food compass

[mccoy]

The system sounds promising and, above all, the scores appropriate

Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system using expanded characteristics for assessing healthfulness of foods

• Dariush Mozaffarian, 
• Naglaa H. El-Abbadi, 
• Meghan O’Hearn, 
• Josh Erndt-Marino, 
• William A. Masters, 
• Paul Jacques, 
• Peilin Shi, 
• Jeffrey B. Blumberg & 
• Renata Micha 

[Todd Allen]

It mostly works for me, although being a contrarian I do the opposite of what they suggest.

[mccoy]

Thanks Todd for underlining the glitches from the compass algorithm. Clearly, that's not an algorithm for keto or low carbers. Clearly, it doesn't work 100%. Maybe it penalizes saturated fats too much.

Fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds are in the suggested foods though and that means it's in the right direction. Meat tends to be discouraged and that's right on the whole. I don't know about dairy products.

Of course that's not for specific categories of people. For example, not so young people who start to have glitches in their glucose homeostasis, like myself. 

I didn't find a site where I can look up the different, single foods though.

[Saul]

Hi McCoy!

Use CronOMeter.

    --  Saul

[mccoy]

On second thought it is dangerous that foods like cheerios can bypass the algorithm. Once junk food manufacturers discover that adding vitamins and minerals and polyphenols and some fibers gives the junk morsel a high compass score, the method will become useless.

@ saul: I don't know if cronometer has an advising algorithm, I think not.

[Mike Lustgarten]

Although it's preposterous that some of those foods got decent scores (Lucky Charms!), that list is not the entire Food Compass, which contains 100 pages of data. Someone cherry-picked the worst rankings and posted them as if that's the whole story.

[mccoy]

2 hours ago, Mike Lustgarten said:

Although it's preposterous that some of those foods got decent scores (Lucky Charms!), that list is not the entire Food Compass, which contains 100 pages of data. Someone cherry-picked the worst rankings and posted them as if that's the whole story.

I agree about that, it remains the question on how those foods were able to bypass the compass algorithm. If I were a junk food manufacturer, I would try and take advantage of such weak points and have my junk products classified with a high score.

[Mike Lustgarten]

If I was on that paper, I wouldn't have published until they refined the algorithm such that Lucky Charms wouldn't have a score of 60, which is close to their recommended 70 cut-off. The idea that any processed food, especially junk-food cereals would be superior to real food is nuts (Ha, pun intended!)