Overview
Calories tell you how much. Food Quality tells you what of. It is a 0–100 reading of the composition of the food you recorded on one date, and it is completely independent of whether you hit your calorie target.
Both readings matter and neither substitutes for the other. A day can land exactly on target and be built entirely from refined carbohydrate; a day can run over and be built from vegetables, fish, and whole grains.
How it’s calculated
Eleven contributors, per 1,000 kcal
The score is deterministic. A model never emits points, health copy, or a score. It only fills in evidence about what a food is. A shared scorer then does the arithmetic, the same way every time.
Every contributor is measured per 1,000 kcal, which is what makes a small day and a large day comparable.
Adequacy (more is better):
| Contributor | Measured as |
|---|---|
| Non-starchy vegetables | Cup-equivalents per 1,000 kcal |
| Whole fruit | Cup-equivalents per 1,000 kcal |
| Whole and mixed grains | Ounce-equivalents per 1,000 kcal |
| Nuts, seeds, and legumes | Ounce-equivalents per 1,000 kcal |
| Fish and seafood | Ounce-equivalents per 1,000 kcal |
| Unsaturated-to-saturated fat balance | A ratio |
Moderation (less is better):
| Contributor | Measured as |
|---|---|
| Processed meat | Grams per 1,000 kcal |
| Sodium | Milligrams per 1,000 kcal |
| Added sugar | Percent of energy |
| Saturated fat | Percent of energy |
| Alcohol | Grams |
Each contributor has a lower standard where it earns nothing and an upper standard where it earns its full points, with a straight line between them. Nothing is all-or-nothing: moving halfway toward the standard earns half the points. The contributors are weighted differently: vegetables, whole fruit, whole grains, fat balance, sodium, added sugar, saturated fat, processed meat, and alcohol carry more than nuts, seeds, legumes, fish, and seafood, and the weighted total is mapped to 0–100.
Day score and meal score are different questions
- A meal’s contribution is what it did to this date, in this order. It is
shown as
+Nor−N. - A meal’s own score is what the meal is, read from its own foods on the same 0–100 scale, unmoved by the rest of the day.
Meal scores are never averaged into the day score. A meal can score well on its own and still contribute little to a date that already had plenty of vegetables.
Edge cases and fallbacks
- Below the meal calorie floor, a meal has no score. The date has no such floor: it speaks as soon as recorded food contributes positive covered energy.
- An empty or entirely uncovered date stays unscored.
- A meal still analyzing makes the date answer
analyzingrather than the score it held before, because the foods that analysis will add are not yet in what the scorer read. - Historical assessments are snapshots: Later catalog or classifier changes do not rewrite them.
- Missing evidence is not treated as zero: it waits.
How to read your score
Read it as a composition reading, not a moral one:
- Direction over level: a month of 60s rising to 70s is the useful signal. A single 45 after a birthday dinner is not.
- The contributor breakdown is the most useful part: “Sodium cost you eight points today” changes tomorrow’s shopping. “Your day scored 58” does not.
- A high score is not permission to ignore calories, and a perfect calorie day is not a quality day. They measure different things on purpose.
The most common misreading: assuming a low score means you ate badly. It often means you ate narrowly. The adequacy contributors are earned by presence, so a day with no vegetables, no fruit, no fish, and no whole grains leaves points on the table before a single moderation penalty applies.
What to do with it
- Add before you subtract: Six of the eleven contributors reward presence. Adding a vegetable side moves more than removing a snack.
- Fix the contributor with the biggest gap, not the one you feel worst about.
- Watch sodium and added sugar as percentages, not as villains: Both are measured relative to your energy, so a large day carries more of both before it is penalised.
- Let the coach read the breakdown with you: it can cite which contributors moved and what a realistic next step looks like, grounded in the same numbers you can see.
Troubleshooting & FAQs
- I ate very little today. Why is my Food Quality low?
- The scale reads composition per 1,000 kcal, so eating less does not raise it. A small day of refined carbohydrate has the same composition as a large one. What does move it is what the calories were made of.
- Why does one meal show a score and another shows none?
- A meal below the calorie floor has no score at all. The scale reads composition per 1,000 kcal, so a calorie-free drink has neither adequacy nor excess and would otherwise be published at the exact middle of the scale, which would be meaningless. The day itself has no such floor.
- I edited an old meal and its score did not change. Is that broken?
- Stored assessments do not follow later catalog or classifier changes; historical evidence is not rewritten when a food's profile is updated. Editing the meal's own foods does re-score it; a change to the underlying food catalog does not reach back.