They claim to be transparent, but they don't publish the criteria by which they decide which foodstuffs are healthy and which ones aren't.
My diet spreadsheet uses the
Nutrient Profile Score devised by the FSA, and calculates the score for each individual foodstuff as well as an overall score for my whole diet. In addition it also calculates how well my diet meets the
Nova criteria for unprocessed food content, and calculates the level of each vitamin and nutrient using the
USDA database.
What originally piqued my interest in diet 9 years ago was a bowel tumour, I was never much interested in cookery so it was payback for years of eating an unhealthy diet, or so I thought. What made me even more interested was making a spreadsheet, and finding that my diet wasn't anything like as unhealthy as you might think from my lack of home cookery. It really isn't that difficult to meet the main criteria for fat, salt, sugar, fibre, fruit & veg, processed meat etc without cooking everything from scratch, if you're selective about what you buy, but the Nova criteria are quite different, instead of focusing on macro nutrients like most systems, they just look at the level of processing. That makes a big difference to my diet, because I eat
a lot of bread, and bread is either very healthy by the standards of the FSA NPS, or very unhealthy and ultra-processed by the standards of Nova. Conversely, olive oil fares well under Nova, but not the FSA.
In the last 5 or 6 years I've switched to about 70% of my dinners cooked from scratch and 30% processed, but hasn't made a great deal of difference to the data, except for an increase in fat due to the olive oil in everything. I'd like to find a way of cutting down on the bread, but it's difficult replacing such a huge quantity of calories and fibre without switching to another cooked meals each day instead of sandwiches.
It's good that it tells you how bad some of the additives are and others that are of no real concern.
