Post: The Healthy Eating Index: How Well Does Your Diet Score?

How is the HEI calculated?
HEI and health outcomes
Comparing popular diets using HEI
Improving HEI scores: Practical strategies
Key takeaways on HEI

Did you know that diet quality is one of the most significant predictors of longevity and disease prevention? Yet, assessing whether regular eating habits and diets truly support overall health and longevity has been challenging.

Diet quality plays a crucial role in maintaining overall health and preventing chronic diseases. As non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer continue to rise globally, the need for standardized methods to assess dietary patterns has become imperative. 1

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI) serves as an essential tool for evaluating how well individual and population-level diets align with dietary guidelines. This article explores the importance of HEI from the perspectives of health and disease, the major components of the HEI, how it is calculated, its associations with various health outcomes, and how different dietary patterns score on this index. Diabetes monitor, Cholesterol diet and healthy food eating nutrition. Image Credit: Chinnapong/Shutterstock.com How is the HEI calculated?

The HEI is a scoring system designed by the National Cancer Institute and the United States (US) Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion to measure adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. 2 The most recent version, HEI-2020, consists of 13 dietary components categorized into two groups: adequacy and moderation. 3

The components under adequacy encourage higher consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, total protein foods, seafood, plant proteins, and fatty acids. In contrast, the moderation components assess the intake of refined grains, sodium, saturated fats, and added sugars, which should be limited. 4,5

Each component is assigned a score ranging from 0 to 5 or 10, with the total HEI score ranging from 0 to 100. A higher HEI score indicates better alignment with dietary guidelines. The data used for HEI calculations are typically derived from dietary recalls, food frequency questionnaires, and national nutrition surveys. 4,6 The HEI has been widely utilized in epidemiological studies to evaluate dietary quality. It […]

The Healthy Eating Index: How Well Does Your Diet Score?