Key Takeaways (expand)
- Nutrient density measures the amount of essential nutrients in a food relative to its calorie content, guiding choices toward more nutrient-rich options.
- Previous nutrient profiling systems have faced limitations, such as inconsistent nutrient inclusion, data gaps, and potential biases against certain food types.
- The Nutrivore Score addresses these limitations by offering a comprehensive, unbiased evaluation of nutrient density based on a full nutrient profile per calorie.
- Designed independently of specific dietary guidelines, the Nutrivore Score provides consumers with a straightforward, accessible way to identify nutrient-dense foods across all categories.
- Including over 30 essential nutrients, the Nutrivore Score reflects current data and is adaptable to new research, ensuring it remains a reliable resource as nutritional science evolves.
- By encouraging nutrient-dense choices, the Nutrivore Score promotes balanced eating patterns that support daily nutrient needs and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.
Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
The concept of Nutrivore is very simple: Choose foods such that the total of all the nutrients contained within those foods adds up throughout the day to meet or safely exceed our daily requirements for the full complement of essential and nonessential (but still very important) nutrients, while also staying within our caloric requirements. The easiest way to do this is to have the foundation of the diet be a wide variety of nutrient-dense whole and minimally-processed foods, including selections from all of the nutritionally distinct food families. But, how do we identify the most nutrient-dense options? That’s where the Nutrivore Score comes in!
The Nutrivore Score is a measurement of the total amount of nutrients per calorie a food contains.
The Nutrivore Score is a way to quantify the nutrient-density of foods and make the nutritional evaluation of foods objective. Nutrient density is a core concept in nutritional science, serving as a guide to assess the quality of foods based on their concentration of essential nutrients relative to caloric content. This article examines the evolution and challenges in defining nutrient density, analyzing how existing nutrient profiling methods, despite their usefulness, often lack consistency and precision. The Nutrivore Score is an advanced, comprehensive model that attempts to address these issues by emphasizing a holistic approach to nutrient sufficiency. Integrating diverse nutrients and focusing on maximizing nutritional benefits per calorie, the Nutrivore Score provides a clearer, consumer-friendly tool for understanding and applying nutrient density in dietary choices. We can use the Nutrivore Score as a tool to identify the most nutrient-dense options within every food group and subgroup, to inform your day-to-day choices.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to do any math! I’ve provided all of the Nutrivore Scores in a searchable database here. Below, I’ll explain the scientific foundation for the Nutrivore Score, the data sources, and how it’s calculated. But, if you want to skip this more technical discussion and just start using the Nutrivore Score, no worries, my feelings aren’t hurt!
Nutrivore Score Search
Look up the Nutrivore Score of any food in the database of 8,000 foods.
Why Use the Nutrivore Score?
The Nutrivore Score was developed to address longstanding gaps in nutrient profiling, providing a comprehensive and user-friendly tool that captures the full spectrum of nutrients in a food relative to its caloric content. Unlike traditional nutrient density measures, which often focus on isolated nutrients or broad food groups, the Nutrivore Score evaluates each food based on its entire nutrient profile. This method ensures that high-nutrient foods are not overlooked simply because they are rich in certain fats or have higher energy density, as was the case with previous scoring systems.
The primary goals of the Nutrivore Score are to:
- Improve Public Understanding of Nutrient Density: The Nutrivore Score offers a straightforward way for consumers to assess nutrient-dense foods, empowering them to make informed choices that support balanced and healthful diets.
- Encourage Comprehensive Nutrient Intake: By valuing both macro- and micronutrients along with phytonutrients, the Nutrivore Score promotes nutrient sufficiency across a wide range of nutrients, encouraging more varied and complete dietary patterns.
- Support Health and Disease Prevention: The score is grounded in evidence linking nutrient-dense diets to reduced risk of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. By helping consumers identify foods with high nutrient-to-calorie ratios, the Nutrivore Score aims to guide choices that support long-term health outcomes.
