So what happens if you take all the *essential* nutrients and create an index that scores food? What comes out at the top? Why liver and BACON of course!

Fruit were shockingly far down, and grains and legumes are indeed relatively empty calories. Not to mention grains' *anti-nutrients*. Note that for the scoring he used only known *essential* nutrients. If you want anti-oxidants fruit are up there. But overall vegetables are *way* higher than fruit, and no fructose to boot.

Another take-away is the incredible anti-animal-source bias of the Whole Foods "ANDI", and the "Nuval" food nutrition scores, such as by leaving out Vitamin B12, increasing the weight of flavonoids and other non-essential nutrients, and lowering the score based on cholesterol and saturated fat content (folks it's not the 80s anymore).

Before you criticize his work, he does mention the caveats:
- this is not meant to be a be-all end-all dietary advice. Do with the info as you wish
- certain known essential nutrients weren't represented
- he used a single large database source (for consistency)
- some nutrient entries for some items were zero even though they are known to be non-zero
- there are some nutrients that are today known to be non-essential but which have important health benefits, such as immune-regulatory anti-bacterial, and anti-oxidant effects which were not used in the scoring
- he didn't include bio-availability as a factor, because the data isn't consistently available from a single source. This would make grains and some other plant sources look worse

 

Nothing will ever replace my hourly garden-hose enema therapy.