Fact Check: Are Nutrient Profiling Systems Helpful?

Nutrient profiling systems have been around for a while now. They let the consumer understand the nutritional value of each item and help them understand what works best for their diet.

However, these nutrient profiling systems address specific aspects of nutrition and diet instead of focusing on everything on nutrition. It’s important to understand what this system does and how it’s helpful for any diet.

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How do nutrient profiling systems help?

When you’re following a diet, there’s no way of knowing how many carbs, proteins and fats anything contains unless that information is available on the packaging.

Without that information, it’s quite difficult for people to have a proper diet, and there will be an extreme 'trial and error' system involved.

Ideally, each profile should provide the consumer with four elements of information, if not more - carbohydrates, fats, proteins and calories.

These are usually mentioned as per one serving of the item. This tool has been extremely helpful over the years for fitness enthusiasts and coaches who want to create diet charts for themselves and their clients.

Usually, food manufacturers are always focused on providing this information to help consumers understand which product to purchase and which not to.

Now, nutrient profiling systems aren’t all that good either. If you’re following a strict diet, your only focus will always be on the information rather than the food itself.

That can trigger an eating disorder or make you feel demotivated to follow the diet. The reason being, the more you focus on nutritional information, the more you restrict yourself from various types of foods that you might be craving.

That will deplete your motivation and even affect your mental health. It’s well known that food often triggers the feeling of happiness, so constantly restricting food in some shape or form will affect your mental health to a degree.

Moreover, it’s not completely easy to create a diet chart by only focusing on the nutritional values provided by the packaging.

It limits your choices and forces you to choose from good foods and avoid the bad ones. You will have to create a diet based on foods that match the ranking system and nothing apart from that.

That might become a problem if you truly love eating something, and the packaging does not come with nutritional information. Such instances can cause you to force yourself into making a choice that you don’t want to make.

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Can you avoid nutrient profiling systems?

There is no way to completely avoid the system, but you can choose to avoid the information. This is the only way you can add it to your diet without having to think about nutritional information all the time.

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Bottom line

It's a good practice to keep an eye on the nutritional information of food, especially when you’re trying to follow a diet and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The idea is to stick to a certain number of calories a day with a proper macronutrient division. If you don't know how many calories you’re consuming from a product, it’ll become quite difficult to stick to your daily calorie requirements.

In fact, nutrient profiling systems are extremely helpful for someone who wants to lose weight. It doesn’t take much to cross the daily calories and move to a surplus. To stay in a proper deficit, you need to be able to know the food you’re eating.

Meanwhile, when you’re eating on a calorie surplus, it’ll be easier to find the information, and even if you're slightly overboard, it’s not going to affect you as much unless you’re on an extremely strict calorie surplus diet.