- Reduce Confusion from Conflicting Dietary Advice: The Nutrivore Score provides a consistent, objective standard that remains independent of specific dietary guidelines or trends. Rather than conforming to current dietary fads, the Nutrivore Score focuses purely on the nutrient composition of foods, giving consumers an unbiased tool for healthier eating.
Through these goals, the Nutrivore Score seeks to redefine how nutrient density is understood and applied in everyday diets. This approach encourages individuals to maximize their nutrient intake without excessive calories, aligning with broader public health efforts to combat malnutrition, overnutrition, and diet-related chronic diseases.
Challenges in Nutrient Profiling
The concept of nutrient density is foundational in modern nutrition science, yet defining and measuring it accurately remains challenging. Nutrient-dense foods provide essential nutrients relative to their caloric content, but varying definitions and measurement approaches have led to inconsistencies in identifying these foods. This article examines the historical evolution of nutrient density, the challenges in establishing standardized nutrient profiling methods, and the limitations of existing scoring systems. It highlights the need for an independent, evidence-based approach to nutrient profiling that prioritizes nutrient sufficiency over adherence to dietary guidelines, ultimately aiming to improve public health by promoting a clearer understanding of what constitutes a nutrient-dense diet.
The Nutrivore Score Calculation
The Nutrivore Score is a measure of how much nutrients, relative to the daily value (DV), a food contains per calorie, i.e., it is a way to quantify the nutrient density of a food.
When we look at nutrient profiling methods described in the scientific literature, it becomes abundantly clear that a nutrient-density score best describes a food when:
- it includes as many nutrients as possible,
- the contribution of nutrients are not capped at 100% DV,
- they are presented relative to calories,
- they are not weighted by food groups, and
- they are not normalized to a fixed scale.
All of the above logic is applied algorithmically to the Nutrivore Score calculation, making this nutrient density score the most comprehensive, and least biased, method for representing the inherent nutrient content of foods. It is an incredibly useful tool for identifying the most nutrition foods, borne out of a confusing array of similar, yet all flawed, nutrient density scores, while recognizing the current limitations posed by incomplete data.
The Nutrivore Score is calculated as the sum of each nutrient relative to its RDA or AI present in 100 grams of the food, divided by the amount of calories per 100 grams.
Of course, you don’t need to do any math! You can simply search the Nutrivore Score database here!
The Nutrients Included in the Calculation
The Nutrivore Score is calculated based on 32+1 nutrients. The 32 primary nutrients that go into the score are:
Further, the Nutrivore Score adds the highest value of available data for one bonus nutrient (that’s the +1), relative to a threshold set using epidemiological studies for that nutrient, similar to a %DV. The bonus nutrient currently can be any of: glucosinolates (the precursor for isothiocyanates and indoles), thiosulfinates, CoQ10, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), betaine, betalains, myo-inositol, ergothioneine, taurine and medium-chain triglycerides.
The reason why only one bonus nutrient is included in the Nutrivore Score is because incomplete data would mean less common foods are unnecessarily penalized. Where the level of multiple nutrients in a food remain unknown, the Nutrivore Score is marked with a footnote to denote that the score is likely underestimated for that food and should be thought of as a minimum.
Additionally, where non-caloric sweeteners or fats affect the nutrient density of a food, inflating the Nutrivore Score, this is also marked with a footnote. Similarly, fortified foods are also marked with a footnote indicating that the addition of vitamin or mineral fortification is also inflating the Nutrivore Score.
The Nutrivore Score Dataset
The primary dataset for the Nutrivore Score calculation is the USDA Food Central Database. Data that’s not included in the Food Central Database are obtained from scientific papers and other databases like Phenol Explorer and other national databases whenever possible. When multiple papers report the amount of a nutrient for a particular food, the highest value is utilized, unless there’s a clear methodological advantage to one specific measurement, and provided it is no more than one standard deviation from the mean of all available data (in which case, the second highest value is utilized following the same statistical test).
