How healthy is your diet, actually?

On a 0 to 10 scale, consistently landing in the upper half across most meals is a reasonable working target, and expecting every meal to score highly is a good way to abandon tracking entirely. The more useful reading is directional: is your average moving up over a month. A score is calibrated against its own scale, so comparing it to a number from a different app tells you nothing.

By weighting the nutrients in a meal, things like protein and fibre pulling upward and heavy refined carbohydrate, saturated fat, sugar and sodium pulling downward, into one figure. Every scoring system chooses its own weightings, which is why Nutri-Score, NOVA and the Healthy Eating Index reach different conclusions about the same food. Treat any score as one defensible opinion rendered consistently, not as an objective measurement.

Two usual causes. Either the log is incomplete, which is by far the more common one, since a missing cooking oil or a dressing changes a meal's profile substantially, or the meal genuinely leans on something the score weights against, such as a large amount of saturated fat in an otherwise wholesome dish. Check the ingredient breakdown first. If it does not match the plate, fix the log rather than the meal.

No, and conflating the two is the most common misreading of any diet score. Nuts, olive oil, oily fish and avocado are calorie dense and nutritionally strong, so a meal built around them can score well and still be large. Quality tells you about composition, calories tell you whether it fits your day. You need both numbers, and neither substitutes for the other.

Nutri-Score is a public front-of-pack labelling scheme that grades packaged products A to E, and it is designed for products on a shelf. The Nutrify Score rates a meal you actually ate, including home cooking and restaurant food that carries no label at all, on a 0 to 10 scale. Different inputs, different purpose, and they will not agree on everything.

No. A quality score cannot tell you whether you are in a deficit, and calories cannot tell you whether your diet is nutritionally sound. They answer separate questions and they can move in opposite directions, which is the interesting case: a flat calorie trend with a rising score means the composition improved while the total held steady.

The usual levers are more fibre from vegetables, pulses and whole grains, more protein spread across meals rather than piled into one, and less reliance on refined carbohydrate and added sugar. Before changing anything, though, look at which meals actually score lowest, because it is often one repeated meal doing the damage rather than your diet in general.

The score is derived from the nutrition attached to the meal, so it reflects whatever the meal contains once you have finished editing it. That is worth knowing in both directions: correcting an under-logged meal will usually pull its score down, which feels like a punishment but is the score becoming accurate rather than becoming harsher.

Nutrify is free to download on iOS and Android, and the Nutrify Score is covered by the same subscription as everything else rather than sold as an extra. Every feature is open during the 7-day trial; after that it is a paid app, which you can cancel at any time.