A food can carry two different judgements, and they answer different
questions. The suitability rating says how a food suits a named condition
in general. Your personal score says how a food suits you, today.
Your personal score
Signed in, every food card and food page shows a score out of 100 in a coloured
badge, and the score falls into one of four bands:
Great — 75 to 100
Good — 50 to 74
Fair — 25 to 49
Poor — 0 to 24
The score adds up three things:
How well the food's nutrients line up with your targets — a food that fills a nutrient you are short on scores up, and one that would push you past a limit scores down
Your conditions — a food whose suitability rating for one of your conditions is Caution or Avoid is penalised, and the badge says which condition and why
General nutrition quality — fibre, sugar, saturated fat and sodium, read the same way for everyone
The badge explains itself in a line: "Rich in iron for your profile", "High
sodium — may exceed your daily target", "Avoid — not recommended for
hypertension".
How personal it is
With no conditions and no labs on file, the score reads the food against general targets, and the page says so
With conditions added, it applies their ratings and limits
With lab results uploaded, your targets come from your own markers: a low ferritin raises the weight of iron, a high potassium result turns potassium-rich foods into a caution
The hint under the results — "Score reflects your health conditions only" or
"Generic guidance — no labs or conditions on file" — tells you which level you
are at, and links to the labs page to move up. Scores are recalculated as your
logs, conditions and labs change, so the same food can score differently next
month.
Where it appears
On every result card on the Foods page, once the page has scored them
As the Best for you sort order, which re-ranks the page by score
On the food page, next to the header
The score is for signed-in readers: it needs a profile to be personal to.
Suitability ratings
A suitability rating is a word — Excellent, Good, Moderate, Caution or Avoid —
stored on a food for a specific condition, and shown as stars out of five in
the "Suitability by health condition" panel of the food page and as chips on
the phone.
Not every food has them. The regional-dish catalogue carries a rating for each
of its dishes, and a set of core database foods — several thousand of the six
million — carry them too. Most packaged products and most national-table foods
do not, and their pages simply have no suitability panel. That is the honest
state of the data, not a loading failure.
Ratings drive two things in search:
The Good for Health Condition filter keeps foods rated Good or Excellent for the chosen condition, so it only ever returns foods that carry a rating
With that filter on, each card shows the food's stars for that condition
What none of this is
A score is guidance about fit, not a medical judgement. A 90 for you is a food that suits your targets, not a food you must eat
The suitability words are general to a condition; your score is the one that knows about your labs
Neither rating reads your medications; those produce separate
medication warnings
Taste, culture, cost and what is in your kitchen matter too
Related Articles:
Understanding Nutrient Data
Adding Health Conditions
Food Recommendations from Labs