It is unusual for there to be nutrient data for different quality levels of a food. For example, the Food Central database contains only one entry for olive oil, but research has shown that the polyphenol content of virgin olive oil can range from anywhere between 50 to 5000 mg/kg, and the vitamin E content can range from 100 to over 1000 mg/kg. When possible, Nutrivore Scores are calculated for different quality levels of the same food by using data from scientific studies for those nutrients where quality impacts nutrient concentration in the food.
Another example, even though locally-grown, in-season organic vegetables and fruit are known to have higher nutrient density (due to being grown in higher quality soil, picked ripe, and eaten much sooner after harvest), there are no separate entries in the Food Central database for organic versus conventionally-grown produce. For this reason, we can think of Nutrivore Scores as a minimum or average value and feel confident that the effort to seek out higher quality options (grass-fed meat, wild-caught fish, fresh cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil, and local in-season vegetables and fruit) is still nutritionally valuable if currently not quantifiable.
Corrections (or Lack Thereof) to the Nutrivore Score
Rather than penalizing for the presence of nutrients whose excess is associated with health problems (like saturated fats, sodium and sugars), these nutrients are simply not included in the Nutrivore Score calculation. It is helpful to note that foods high in fats and sugars have a higher energy density, meaning more calories per gram or per serving of food, which does lower the Nutrivore Score.
In addition, the presence of antinutrients such as phytates or oxalates are not taken into account. This is because the impact of antinutrients on nutrient absorption is extremely context dependent. For example, our gut bacteria can liberate a substantial amount of the calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium and zinc bound to phytates for us, thereby releasing the bound minerals as well as phosphorus and thereby enhancing their bioavailability. A healthy, diverse gut microbiome can typically degrade about half (about 500 to 600 mg daily) of the phytate consumed in the average American diet. Other factors influencing bioavailability include health of the gastrointestinal tracts, nutrient status, competitive binding with other nutrients, meal composition, various drugs and supplements, time of day and biorhythms, age and gender. It doesn’t make sense to try to reflect nutrient digestibility and absorption in the Nutrivore Score when the system is so complex and varies from individual to individual.
Want to Know the Top 100 Nutrivore Score Foods?
Get it Directly in Your Inbox!
The Nutrivore Newsletter is a weekly email that delivers bite-size fun facts, practical tips, recipes and resources. Sign up now and get 5 free guides directly to your inbox:
- Easy Steps to Nutrivore 4-page guide
- Nutrivore Foundational Foods 6-page guide
- Nutrivore Score Guide to Food Groups 3-page guide
- Nutrivore Meal Map
- Top 100 Nutrivore Score Foods
Future Updates to the Nutrivore Score
As more nutrient data become available, the Nutrivore Score will be updated to reflect more complete nutritional information. This obviously applies to missing nutrition information from the Food Central database, but there’s also the likelihood of adding nutrients to the Nutrivore Score calculation in the future. For example, a protein digestibility score, soluble versus insoluble fiber, trace minerals, functional nonproteinogenic amino acids and peptides, functional fatty acids, and vitamin-like compounds that aren’t currently utilized to calculate the Nutrivore Score could all be added once there is sufficient data to rationalize their inclusion. For now, extremely sparse data makes this prohibitive, and similarly would reward foods simply for being better studied, not necessarily for inherently higher nutritional value, relative to less common foods.
Benefits of the Nutrivore Score
The Nutrivore Score provides a unique and powerful tool for navigating nutrient density and making informed dietary choices. By evaluating foods based on their complete nutrient profile per calorie, the Nutrivore Score addresses the limitations of previous nutrient profiling methods, offering a comprehensive, unbiased measure of nutrient density. This score enables consumers to identify the most nutrient-dense options within every food group, supporting a balanced, nutrient-rich diet that aligns with individual health goals and public health recommendations.
