Conference on Friday to Discuss Change in Nutritional Scoring System

Nutrition experts, scientists and policy-makers from North America will gather this Friday, November 30, 2007 to discuss a new system for scoring and ranking foods based on overall nutritional quality.

Foods have been ranked previously on a variety of systems, including by calories, fat content, and the glycemic index. In-fact, one of the people involved in developing this new system of classifying foods by nutritional value invented the glycemic index. The newly proposed system, called the Overall Nutritional Quality Index (ONQI), is based on a scale that takes into account a food’s fiber, sugar, fat content and other factors to return a score from 1 to 100. So far we have been unable to determine which is better, 1 or 100, but that’s only thanks to a huge oversight by the intern who must have written the press release.

The nutrition experts involved in developing the ONQI include past presidents of the American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetes Association; President of the American Cancer Society; Inventor of the glycemic index, and top academic experts in topics from nutritional biochemistry, childhood diabetes and obesity, to epidemiology, and other nutritional guideline gurus.