We’ve improved the Meal Score to provide a more complete picture! In addition to glucose response, your Meal Score now considers Food Quality - a recently introduced feature that evaluates how processed a food is, its nutritional quality, and its glycemic index.
How it works
To calculate your Meal Score, Veri now weighs your glucose response against the Food Quality of its ingredients. The Meal Score screen will show you how each factor contributes to your score.
Here is an example of how two meals can be scored differently, even with the same glucose response, because of the quality of the foods.
Good glucose response with high-quality foods:
Good glucose response with low-quality foods:
Note: Food Quality evaluates how processed a food is, its nutritional quality, and its glycemic index. Read more here.
This works in the other direction as well. For instance, if you eat a meal with high-quality ingredients, but your blood glucose levels increase, the score will be higher than before the upgrade.
How to get the most out of this upgrade
To get the most accurate Meal Score, log your ingredients and be specific. For example, if you had a turkey sandwich, you should log the bread, turkey, lettuce, tomato, and condiments. This will also help you learn which foods to keep and which foods to kick.
Why we made this change
We’ve never been a company that believes in keeping your glucose flat. Glucose rising and falling is a part of normal physiology. What we coach is avoiding the aggressive spikes that lead to brain fog and fatigue in the moment and compound over time into poor metabolic health outcomes – and our model reflected that.
But there was something missing.
Glucose is a powerful signal that lets you see your individual response to food, but that signal can get distorted in some cases because it doesn't fully capture food quality. You could eat a “Big Mac” and have steady glucose levels - it wouldn’t mean it was the right choice.
We know from a wide variety of research and observational studies that food quality matters immensely. Attributes like the leveling of processing and its nutritional quality have just as much of a role as a food’s glucose impact.
We began solving this problem by introducing “Food Quality” a few months ago. A new feature that labels logged foods as “Enjoy,” “Moderate,” or “Avoid” depending on how processed a food is, its nutritional quality, and its glycemic index.
After testing this feature with our users we then updated the Meal Scoring algorithm to take into account both glucose response and Food Quality.
The result? A Meal Score that paints a holistic picture and guides you to make the right choice for your metabolic health.
"A strong body of research demonstrates that ultra-processed foods are associated with adverse health outcomes, like risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, depression, and death. Food Quality is one tool that can help people navigate what foods to focus on as they work toward a healthier lifestyle."
- Dr. Vimal Ramjee, MD, Director of Health at Veri
Frequently Asked Questions
Will my old meal scores be updated?
Yes.
What happens if I don’t have logged ingredients?
Your meal score will only use glucose. You should log ingredients to get a complete picture of the meal quality. If you use a descriptive title, Veri will generate suggestions for ingredients.
Is the portion size of ingredients taken into consideration?
No. At this time, portion size of ingredients is not considered for the Meal Score.
What happens if the ingredients don’t have quality tags?
Veri will only use the foods we have tags for when calculating food quality. We have already categorized a high proportion of the most commonly added foods and are working to increase the number further. Make sure to log these ingredients anyway since they'll be considered as soon as we release the quality tags.
I had better scores before. Can I go back to the old scoring?
You cannot go back to the old scoring. While you may have an adjustment period of relearning the best foods for you, considering food quality, not just glycemic response, is essential for building a diet that supports your metabolic health.