"Healthy Eating Index" and "Optimal Diet Membership" Nutritional Evaluation

Nutritional recommendations from experts are usually nutrient based. Commonly used dietary recommendations for consumers include readily comprehensible, visual, food based descriptions, such as circular graphs and food pyramids. Studies on the evaluation of such food based descriptions have led to numerical procedures (dietary indices) that have developed their own momentum. These dietary indices are only weakly associated with clinical disease outcomes. The "optimal diet membership" method used in software programs for nutrition counseling leads to the insight that very diverse "healthy" dietary patterns exist, independent of the underlying mathematical method employed. Therefore, focusing on an individual food based description should only be used to provide examples.