Precis

There is widespread consensus among experts that improvements in activity levels and dietary patterns have enormous potential to promote health and prevent disease. Healthful eating and activity patterns (along with other sensible behaviors, such as tobacco avoidance) could reduce the rate of heart disease by as much as 80%, diabetes by up to 90%, and cancer by nearly 60%.

In the case of diet, there are two ways to close the gap between how we eat at present and how we should eat for optimal health. One involves a fundamental shift in the pattern of the diet, as reflected in such advice as “eat more fruits and vegetables.”

There is another way to improve dietary patterns and that is one food choice at a time. The range in nutritional quality for every food category represented on supermarket shelves, is vast. Choosing the most nutritious offerings in each category offers a powerful means to reduce intake of calories, sodium, added sugar, and harmful fats, while increasing intake of fiber, beneficial nutrients, vitamins, and minerals.

But between the average consumer and those choices is a rolling sea of competing claims, half truths, marketing hype, and hopeless confusion. Upon those troubled waters, the ONQI offers a lighthouse beam. An unfailing, ever reliable guide to better nutrition both within and across food categories. A beacon to better health that comes of better eating. An illumination… of how actually to get there from here.

Mission & Objectives

To develop a (the) definitive algorithm to stratify food items within any category, and across food categories, based on overall nutrition quality.
To measure overall nutritional quality using the best science available, encompassing nutritional biochemistry; physiology and metabolism; dietetics; and epidemiology and public health.
To develop an algorithm for assessing the overall nutritional quality of foods that entirely avoids the “good food/bad food” dichotomy and controversy.
Specifically, to develop a novel metric for the nutritional quality of individual foods, and the nutrients in those foods, based on the relationship among nutrients in foods, the overall quality of the diet, and associations with health outcomes.
To place the ability of top nutrition experts to discriminate among food choices on the basis of nutrition into the hands of every consumer.
To provide the public a powerful and empowering means to improve dietary intake patterns, and thereby health, one food choice at a time.

ONQI Project Vision Statement

A single, trusted, reliable and universal nutrition guidance system available to consumers at every point of purchase, freely accessible on-line, and on every package in the food supply enabling all consumers to choose foods for consumption on the basis of overall nutritional quality with complete confidence, great convenience and ease, and unfailing immunity from any and all potential deception related to marketing.
An improvement in the approximation of prevailing dietary patterns to recommended dietary patterns, specifically (in the United States) the current version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
An improvement in the public health, as reflected in particular by declining rates of obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, by virtue of improvements in prevailing dietary patterns.