Health Nutritional Index (HENI)
How many minutes of healthy life does this food add or subtract, on average, if it shows up in a typical day's eating? HENI takes the best-known links between food and disease, and turns each serving into a number of minutes you can feel in your bones.
Score a food, meal, or day
Build the food list, pick serving sizes, and get the total minutes added or subtracted. You can break the result down by which foods drove it.
See it next to other lenses
All scores runs health impact alongside healthy eating, Food Compass, star ratings, environment, and eating style on the same list of foods. Different questions, one page.
What does “minutes of healthy life” feel like?
A few published per-serving examples to set the scale. Positive numbers add time. Negative numbers subtract. Most foods sit close to zero. A single serving rarely moves the needle on its own. It is the day, the week, and the year that add up.
How the number is built
- Look at fifteen ways food affects health. These are the dietary factors the Global Burden of Disease research has the strongest evidence for: fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds, whole grains, milk, red meat, processed meat, sugary drinks, fibre, omega-3 fats, polyunsaturated fats, trans fats, calcium, and sodium.
- Translate to lost or gained healthy life. For each factor your food carries, we apply a coefficient from the published research that says how much disease burden one serving adds or removes, on average, in the population.
- Turn the burden into time. A published conversion (Stylianou 2021) turns one micro-unit of disease burden into about half a minute of healthy life. The sign is set so that a positive number adds time and a negative number subtracts.
- Add up across your foods. Each food contributes its own slice, plus or minus. The total is what shows in the result. A full food diary day is the cleanest input because it lets you see the day as a whole.
At a glance
Where the foods come from
HENI runs on the same food catalogue used by every other tool here. The Canadian Nutrient File supplies most of it, and the FAO West African Food Composition Table covers staples like fonio, baobab pulp, and dried fish. When a West African food shows up in your meal, the researcher view flags the small measurement differences so nothing slips by quietly.
What HENI is not
- Not a personal life-expectancy prediction. The minutes are what you would see on average in the population, not what you will see in your own body. Your outcome depends on a lot HENI does not model.
- Not built for dramatic diet changes. HENI assumes you are adding or swapping a serving here and there. If you wholesale rebuild your eating, the simple add-up no longer holds.
- Not Canadian-validated. The risk coefficients are anchored to US adult eating. Adapting them for Canadian intake is documented future work.
- Not everything that matters. Saturated fat on its own, vitamin D, how food is processed, how it is cooked, and how well your body absorbs nutrients are all left out. The fifteen factors are what the evidence is strongest for, not the whole picture.
Three ways to read every result
The numbers stay the same. The story around them changes. The everyday view gives you the minutes in plain English. The researcher view breaks the minutes down across the fifteen factors and shows the coefficients behind them. The policy view frames the same numbers for procurement, taxation, and food-environment work.
Pair with other lenses
HENI answers “how many minutes?”. HEFI answers “does this line up with Canada's Food Guide?”. HSR answers “is this product better than the others next to it on the shelf?”. The all scores page runs all six in one go.
Where the science comes from
HENI was developed by Stylianou and colleagues and published in Nature Food in 2021. It builds on the Global Burden of Disease food research and on earlier life-cycle work that combined nutrition and environmental impact in a single frame.