rant about food grading system on CC

First off, I want to say I LOVE CC.  I love the forums and all the information and being able to keep track of my weight and calorie intake... (I'm a big fan of the trend line, but weighing every day is annoying...)

But I do NOT like the way they grade food that you manually input.  I buy my yogurt from the local dairy here... so because it's local I manually input it.  I buy the low-fat yogurt b/c they don't have a nonfat, but I don't mind because it's really not that much fat and I'm willing to take the trade-off.  The good outweighs the bad.  When I input it, it gets a grade of C+ (it's 170 calories and 1.5g fat).

HOWEVER, if you look up the Yoplait Light... which I mistakenly bought before I started reading ingredients first... it gets an A.  Yeah, it's 100 calories and fat free, but it's full of artificial sweeteners and HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP!!! A?  What?  Are you kidding me?

My yogurt is made from milk from cows that don't get hormones and don't have a bunch of added crap and it gets a C+.

BS!!!

That's all... just my little rant for the day.  :)

Please take the nutrition grades with a grain of (low-sodium) salt.  They are meant to be a guide and based on specific things:

(taken from the FAQs)

Foods : What is the Nutrition Grade? (FAQs)

The Nutrition Grade was developed with the goal of helping people improve the nutritional quality of their diets. This tool is fully automated and does not feature any manual corrections - hence all items are evaluated objectively and following the same set of rules.

As you may know, not all nutrients are equally good for you. Some of them, like cholesterol, sodium, and saturated fats should be avoided as much as possible. Some other ones, however, such as minerals and vitamins, are essential for your health. Thankfully, the USDA devised the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) figures for each one of these nutrients, which were used as the foundation of the Nutrition Grade's algorithm.

Obviously, foods rich in minerals and vitamins are graded highly, and their good points are all listed right next to their grade. Undesirable nutrients contribute to the bad points. Even though the USDA does provide RDA values for these nutrients, these values must be understood differently from those for the desirable nutrients; the undesirable RDAs should be viewed as the very last limit, whereas the desirable RDAs mark a target to shoot for.

The Good and the Bad Points provide a summary of what the Nutrition Grade identifies as the food items' special strengths and weaknesses. Those points are then converted to a numerical format, and then finally turned into the well-known letter format (A-best; F-worst).

No automated tool is perfect, and the same is true for this one. Please understand that Nutrition Grade only checks how close or far away a certain food is in respect to your RDAs. There are many more aspects that need to be considered for Health, and this is only one of them.

Finally, Nutrition Grade will not necessarily help you lose weight. It will, hopefully, help you get it done as healthy as possible, but you could, for example, eat only perfectly graded food items and still end up gaining weight. Weight loss is all about counting calories and it is not necessarily related to health - but health and weight loss are also not mutually exclusive. In other words, you should keep an eye on your calories, and at the same time, also try to get as good a grade as you can.

I always use CC first when I check all the Bookmarked (Favorites) sites I have for researching calories and nutrients in foods I eat or might eat.  I occasionally find a "Grade" on CC that I disagree with, based on what other sites or reliable research suggest.  For example:  English Walnuts gets a "B-."  However, I have done enough research to know that, in moderation, English walnuts are a healthy nut to eat and are listed in many healthy food lists.  Overall, though, I like CC's set-up for "grading" foods that will help a person not overeat.  When I am charting my personal food spreadsheet, CC is always my first look.

Ha ha!  I had to edit this posting.  I had put "will help a person not evereat" when I meant "will help a person not overeat."

I realize it's automated... I realize that no matter what the grade MODERATION is always key... it just annoyed me and I felt the need to rant about it to fellow CCers. 

The fact that something gets an A because it falls in the best range from the RDA when it's got a bunch of CRAP in it that's horrible for your body but doesn't show up in the numbers really irritates me is all.  :P

I do really love this site and will continue to use it... I was just frustrated.

It probably goes along with my current frustration that High Fructose Corn Syrup is in EVERYTHING and healthy food is expensive!!

