Nutrition Scores

Kiashu

This feature rolled out here today, and is discussed here. This is interesting, but to some extent seems rigged against us - for example, the "Minerals" category includes chromium, fluoride, iodine and molybdenum - five elements which are by default not displayed in the nutritional reports, and for which little or no nutritional data is available. What's a good source of molybdenum? Should I be trying to chip off bits from my stainless steel pot? Likewise things like lycopene.

So, because the data is absent, the consumption reads as 0% for that category, and lowers our score there. This seems like a good way to get a nocebo effect going, which is particularly dangerous when dealing with something people tend to obsess over, like food.

Realistically, if you want to get this deep into the weeds with all this stuff, more data will be needed. As well, most of this stuff is going to completely overwhelm a newbie, so I would suggest some global setting of complexity, like,

Level 1 = calories and highlighted nutrients only - nothing else displayed
Level 2 = calories, highlighted nutrients and macronutrients (carbohydrates, fibre, fat, protein)
Level 3 = as above, plus vitamins and minerals
Level 4 = the whole hog

Karen_Cronometer

Hi Kiashu,

Thanks for your feedback on Nutrition Scores. I love your levels idea (of course I want the whole hog!)

We thought about this as well. Since data is very important to us, we introduced the Data Quality score, as well as giving you the confidence score for each category based on the number of foods in your diary that have data available for each nutrient in the score. We hope this will help users find foods in our database that have more complete nutrition data if they are interested in tracking micronutrients i.e. using lab analyzed data from NCCDB and USDA rather than brand name products from CRDB, ESHA, etc.

You can also customize your Nutrition Scores and Highlighted Nutrients to show the ones that are more interesting to you or to show none, if you like a cleaner look to your diary page.

Best,