Plus, CSPI is on the side of the star rankings, which in my experience might as well be an endorsement by Molotov and von Ribbentrop, so to speak.

(Which nutritionists decided that salt was bad? What’s salt do to you that’s so bad unless you already have high blood pressure?

I mean, salt-per-100 calories? And these people are supposed to be nutritionists?)

I’d take the claim that they don’t want people to avoid no-star ratings more seriously if the ranking was 1-4, not 0-3.

“No stars” and “One star” tell very different stories, psychologically – and the people that came up with this ranking system aren’t marketers or psychologists. (I mean, who came up with the display system, not the means of categorisation. The nutritionists can probably manage a 4-way division well enough, though I’m not sure they’re realistic about it. But how to show that 4-way division is not something nutritionists have any special qualifications for.)

Maybe they had no intent to cause an avoidance of the lowest-ranked items, but they sure came up with a mechanism to produce it, anyway.