Through its focus on nutrient sufficiency, the Nutrivore Score encourages a dietary approach that not only meets daily nutritional requirements but also contributes to long-term health and disease prevention. By prioritizing a diverse range of whole, minimally processed foods, the Nutrivore Score simplifies the often complex task of building a balanced, health-promoting diet. Based on a strong foundation of scientific research, the Nutrivore Score empowers individuals to make smarter food choices, maximizing nutrition without excess calories, and fostering a sustainable, health-conscious way of eating.
Nutrivore Score Search
Look up the Nutrivore Score of any food in the database of 8,000 foods.
Learn More About the Nutrivore Score
Nutrivore Score Search
Look up the Nutrivore Score of any food in the database of 8,000 foods.
Want to know the top 500 most nutrient-dense foods?
Top 500 Nutrivore Foods
The Top 500 Nutrivore Foods e-book is an amazing reference deck of the top 500 most nutrient-dense foods according to their Nutrivore Score. Think of it as the go-to resource for a super-nerd, to learn more and better understand which foods stand out, and why!
If you are looking for a quick-reference guide to help enhance your diet with nutrients, and dive into the details of your favorite foods, this book is your one-stop-shop!
Buy now for instant digital access.
Citations
Expand to see all scientific references for this article.
Chiuve SE, Sampson L, Willett WC. The association between a nutritional quality index and risk of chronic disease. Am J Prev Med. 2011 May;40(5):505-13. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2010.11.022. PMID: 21496749; PMCID: PMC3100735.
Darmon N, Briend A, Drewnowski A. Energy-dense diets are associated with lower diet costs: a community study of French adults. Public Health Nutr. 2004 Feb;7(1):21-7. doi: 10.1079/phn2003512. PMID: 14972068.
Darmon N, Darmon M, Maillot M, Drewnowski A. A nutrient density standard for vegetables and fruits: nutrients per calorie and nutrients per unit cost. J Am Diet Assoc. 2005 Dec;105(12):1881-7. doi: 10.1016/j.jada.2005.09.005. PMID: 16321593.
Drewnowski A , Burton-Freeman B . A new category-specific nutrient rich food (NRF9f.3) score adds flavonoids to assess nutrient density of fruit. Food Funct. 2020 Jan 29;11(1):123-130. doi: 10.1039/c9fo02344e. PMID: 31938797.
Drewnowski A, Dwyer J, King JC, Weaver CM. A proposed nutrient density score that includes food groups and nutrients to better align with dietary guidance. Nutr Rev. 2019 Jun 1;77(6):404-416. doi: 10.1093/nutrit/nuz002. PMID: 31222368; PMCID: PMC6489166.
Drewnowski A, Fulgoni V 3rd. Nutrient profiling of foods: creating a nutrient-rich food index. Nutr Rev. 2008 Jan;66(1):23-39. doi: 10.1111/j.1753-4887.2007.00003.x. PMID: 18254882.
Drewnowski A, Fulgoni VL 3rd. Nutrient density: principles and evaluation tools. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014 May;99(5 Suppl):1223S-8S. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.113.073395. Epub 2014 Mar 19. PMID: 24646818.
Drewnowski A, Maillot M, Darmon N. Testing nutrient profile models in relation to energy density and energy cost. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2009 May;63(5):674-83. doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2008.16. Epub 2008 Feb 20. PMID: 18285808.
Drewnowski A, Smith J, Fulgoni VL 3rd. The New Hybrid Nutrient Density Score NRFh 4:3:3 Tested in Relation to Affordable Nutrient Density and Healthy Eating Index 2015: Analyses of NHANES Data 2013-16. Nutrients. 2021 May 20;13(5):1734. doi: 10.3390/nu13051734. PMID: 34065287; PMCID: PMC8160959.