I know what you mean!  I freakn' HATE hfcs!  And it's so hard to find food w/o it.  I can't find whole wheat hamburger buns w/o hfcs in my local grocery stores, and I want to cry when I look at yogurt.  I love yogurt but I have to go to a health food store to buy it and then I only have a few flavors to choose from.  I can kinda see why candy has it, but pickles, canned beans, Fiber One bars and Morningstar Corn dogs???  A lot of that stuff is s'pose to be healthy! 

I'm lucky to live in a town that takes "healthy food" to a whole new level. 

For breads... Arnold's and Peppridge farms make breads that don't have hcfs... just fyi.  Your grocery store may have those... And some of the Dannon yogurts don't have it. 

Original Post by michachu:

My yogurt is made from milk from cows that don't get hormones and don't have a bunch of added crap and it gets a C+.

BS!!!

That's all... just my little rant for the day.  :)

<snicker> I so agree.

I just input  a home-made ranch dressing, and CC gave it an F; but I know it's better for me as it's not laden with chemicals, excess salt, preservatives and fake-man-made food substances. <Can you tell I'm a whole foods kinda guy (grin)> so I just eat less of it, and make up the fat-calories elsewhere in my food program.

I've seen far to many documentaries about the gross things done in the name of low-fat/healthy foods. I only eat "full fat" products; one of my pet peeves is carageenan, it's added to stabilize and lengthen the shelf life of dairy products. I have developed a sensitivity to it now and can't eat anything with it in it. It is a common additve to yogurts.

<sigh> now I'm ranting/preaching; must be snack time.

Cheers

GB

The grading system is, imho, the single worst feature of CC.  Sugar-filled 'fruit' yogurts give me a higher grade than higher-protein equivalents with no added sugar.  Cocoa Krispies gives me a higher grade than plain oatmeal. It is like a bizarre reverse-incentive system: in order to eat healthy foods, I must battle my desire to have a 'good' score. 

Today I entered a recipe for seitan ('wheat meat') with the following ingredients: vital wheat gluten, soy flour, tofu, and nutritional yeast and it got a D+!!!  One serving is 134 kcal, 1.1 g fat, 10 mg sodium, 8.6 g carbs, 1 g fiber, .8 g sugar, and 22.6 g protein.  Apparently, unless I 'fortify' my seitan with vitamins like an industrial food processor, though, it is "bad for me". This isn't even a situation where the food in question is so nutritionally dense that it should be taken in moderation -- it is a super-low-cal source of vegetarian protein. 

C'mon, CC!  Not every food item needs to have 20% RDA of ascorbic acid added to it for it to be healthful!

Original Post by coreyander:

The grading system is, imho, the single worst feature of CC.  Sugar-filled 'fruit' yogurts give me a higher grade than higher-protein equivalents with no added sugar.  Cocoa Krispies gives me a higher grade than plain oatmeal. It is like a bizarre reverse-incentive system: in order to eat healthy foods, I must battle my desire to have a 'good' score. 

Today I entered a recipe for seitan ('wheat meat') with the following ingredients: vital wheat gluten, soy flour, tofu, and nutritional yeast and it got a D+!!!  One serving is 134 kcal, 1.1 g fat, 10 mg sodium, 8.6 g carbs, 1 g fiber, .8 g sugar, and 22.6 g protein.  Apparently, unless I 'fortify' my seitan with vitamins like an industrial food processor, though, it is "bad for me". This isn't even a situation where the food in question is so nutritionally dense that it should be taken in moderation -- it is a super-low-cal source of vegetarian protein. 

C'mon, CC!  Not every food item needs to have 20% RDA of ascorbic acid added to it for it to be healthful!

 Wow... just wow. So, lots of people could very well be taking the grading system at face value and eating things that have not near the nutritional value they think it does.  That sucks.

That seitan example is actually a good one of why the CC grading system works.   It's a heavily processed food containing protein and not much else which means it's something to be consumed in very small amounts rather than being the main feature of someone's diet.  Hence the D grading. 

The majority of anyone's diet should be fresh vegetables, simple grains, fruit and so forth.   If you do that consistently and use other foods in smaller quantities to balance them out, you'll have a very healthy diet and probably A grades all the way.

