Healthy Nutrition｜Food Compass

A study published in Nature Food announced that the Food Compass version has been updated.

So what is Food Compass?

Food Compass is a new nutrient analysis system developed by a team of researchers at Tufts University.Contemporary people are facing increasingly complex diets. There are so many new brands, products and ingredients that it is difficult to distinguish how to choose healthy food by oneself! To solve this problem, a team of researchers from Tufts University in the United States has developed a new tool- Food Compass.

The researchers scored foods and beverages based on 9 health-related domains and 54 attributes such as nutrient ratios per unit calorie of food, vitamins, minerals, food ingredients, additives, processed substances, specific lipids, fiber/proteins, phytochemicals, etc., and then added the scores of the domains to arrive at the final Food Compass score.

Food Compass 2.0 builds on the original by adding scores for food-mixed meals, allowing for higher scores for recipes that include starchy staples and other healthy ingredients, and is able to provide important differentiation for food-processing categorization, which supports Food Compass's alignment with modern nutritional science and diverse food cultures that value traditional eating patterns. The results of the study indicate that Food Compass 2.0 has an improved ability to assess the healthfulness of foods and beverages and can be validated against healthy eating patterns and health outcomes.

Food Compass 2.0 performed well by researchers who scored the daily meals of 47,099 representative U.S. adults (the energy-weighted average FCS of each person's intake of food and beverages, or i.FCS) and then validated it based on health outcomes.

The researchers took 9,273 foods and beverages from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and categorized them into 12 broad categories and 44 subcategories.

In the Food Compass system, each food, beverage or mixed dish receives a final score ranging from 1 (least healthy) to 100 (healthiest). Researchers identified foods and beverages with a score of 70 (excellent) or higher as ones that should be encouraged; those with a score of 31-69 (passing) should be consumed in moderation; and anything with a score of 30 (failing) or lower should be consumed sparingly.

So scoring food, does it really work?

Nowadays, food is being updated at a rapid pace, and with nutritional science itself being an ever-changing science, we are in an era of rapid scientific advancement.Food Compass's consistent scoring of different foods helps to help us assess and compare the health of combinations of foods and beverages that may be marketed or consumed together, and gives us an initial understanding of food, making it simple for people to make relatively healthy judgments.