Does this Nutrient Density Index make me look fat?

Any recent trip into Whole Foods Market would have introduced you to the newest in food rating systems: The ANDI (Aggregate Nutrient Density Index) and its meat-minded sibling, the 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating.

The basic premise of the ANDI system is this: Nutrients divided by calories = how good it is for you. And while seemingly logical enough, a closer look reveals it as the mostly arbitrary system it is; an invention (invention name generator anyone?) by author and physician, Dr. Joel Fuhrman in an effort to further educate people on what they’re putting in their mouths. Kind of.

The only problem? Good luck looking closely.

There are no charts, no literature, no QR codes or reference tables to help you navigate the system. Instead you get a number printed on a label with no further explanation.

Take this quinoa, ANDI score 21. Is that a good or bad review? Is it 21 of a possible 30, or is it like golf where the lower the score, the better? You get no information on how this relates to other grains, sprouted options, other brands, or even other numbers. You don’t know if it’s a good source of protein, minerals, healthy fats, or anything else that may or may not be good for you. It’s a 21. Without going home to do some serious Internet due diligence, you’re just left with another overly-simplified way to make eating healty super complicated.

But let’s say for sake of argument that you try. You hunt down an employee for guidance or take the time to refer to Whole Foods’ online introduction to the program. You’re still left with a secondary issue: ANDI’s obvious predilection for low-calorie, low-fat foods. What about people not trying to lose weight? The system is not only difficult to make sense of, it’s just plain inaccurate. Super-foods like avocado and walnuts are ranked under white bread and pasta because of their fat content.

And even the ANDI creator knows it. “Keep in mind,” Dr. Fuhrman warns, “that nutrient density scoring is not the only factor that determines good health. For example, if we only ate foods with a high nutrient density score our diet would be too low in fat. So we have to pick some foods with lower nutrient density scores to include in our high nutrient diet.” Too bad he, and Whole Foods, just got finished telling us that this was going to be effortless, which is also a bit of a paradox.

I thought the whole point behind stores like Whole Foods was to say, “You should want to try. Understanding the food you eat matters. Take the time and money to feed yourself right.”

But ANDI champions an exact opposite mentality. It basically says that you can eat well without having to really educate yourself–that things can be both quick and well-informed. If all I have to do is look for numbers close to 1000 to fill my cart with “healthy” options, I am going to stay the same uneducated, sound-bite driven consumer I have always been, and isn’t that what they’re supposed to be trying to stop?