ONQI: A New Way to Find Healthy Food

Interesting. Seems similar to the opposite of Weight Watcher Pounts where less is better.

*Points

Well I didn't find their website very helpful, but I'm wondering how this system will work because (as I understand it) fresh produce loses nutrition the longer it sits around waiting to be bought. So an apple that's been in storage, and has now sat on the shelves should be less nutritious than one that is plucked from the tree.

The only problem seems to be that the rankings reflect the "healthy" conception of the designer. According to the FAQs, saturated fat and cholesterol are detractors. But that depends who you talk to. It's a good idea, but I think that needs to be made apparent. It makes me think of enriching foods, that you can only put in what you know you took away. With something like this, you can only rank foods according to what you know is there and how you believe they should be ranked, irregardless of anything else you don't know is there or think is important.

I don't get it. Most of us know what healthy food is, right? Why do we need to compare, says apples with oranges? We need to get all around nutritions from different type of food anyways. It may be interesting facts to know but it's better to learn the real nutrition facts like vitamins and minerals in each food item rather than learning a short cut, because "100" doesn't tell me much.

I agree that any summary such as this will remove certain information. For the consumer interested in nutrition, which is likely most of the people who reada this blog, this summary may not be all that helpful, but I'm thinking that my husband could get something out of this. He will sometimes try to read labels and make sense of things, but he gets totally lost when tries to compare more than one variable. I think it might be useful to him to be able to compare similar products. For example, I looked at the website and saw crackers as a category-I don't eat a lot of crackers, because many are nutritionally weak- but if you're going to eat some crackers, why not a more nutritious cracker? Like nutrition labels and WW Points etc., it's a tool, not a panacea.

Anything like this is an oversimplification. They make up whatever criteria they want for healthiness and score it however they want.

For example, this lowers a food's score if the food contains Sodium. There's nothing wrong with Sodium for people with normal blood pressure. Some people should try to limit their Sodium intake. Most people should not.

Some people are allergic to nuts. Those people should limit their intake of nuts. Most people should not. Yet this score doesn't penalize nuts. Why the double standard?

The score is basically a way to hide details from people. It's not necessarily a bad thing because sometimes you don't want all the details, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's just some group's opinion.

In theory, it's not a bad idea but like others have said, certain nutrients could be seen as bad or good depending on who you talk to. Some people claim that lots of saturated fat is good for your overall health while others say to limit it as much as possible; some people need to limit sodium while others do not need to watch their sodium intake as much.

I also foresee some problems with assigning foods a number that ranks them...some people with very concrete-thinking minds (like my husband) would try to only eat foods given a score of 100. And living on mustard greens, spinach, broccoli, strawberries, blueberries and oranges wouldn't be a lot of fun (or healthy, for that matter). What numbers are we shooting for? Eating foods mostly above say, a 50? Or should we be shooting for mostly 90-100s with a few lower numbers thrown in here and there?

Those are all high Alkli foods. As the list goes down so does the alkli/acid pH ratio.

I think it is interesting to see the difference but I am not sure I fully understand the point, the difference between apple and oranges is surely not great enough to notice a difference. Also when you are talking chicken and meat products surely it depends on how the chickens were looked after. Free range chicken are always going to be loads healthier. I think if you are looking to lose weight you should look for the ingredients on the package, anything fresh like fruit and vegetables are always going to be good for. Fresh meats as long as the meat content is good and the chicken was looked after in a humane way then you'll be ok.

Wow quit interesting. I hope that the grocery stores make this info public in the store at some point. Thanks for the info.

Wow! And on what basis is this Index based? According to Sandy Szwarc on junkfoodscience there is no scientific evidence (as opposed to junk science) that any one food is better or worse than any other food. Who decides that food A is healthier than food B? Who could make money here?

Sounds like someone has an agenda to push.

Bottom line is that I had better not lose any weight because saturated fats are so bad for me that by losing weight I will put saturated fats into my system. By doing so I will kill myself, considering how much saturated fat is stored in in my system.