Well don't forget that this free site makes its income from advertising. So of course you should take product recomendations on this sight with the eyes of a skeptic.  Yoplait Yogurt is basically glorified candy, you would be better off eating gummy bears with a half cup of skim milk.

Don't misunderstand me though, this sight is a great tool for dieting

"full fat" products?  Like whole milk?  oh well, its your arteries.

I try not to get too plugged into the "grade" but there are other discrepancies as well.  For example, 6 jumbo shrimp boiled are less than 50 calories.  But if I select "Whole Foods 6 boiled shrimp" the calorie count is 110.   I can't imagine that Whole Foods adds 60 calories to boiled shrimp.  Why do you think there is such a difference in a simple food like this?

Original Post by gi-jane:

That seitan example is actually a good one of why the CC grading system works.   It's a heavily processed food containing protein and not much else which means it's something to be consumed in very small amounts rather than being the main feature of someone's diet.  Hence the D grading. 

The majority of anyone's diet should be fresh vegetables, simple grains, fruit and so forth.   If you do that consistently and use other foods in smaller quantities to balance them out, you'll have a very healthy diet and probably A grades all the way.

 I don't even know what seitan is... lol.  I was just annoyed that my relatively healthy yogurt would get a low grade when it doesn't have a bunch of added chemicals... do I think it should get an A?  No. B maybe B+.  It does have fat, yes.  But does it have high fructose corn syrup and the other chemicals?  Nope. I will continue to enjoy it from time to time with my breakfast.  :)

I'm doing well so far between sticking with lots of whole foods and only packaged foods that don't have 9000000 ingredients that I can't pronounce.  10.5 pounds down 39.5 to go.  And I've only been at it for about 8 weeks.

The nutrition grade on CC is a joke and it doesn't work.  I made a joke recipe called Josh's butter bread to demonstrate just how arbitrary and idiotic CC gading is.  My "butter bread" gets a C grade, and one serving contains 383 grams of fat per serving and, incidentally, 240 of those grams are saturated fat.  If you had one serving of this every day, you would probably gain several hundred pounds in the course of 1 year, that is if you were still alive, and it gets a "C".

Original Post by gi-jane:

That seitan example is actually a good one of why the CC grading system works.   It's a heavily processed food containing protein and not much else which means it's something to be consumed in very small amounts rather than being the main feature of someone's diet.  Hence the D grading. 

The majority of anyone's diet should be fresh vegetables, simple grains, fruit and so forth.   If you do that consistently and use other foods in smaller quantities to balance them out, you'll have a very healthy diet and probably A grades all the way.

I normally agree with you, gi-jane, but not in this case.  While vital wheat gluten itself is processed, it is just a shortcut ingredient and doesn't affect the nutritional outcome of the product.  I used to make seitan the traditional way (out of whole wheat flour and water), but it is simply messier to make it that way than to buy vital wheat gluten.  The recipe I make now has the same nutritional value as when I used flour and water, the nutritional system is simply penalizing me for having the gluten separated at a factory rather than in my sink.

Honestly, I think this is a case of processing paranoia gone too far.  Seitan, even in a generous amount, is not a barrier to a healthy diet by any estimation.  Wheat protein doesn't magically become unhealthy when it is no longer physically bound to wheat starches.  Besides, the recipe I adapted mine from was developed by an RD for her patients.  Tofu, bread, tempeh, pasta, yogurt, white rice, and peanut butter are all equally (if not more) processed foods and any of us should be shocked to find those foods rated so low.  And surely you should grant that wheat gluten shouldn't be ranked lower than something like Cocoa Krispies.

Edit to add: On a broader level, I simply don't think that the "low grade means only eat small amounts" is a proper use of letter grades.  As someone who works in education, I would never tell a student that they should try to get Cs, Ds, and Fs on small assignments and get As on big assignments so that their average still comes out to an A.   Ultimately, I think the very problem is that the grading system is designed to evaluate every food stuff as though you are proposing to eat it for every meal.  Therefore, unless the grade has been manually adjusted (as it is for many, many things), the only foods that get high grades are ones that have a fairly unusual balance of macronutrients and vitamins. 

So nice to see that diet products get A's too.