Are Lucky Charms Better Than Steak?
Having a foundational education in sports nutrition knowledge is so important to critically evaluate the information being spread about food and nutrition.
Are Lucky Charms better than steak?
I want to start off by answering that question. No, Lucky Charms are not better than steak. But I also want to add some context to why I’m asking that question. Recently, The Good Rancher released a “sensationalized” article regarding the Tufts Food Compass. If you’re unfamiliar, the Tufts Food Compass is a food product scoring system that assesses the “healthfulness” of a food or beverage. The food/beverage scores are broken down into categories like fruits, seafood/dairy/eggs/meat, grains and even mixed dishes. However, the article made a combined graphic and lumped all of the scores together across categories. So, the main problem with the Good Ranchers article is that they took the overall scoring of these foods from different categories, and mashed them together to look like this (see multi-color image above).
The original graphs from individual categories are shown above.
Even separately, I can’t entirely agree with all of these scores. Some make sense while others make little sense. The scoring system accounts for nutrient ratios, vitamins, minerals, additives, processing, fiber, protein, phytochemicals, etc. But what about foods high in nutrients people typically don’t get enough of? What if a food high in vitamins and minerals is fortified with those nutrients, but holds very little nutritive value otherwise? Shouldn’t a whole food that’s also high in those nutrients score high, or even higher? Saying that lucky charms are healthier than steak is, to me, a strange statement. They both provide different macronutrients, one primarily carbs, and the other primarily protein and different macronutrients. Lucky Charms are fortified with micronutrients, whereas steak/beef naturally has high levels of iron, zinc, selenium, riboflavin, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, phosphorus, pantothenate, magnesium and potassium. The article is quite misleading by taking foods from two different categories, that were scored based on looking at the different foods in the same category.
I feel like I say this all the time, but this is yet another example of why you shouldn’t believe everything you hear and see on the internet! Having a foundational education in sports nutrition knowledge is so important to be able to critically evaluate the information that is being spread about food and nutrition.
-Claire Igoe MS, RD, LDN
