Join Dr. Sarah on her Science Strolls and learn more about the Nutrivore Philosophy!
The concept of Nutrivore is very simple: Choose foods such that the total of all the nutrients contained within those foods adds up to meet or 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.
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What Is the Nutrivore Score?
The Nutrivore Score is an objective measurement of the total amount of nutrients a food contains per calorie. The Nutrivore Score is a way to quantify the nutrient-density of foods and make the nutritional evaluation of foods objective. We can use the Nutrivore Score as a tool to identify the most nutrient-dense options within every food group and subgroup, to inform our day-to-day choices. There are 33 nutrients that go into the calculation. The Nutrivore calculus takes into account the full cadre of essential nutrients—vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and essential fatty acids—in addition to fiber, phytonutrients, nonessential and conditionally-essential amino acids, nonessential health-promoting fatty acids, and nonessential vitaminlike compounds. This ensures both nutrient synergy as well as prioritizing the full complement of nutrients our bodies need to thrive.
Should We Score Foods?
Should we score foods? This is a difficult question to answer because standard American diet culture has taught us to view foods as either good or bad, so we instinctively view scores in the same way. The Nutrivore Score is a measurement of nutrient density, which means total nutrients per calorie. It provides an important lens through which to look at foods, in order to help us understand what different foods have to offer us nutritionally but shouldn’t be the only things we consider when making food choices. For instance, it doesn’t tell us what nutrients a food contains, nor the nutrients per serving.
Being able to think of foods in a more sophisticated way than ‘bad’ or ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ is important for making healthy eating sustainable, because when you think of a food as bad or yourself as bad if you eat it, you’re engaging with that guilt-blame cycle that tends to lead to falling “off the wagon”. Bottom line, you can eat the emptiest of calorie foods without having an impact on your overall health if the rest of your diet is meeting your nutritional needs. We need to think of the Nutrivore Score as a measurement of nutrient density that does not in any way impart a value judgment on food. It is merely a tool that we can use to identify the most nutrient-dense foods within every food group and subgroup, to inform your day-to-day choices.
Should We Label Foods as ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’?
It’s difficult to talk about improving diet quality without talking about “good” foods or “good” choices. The problem is when we label something as good, we automatically label the opposite as bad. Labelling foods as bad does us a disservice because it implies if you eat a bad food, you’re bad for eating it, and that feeds the guilt blame cycle that can lead to disordered eating.
The problem is that it’s difficult to say a food is an important food nutritionally, without implying it’s good. In part because diet culture has indoctrinated us to label foods as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’. Ultimately, letting go of value judgments of foods is one of the best things we can do to make healthy eating patterns sustainable for our entire lives. It’s a challenge, but one worth tackling.
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- Nutrivore Meal Map
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What Is a “Good” Nutrivore Score?
The Nutrivore Score is a tool to help you improve the overall nutrient density of your diet. A nutrient-dense powerhouse superfood is any food with a Nutrivore Score higher than 800. High nutrient-density foods have a Nutrivore Score between 400 and 8000. Medium nutrient-density foods have a Nutrivore Score between 150 and 400. And, low nutrient-density empty-calorie foods have a Nutrivore Score less than 150. Overall dietary nutrient sufficiency is easy to achieve by selecting a variety of the highest Nutrivore Score foods from the Nutrivore Foundational Foods.
However, it’s important to emphasize that there is no Nutrivore Score above which a food is considered “good” and below which the food is considered “bad”. One of the most important insights into the nutrient-density calculation is that all foods lie on a spectrum. Any food with a Nutrivore Score over 150 will contribute more nutrients than calories to the overall diet, but there are foods with Nutrivore Scores below that threshold that can fill really important nutritional niches. A prime example of this is cheese. The average Nutrivore Score for cheese is 140, but it is also the most concentrated food source of calcium. There are whole foods that score below 150 and ultra-processed foods that score above. Not every food you consume has to be the pinnacle of nutrient-density. You can have a very healthy diet which includes some ‘empty calorie’ foods, not included because they are top 100 Nutrivore Score foods, but because they improve your quality of life. It’s really important to include these foods into our diet because they make healthy eating more sustainable.
