More than three years ago, Cheryl Levy of Littleton, Colorado, attended a health-themed conference with a friend. There, she witnessed a charismatic speaker talk about the importance of exercise and eating better. The speaker claimed he had a new solution that would make it easy for anyone to improve their diet: a food ranking system that would compare the nutrition quality of all the foods on the supermarket shelf. What’s more, the speaker continued, this system would be as reliable as having a nutrition expert shopping beside you and would be so easy to use, it could be learned, understood, and put to work in a matter of seconds.
At the time, Cheryl thought, I love the idea. Too bad I’ll probably never see it in my local supermarket.
The speaker was Dr. David Katz, and he was talking about his latest creation, the NuVal Nutritional Scoring System. But Cheryl wouldn’t experience the system for herself until years later, when a familiar blue hexagon shape—a NuVal Score—caught her eye while shopping at her local King Soopers supermarket.
“I thought, ‘They’re actually doing it!’” she said. “It was wonderful to see.”
Since then, Cheryl has tried new foods, changed what she ate, and found a new way to teach her 10-year-old son about the importance of nutrition, thanks to NuVal Scores. Because of her story and dedication to eat for better nutrition, Cheryl was named NuVal’s “Mom of the Month” for February 2012.
Even before using NuVal Scores, Cheryl was a very conscientious shopper, and spent a lot of time reading nutrition labels, looking for products low in calories, sodium and sugar. While still a label-reader, she says “now I read them for things I never would have thought about buying before.”
Cheryl said NuVal Scores have guided her to more nutritious choices in everything from bread to deli meats to soups to eggs. “It can be confusing to know what’s the best thing to buy,” she said. “Sometimes, I felt like I was going ‘eeney, meeney, miney, moe’ when choosing.” Using NuVal Scores cut through a lot of the clutter and made shopping easier, she said.
One area where NuVal Scores helped dramatically was in shopping for food with her son, and in how it taught him how to shop for better nutrition.
“Before, he would just go for the boxes that looked like they were yummy, but now he looks at the score. We used to read labels together, but he’s a 10-year-old. He doesn’t know what the sodium level means,” she said. “With NuVal, I can point to the score and say, ‘see?’ I can now tell him to find the best NuVal score he can in (the product) he wants while I shop for other things.”
“Many times, I’ll tell him, if you want to buy a certain food, it has to have (a NuVal Score) of at least two digits,” she said. “One day, he found a candy bar that scored in the double digits (a Payday bar, which gets a NuVal Score of 23) and he was so excited. I got it for him; that was his reward for reading the scores and finding something better.”
As for Cheryl and her husband, they’ve also been rewarded by losing some weight and now feel they have a guide to help them find better foods in the supermarket.
Cheryl has been a dedicated shopper at King Soopers for more than six years, and said the addition of NuVal Scores “definitely” make her want to continue shopping there for the foreseeable future.
“The reason I switched to King Soopers in the first place was because I loved the way they made it easy to find natural and organic foods,” she said. “NuVal takes it a step further. For me, it makes it easier to shop there.”
Just in case you missed our first NuVal Mom of the Month, you can read Sally Galvin’s story here.
We Want To Hear From You!
We want to hear from you moms out there with great stories to tell. How has The NuVal System impacted your life? Do you feel more confident in your shopping? Are your kids eating better? Have you lost weight or changed your life as a result of NuVal? If you’re willing to share your story with others, please email it along with a photo or two to info@nuval.com. For each story that we receive, we’ll mail you a NuVal® Moms shirt, and welcome you to our Moms Club and enter you to win a $100 American Express gift card! And, we’ll select a NuVal® Mom of the Month who will receive a big prize and be one of the celebrated faces of NuVal. We can’t wait to hear from you!
Developed by an independent panel of nutrition and medical experts, the 