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See how closely a day of eating matches Canada's Food Guide across ten components, with plain-language results.
A score for how closely a day of eating lines up with Canada's Food Guide. Six things the Guide encourages add to your score, four nutrients worth moderating can pull it down. The total runs from 0 to 80.
Researchers may know this measure as HEFI-2019 (Brassard et al. 2022).
Pick the one that fits what you have in front of you, from a quick look at one food to a whole day of eating.
Walk through your day one meal at a time. The wizard turns each meal into the foods that make it up, then sends them here for scoring. This is the way healthy eating scores were meant to be used, and it gives you the most useful number.
Pick foods from our catalogue, set the serving sizes, and get a score across all ten things HEFI looks at. You can score a single meal, but a whole day is what the score is built for.
Line up a few meal ideas side by side and see how they rank. Useful when you are planning a menu, swapping an ingredient, or testing a recipe change.
See how one food on its own would land in HEFI's ten checks. Best for understanding why a food helps or hurts a day's score, not as a standalone judgment.
There is no “healthy” line to clear. The score makes more sense when you hold it next to the range of Canadian eaters from the 2015 national survey. The median Canadian sits at 43, the top one percent reach 63, and almost nobody hits 80.
Ten things, grouped into the six that earn points and the four that can cost them. Together they add up to 80.
How much of what you eat is whole vegetables and fruit.
Whether whole-grain foods show up in the day at all.
When you eat grains, how often they are the whole-grain kind.
Whether the day includes enough foods that count as protein sources.
How often your protein comes from plants like beans, lentils, tofu, and nuts.
Whether what you drink leans toward water, plain milk, and unsweetened plant beverages.
The balance between unsaturated fats (from things like fish, nuts, and oils) and saturated fats (from butter, fatty meats, and full-fat dairy).
How much of the day’s calories come from saturated fat.
How much of the day's calories come from sugars that were added to a food or freed up by processing, like the sugar in fruit juice or syrup.
How salty the day is for the calories it provides.
Every food you score is drawn from a real food composition database. The Canadian Nutrient File is the one HEFI was built against, so it stays the home base. The West African Food Composition Table fills in foods the Canadian database does not cover. When a West African food shows up in your meal, the researcher view flags the small differences in how it was measured, so nothing slips by unnoticed.
The numbers stay the same. The explanation changes depending on who is reading. The everyday view gives you a plain-language read of where your day sits. The researcher view shows each component, the ratios behind it, and the references it draws on. The policy view frames the score for population monitoring and Food Guide implementation work.
HEFI-2019 was developed and validated by Didier Brassard and colleagues for Health Canada, with two companion papers in the Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism journal in 2022. The Canadian benchmarks shown above come from the 2015 Canadian Community Health Survey, which is the same population the score was tuned against.
The Healthy Eating Food Index is the score Health Canada uses to measure how closely the way Canadians eat lines up with the 2019 Food Guide. It works best when you give it a whole day of eating, which is exactly what the 24-hour recall wizard above is built to help you do.