Nutri Score, Part 2

In a previous post I talked about Nutri Scores. I thought I had them all figured out.

Then we went to Germany. I stopped at a grocery store to buy some things for our lunch. I went to buy some lunch meat. They had scores of “D” and “E”. I realize that German meats have a lot of fat and salt, but I was surprised to see an E given that a stick of margarine is a D. Granted, it was on some meat that was labeled “sausage ham”, but I still have a hard time believing that it is worse for me than eating a plain stick of butter. At least the ham has some protein in it.

After doing some searching, I found that Nutri Score calculations are based on the amount of good stuff (fruit, vegetables, nuts, fiber, protein) minus the amount of bad stuff (sugar, salt, saturated fats, calories). Each category has its own point system (e.g., 1 gram of salt is not equivalent to 1 gram of vegetables).

However, for oil, butter, etc. are a little bit different. Specifically, they don’t care about absolute saturated fat levels but rather percent of total fat. Furthermore, calories and saturated fat have point caps such that unsalted butter/margarine will never be an E. It needs the added salt (or sugar) to push it into the E category.

Thus, ham with an E score is not actually worse for you than unsalted margarine with a D score. The ham is less bad on the fat and calories dimensions, but the fact that it has salt gets it pushed into the E category.