Drewnowski A. Concept of a nutritious food: toward a nutrient density score. Am J Clin Nutr. 2005 Oct;82(4):721-32. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/82.4.721. PMID: 16210699.
Drewnowski A. Defining nutrient density: development and validation of the nutrient rich foods index. J Am Coll Nutr. 2009 Aug;28(4):421S-426S. doi: 10.1080/07315724.2009.10718106. PMID: 20368382.
Drewnowski A. The Nutrient Rich Foods Index helps to identify healthy, affordable foods. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Apr;91(4):1095S-1101S. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.2010.28450D. Epub 2010 Feb 24. PMID: 20181811.
Fernández-Ríos A, Laso J, Campos C, Ruiz-Salmón I, Hoehn D, Cristóbal J, Batlle-Bayer L, Bala A, Fullana-I-Palmer P, Puig R, Aldaco R, Margallo M. Towards a Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus index: A review of nutrient profile models as a fundamental pillar of food and nutrition security. Sci Total Environ. 2021 Oct 1;789:147936. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.147936. Epub 2021 May 21. PMID: 34082212.
Fulgoni VL 3rd, Keast DR, Drewnowski A. Development and validation of the nutrient-rich foods index: a tool to measure nutritional quality of foods. J Nutr. 2009 Aug;139(8):1549-54. doi: 10.3945/jn.108.101360. Epub 2009 Jun 23. PMID: 19549759.
Imai C, Takimoto H, Fudono A, Tarui I, Aoyama T, Yago S, Okamitsu M, Sasaki S, Mizutani S, Miyasaka N, Sato N. Application of the Nutrient-Rich Food Index 9.3 and the Dietary Inflammatory Index for Assessing Maternal Dietary Quality in Japan: A Single-Center Birth Cohort Study. Nutrients. 2021 Aug 19;13(8):2854. doi: 10.3390/nu13082854. PMID: 34445014; PMCID: PMC8400739.
Maillot M, Darmon N, Darmon M, Lafay L, Drewnowski A. Nutrient-dense food groups have high energy costs: an econometric approach to nutrient profiling. J Nutr. 2007 Jul;137(7):1815-20. doi: 10.1093/jn/137.7.1815. PMID: 17585036.
Miller GD, Drewnowski A, Fulgoni V, Heaney RP, King J, Kennedy E. It is time for a positive approach to dietary guidance using nutrient density as a basic principle. J Nutr. 2009 Jun;139(6):1198-202. doi: 10.3945/jn.108.100842. Epub 2009 Apr 1. PMID: 19339707.
Mobley AR, Kraemer D, Nicholls J. Putting the nutrient-rich foods index into practice. J Am Coll Nutr. 2009 Aug;28(4):427S-435S. doi: 10.1080/07315724.2009.10718107. PMID: 20368383.
Murakami K, Livingstone MBE, Fujiwara A, Sasaki S. Application of the Healthy Eating Index-2015 and the Nutrient-Rich Food Index 9.3 for assessing overall diet quality in the Japanese context: Different nutritional concerns from the US. PLoS One. 2020 Jan 30;15(1):e0228318. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228318. PMID: 31999772; PMCID: PMC6992222.
Murakami K, Livingstone MBE, Fujiwara A, Sasaki S. Reproducibility and Relative Validity of the Healthy Eating Index-2015 and Nutrient-Rich Food Index 9.3 Estimated by Comprehensive and Brief Diet History Questionnaires in Japanese Adults. Nutrients. 2019 Oct 21;11(10):2540. doi: 10.3390/nu11102540. PMID: 31640242; PMCID: PMC6836176.
Streppel MT, Sluik D, van Yperen JF, Geelen A, Hofman A, Franco OH, Witteman JC, Feskens EJ. Nutrient-rich foods, cardiovascular diseases and all-cause mortality: the Rotterdam study. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2014 Jun;68(6):741-7. doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2014.35. Epub 2014 Mar 19. PMID: 24642783.
