The Environmental Working Group has waded into the healthy-food rankings game with a smartphone app and database of 80,000 foods, 5,000 ingredients and 1,500 brands. The new Food Scores guide <www.ewg.org/foodscores> combines nutrition data with ingredient concerns and processing issues to score foods 1 to 10, with 1 being the top cleaner, greener and healthier ranking.
But the Grocery Manufacturers Association trade group calls the result inaccurate and misleading and warns Food Scores will falsely alarm and confuse consumers. Products that arent organic, for example, automatically get dinged a half-point. And those containing low-calorie sweeteners suffer a 3.75-point hit based on concerns they actually increase appetites; the grocery group says support for this scoring is not reflective of consensus science.