Wellness - The Katz Meow

Critics claim doctors know nothing about nutrition. Our distracters say nutrition’s not in medical school curricula; doctors eschew vitamins, supplements, essential minerals, herbs; home remedies, and oriental concoctions; and have no clue about carbohydrates, fats, and proteins . Furthermore, critics assert doctors’ general advice to eat fresh fruit and vegetables and to go easy on the fat, sugar, and salt simply won’t do anymore.


Meanwhile health food stores, “healthy” diets, farmers markets, food labels, and cooking shows are flourishing. Every chef, retailer, and marketer worth their salt claims their food is “healthier” than the competitors.


David Katz, MD, director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Center in New Haven, must be purring these days. He has taken a giant step towards silencing critics of doctors’ lack of nutritional knowledge. He and an academic team have created a rating system called the Overall Nutritional Quality Index, or ONQI. The Katz system will ultimately rate all foods in grocery stores on a 1-to-100 basis, with 100 being the healthiest.


Ric Jurgens, president and CEO of Hy-Vee Grocery Stores, a consolidated grocery store chain, has endorsed the Katz system and bought a stake in the Katz algorithm. His stores will start using it on their shelves next summer.


Doctor Katz came up with the idea for his rating system because he was frustrated. He could not explain to his family and his patients how to interpret food labels and eat the right foods. The food labels in grocery stores befuddled, bewildered, and baffled his family and patients.


What to do? Katz assembled a panel of academics to weigh and rate the nutritional value of vitamins, bioflavonoids, anti-oxidants, sodium, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins, and everything else naughty or nice. So far they have rated 20,000 foods and will have 50,000 more done by next summer.


This is a classic example of creating an innovation to fill needs – patients’ needs for better and more specific information on what constitutes healthy foods, doctors’ needs to provide them with that information, and society’s need for better nutrition.