Does the Nutrivore Score Penalize for Undesirable Compounds?
The Nutrivore Score does not include a correction or penalize for things such as added sugars, high sodium, saturated fats, cholesterol, oxalates, etc. Why? How these things impact our health is determined by the composition of the whole diet, not any one food in it, though ideally we would keep these compounds within optimal ranges.
The Nutrivore philosophy is to meet all of our body’s nutritional needs from the foods we eat. Since we’re looking at the quality of the diet as a whole, it doesn’t matter if some of the foods you choose are nutritionally underwhelming; they are more than made up for by the other foods you choose that supply ample nutrition.
That’s why a correction was not incorporated to the score to reflect those ingredients or inherent food compounds because their presence doesn’t make a food good or bad. It’s their overabundance in the diet that skews the diet towards a less healthy composition. Instead, Nutrivore.com includes very detailed nutrition information for each featured food so that you can identify those foods that do contain added sugars, sodium etc. and make an informed choice about how much of that food you would like to incorporate into your diet. That being said, sugars and fats do impact the Nutrivore Score because they impact the energy density of a food (the denominator of the calculation). When present at higher levels, the scores are lower.
Bottom line, no one food will make or break your diet or make or break your health!
Are There Negative Nutrivore Score Foods?
Short answer – no! The Nutrivore Score is calculated as the sum of each of 33 nutrients relative to their RDA or AI present in 100 grams of the food, divided by the amount of calories per 100 grams. The primary dataset is the USDA Food Central Database, with additional nutrient data obtained from scientific papers and other databases like Phenol Explorer.
The 32 primary nutrients are protein, fiber, calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorous, potassium, selenium, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B1 (thiamin), vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin B3 (niacin), vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid), vitamin B6 (pyridoxine), vitamin B7 (biotin), vitamin B9 (folate), vitamin B12 (cobalamin), vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin D (D2+D3), vitamin K, choline, monounsaturated fat, linoleic acid, alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), long-chain omega-3 fatty acids (EPA+DHA), carotenoids, phytosterols, and polyphenols.
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, 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.
A negative Nutrivore Score would mean that you got negative nutrients from a food, meaning that eating that food leached nutrients from your body instead of providing nutrients, which isn’t possible! Some foods provide no nutrients and have Nutrivore Scores of 0 but negative nutrient foods is not a thing. It is possible to have an undefined Nutrivore Score. This happens when foods provide 0 calories, such as the case for salt or baking soda. (I like to think of them as Nutrivore singularities because I’m a Nutrivore nerd!)
Everything You Need to Jump into Nutrivore TODAY!
Nutrivore Quickstart Guide
The Nutrivore Quickstart Guide e-book explains why and how to eat a Nutrivore diet, introduces the Nutrivore Score, gives a comprehensive tour of the full range of essential and important nutrients!
Plus, you’ll find the Top 100 Nutrivore Score Foods, analysis of food groups, practical tips to increase the nutrient density of your diet, and look-up tables for the Nutrivore Score of over 700 foods.
Buy now for instant digital access.
Is it More Important to Track the Nutrivore Score or Calories?
Too often, the value of a food is distilled to a simple number, like calories, carb or fat grams, or glycemic index. These reflect the energy in a food, but not the nutrients like vitamins and minerals. So, they don’t tell you how that food contributes nutritionally to your overall diet. While the Nutrivore Score is also a simple measurement, it fills in an important gap in our knowledge. It measures the quality of a food’s energy by telling us how much nutrition it has per calorie.
The best way to ensure we’re getting all of the nutrients we need from the foods we eat is to focus on the 12 Nutrivore foundational food families and to think about the Nutrivore Meal Map. Serving targets are available in the Nutrivore weekly serving matrix and all of these Nutrivore guides are available for free when you join my email list. While these tools allow you to track with Nutrivore, you don’t need to track, especially if you find it triggering. The ultimate goal of all of the resources on Nutrivore.com is to help you eat a more nutrient-dense diet intuitively.
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What if You Hate Veggies?
