If you’ve taken a walk through your local Whole Foods Market in the past year, you’ve probably seen a stand with purple and green information sheets listing foods in order of “ANDI Top 10 for Produce”, “ANDI Top 10 Super Foods” and so on. Coordinated recipe cards, a suggested shopping list, and an attractive-looking book round out the offering. And the produce and bulk bins sport matching ANDI score labels. It’s a whole system. But is it right, or just another fad?
What is the ANDI Score system, anyway, and who owns it?
ANDI stands for Eat Right America ™’s Aggregate Nutrient Density Index, a proprietary nutrients-per-calorie scoring system that rates for foods from kale to cooking oil and everything in between on a scale of 1 to 1000 points.
The ANDI scoring system started with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, the author of the diet book Eat to Live. On his home page, Fuhrman describes himself as a family physician and nutrition researcher. His diet, which he calls “nutritarian” (and you can become a nutritarian too by signing up) is a highly prescriptive weight loss regimen that focuses on high-value vegetables and fruits and eliminates most meats, fats and carbohydrates. His evaluation of vegetables as high-scoring and processed foods, meats, starches and so on as low-scoring seems only common sense.
Fuhrman’s site claims hundreds of articles and interviews as well as numerous appearances as a nutrition expert on national TV. The site also prominently mentions his two US Nationals pairs figure skating wins back in the 1970s. Does he need to have that information on there if what he’s promoting is serious, science-based dietary advice? Altogether, the site has a very infomercial feel about it, with lots of testimonials from members who’ve lost over 75 pounds with before-and-after photos. Fuhrman himself looks very fit and tanned and taut-faced–maybe a little too much? Maybe it’s just the heavy pancake makeup that infomercial packagers are famous for plastering on their experts’ faces.
Eat to Live is a popular book. Fuhrman’s Kindle edition of Eat to Live is the #700-ranked download on Amazon.com. His web site has something on the order of 4000 subscribers, whose questionnaire responses he mines for some of his journal articles. According to one of the journal papers, his audience is about 65% female, 71% married, the largest proportion college-educated with household incomes over$100K. (At this point, I thought, bingo, the perfect infomercial audience. This is clearly a commercial diet with legs. But wait, there’s more…)
Ahem! Enter Eat Right America, a company started by a businessman who became a fan of Dr. Fuhrman’s. The founder figured there must be a good way to automate the multi-nutrient density calculations for a wider variety of foods and developed a proprietary algorithm based on nutrient values in the USDA’s NAL database. What makes the ANDI algorithm attractive, the company says, is that they weight these calculations per calorie, not per serving. Finally, they claim, you’re getting the “right” comparison of nutrient density for the calories.
But a closer look at the the diet and menus offered on both the Eat Right America and Fuhrman web sites raises a few warning flags. Scan the ingredients list in the Eat Right America 3-day sample menu and you see frequent uses of high-priced fruits, vegetables and grains like quinoa (no surprise there about why Whole Foods might be happy with the shopping list) as well as some trendy and expensive ingredients that don’t sound all that nutritious. Dates? Avocado? Coconut? Sun-dried tomatoes? Cashews–one of the lower-fiber and more expensive nuts, incidentally. Those are usually extras, snacks, not staples, even in a vegan diet.
More seriously, the menu designers seem to have a penchant for bottled carrot juice. They put 7 whole cups of it in a bean stew that feeds 10. Now, carrots, whole carrots, are fine raw or cooked into a stew. They have fiber and vitamin A and in whole form are relatively low-carb as well. But juice them, and you filter out the fiber. You concentrate the vitamin A and carotenoids about 3-4-fold, well beyond the RDA–risking vitamin A overdose–and you concentrate the sugars. What would ordinarily be a bean and vegetable soup with a reasonable amount of carb per serving–about 15 g per half cup or 30 g for a full cup–quickly rises, with the addition of a big 7-cup dose of carrot juice in the pot (NB also much more expensive than plain carrots) to 75 grams. That’s the amount of carb my diabetic daughter would figure for an entire holiday meal that includes a decent-sized slice of cake or pie.
Some of the Eat Right America recipe nutrition counts look like the ingredients as listed don’t quite account for them. The carb is high–occasionally the sodium doesn’t add up right either. And the overall protein is low. In the vegan versions on Fuhrman’s site, which prescribes a six-week starter regimen of a pound of vegetables a day, a pound of fruit, and a cup of beans, the protein is also incomplete or close to it. No grains, and no dairy or meat or fish. No tofu. Avocado and flax seed, two darlings of the vegan world, are recommended to supplement the caloric intake so you don’t lose too much weight (which I thought was the point, but maybe not for a whole six weeks at a time).
All these recommendations flow from the ANDI scores of the food and produce some logical puzzles. Somehow, you never see plain tofu or fish or cheese or yogurt. Apparently they don’t score as high as avocado. How is this possible? Isn’t avocado pulp high-fat and not too exciting as a vegetable?
So the next thing to check–is the ANDI food-rating method right? If you’re judging solely on the micronutrients list, which is what Eat Right America claims to be weighing into its ANDI scoring formula, no it isn’t. Continue reading
Filed under: books, cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Food Politics, nutrition, shopping, top 10, Vegetabalia | Tagged: aggregate nutrient density index, ANDI scores, commercial diets, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Eat Right America, Eat to Live, nutritarian, nutrition, vegan lifestyle, vegetables, weight loss, Whole Foods Market | 5 Comments »
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