Minnesota School Tests New Food System | News

There's a new program in Minnesota to help kids eat better at school.

It's called the NuVal system, and the Sartell School District is just the second in the country to test the program.

The system assigns point values to food, so hopefully students can more easily make healthy decisions. For instance, you can compare a bag of chips that scores '24' to an apple that scores '96.'

"Students have a very limited amount of time to spend eating lunch and making their food purchases, so now they can say 'I want to be healthy, this is better than that, and I can trade up and make the healthy choice,'" says Jodi Ruhe of CentraCare, which is helping the school start the program.

"What we want to do is make the healthy choice the easy choice for students... and they can make a choice really simply without having to know all the nutritional information."

The school has funny posters with Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber in vegetable form promoting the good food choices.

However, not everything is scored. Right now there are 145 a la carte and vending machine products are labeled. Students are not able to make comparisons with main items such as hot dogs and french fries. The school hopes to add numbers for more items as the program progresses.