the bad ingredients that tend to cause obesity and poor health, such as sodium and trans fats. The higher the score, the more nutritious the food, Schlenker said.
