Healthy Body Index
Our mission

Make food quality easier to explore.

Food is more than calories, but no single score can decide what is right for every person. We built HBI to make a broader set of food-data signals easier to see.

Why we built this

Ask whether a food is healthy and you get chaos: one headline says it’s a superfood, the next says it’s killing you, and your tracking app answers a different question entirely — how many calories it has. Calories measure energy. They do not summarize nutrient density, processing, fibre, fermentation, mineral balance, or food-compound research.

Nutrition research contains useful composition data and many levels of evidence, from human trials to early mechanistic work. Turning that into a consumer model requires judgment, transparent limits, and ongoing review—not just a large database.

So we built the score we wished existed: every food represented across eight weighted dimensions and four bounded adjustments, collapsed into one directional 0–100 beta number, with reviewed sources added only as they clear the human evidence queue. Not a diet. Not a guilt machine. A clearer model view.

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The mission

Make food-quality signals legible—without pretending one number knows the whole person.

One useful signal per food. Research that earns its place. Every bite, scored.

How we do it

The score is simple because the data isn’t.

Behind the single number sits a substantial structured nutrition database. Its compound and pathway mappings are being moved through a stricter human evidence-review process.

3,022
Foods scored, from apples to za’atar
12
Dimensions of nutrition science per food
8
Longevity pathways measured
2-step
Identity and food-claim review before a citation is public

The idea is simple: put the complexity in the data so the app can stay calm. The database is structured and queryable; external calibration and the food-to-paper relevance queue are still launch work, so the number is labelled as beta.

Principles

What we believe.

Four ideas shape every score, every screen, and every word we publish.

Depth made simple

The complexity lives in the model so the app can stay calm. You get one directional number, with eight weighted dimensions and four adjustments available underneath.

Longevity over dieting

We include food-composition and healthy-aging research inputs while stating clearly that the current score is directional, not clinical.

Celebration, not shame

Food is one of the good things. HBI is built to reward what you add and the colours you hit, never to scold you for what you ate.

Graded, not hyped

We distinguish human, observational, animal, and cell evidence. Specific citations remain private until both the paper identity and the food-specific claim have been reviewed.

The team

Who’s behind it.

Healthy Body Index is built by Xpand Digital, a product studio that builds data-heavy software. We’re not a supplement company and we don’t sell meal plans — HBI has no products to push and no reason to flatter any food. The score is the product, so the score has to be honest.

See your food the way the science does.

Use HBI on the web today, or join the list for iPhone beta updates.

Open the web app