How healthy is your diet, really?

Did you know the same number of calories can be in the same foods and they can still contain completely different vitamins and nutrients? Case in point, there are 200 calories in both 34 grams of fried bacon and 125 grams of avocado (link), but nutritionally, the two foods couldn’t be more different. Avocado contains 7 grams of fiber and 2.1 grams of saturated fat per 100 grams, while fried bacon contains zero fiber, and almost 7 times the amount of saturated fat.

This is why Lifesum created the food and meal ratings.

Food ratings help you by showing which foods are healthier (despite the number of calories they contain). The ratings are generated based on the ratios of each of the macronutrients they contain, the food group they belong to, and how calorie dense they are (per 100 calories). If the food you’re eating isn’t processed, isn’t very calorie dense, and contains a healthy distribution of carbs, fat, protein, sugar, fiber and sodium, it will get a higher, more positive food rating. These are the kinds of foods you want to eat more of.

Meal ratings are a little different. Obviously when you’re eating a meal, you aren’t always eating a lot of one particular food, but rather a mix of a few different foods. This means that where some foods may be poor in some nutrients, other foods are richer in them, and in this way you get all the nutrients you need from the whole meal. The meal ratings take this into account. They consider how well the meal met your recommended calorie intake amount, what macronutrients and micronutrients made you the meal, and whether foods you ate were healthy overall.

Taking things a step further, the day ratings look at your whole day; considering everything below, so that you can see if you might need to make changes to one or some of your meals, or all of them.

While food ratings and meal ratings aren’t available for meal plans in the app, they are available for diet plans. In the case of diet plans, the rating will adjust based on how well the food meets the criteria set by the specific meal plan. This means that if you eat a fattier snack of cheese and nuts on a keto diet plan, it will receive a more positive rating than if you are the same snack on a classic diet.