ND's Nutritional Target Map™

The Nutritional Target Map appears in every ND analysis, and also on ND's Total Consumption report. This patent pending symbol maps the food in relation to its ability to support common nutritional goals, such as healthy weight loss.

More About the Nutritional Target Map
The Nutritional Target Map relies on two nutritional indices that were developed by NutritionData:

ND's Fullness Factor (FF) is a numerical expression that relates to the food's Caloric density. Its 0-to-5 scale predicts the satiating effect of the food. Higher FF numbers indicate that a lower-Calorie serving of that food is more likely to "fill you up".

ND's Rating is a numerical expression of a food’s overall nutrient density. Its 0-to-5 scale proportionately rewards foods that have the highest amounts (per Calorie) of those nutrients that the FDA deems essential.

Every food has a distinct position on the Nutritional Target Map, and specific areas of the Nutritional Target Map align with common nutritional goals. This makes it possible to predict the value of a food in relation to those nutritional goals.

 

How to Interpret the Nutritional Target Map
To better understand the Nutritional Target Map, look at it as two overlapping targets. The "green target" is for benefit of individuals that are trying to lose weight. Foods that appear closer to the green target's bulls-eye are foods that tend to be more supportive of healthy weight loss. In a similar manner, the "purple target" helps identify foods that tend to be more supportive of healthy weight gain.

The Nutritional Target Map makes it easier to see why some foods are better than others for controlling your weight. To help you understand this, we've temporarily split the Nutritional Target Map below into four quadrants. Let's now consider which types of foods would typically appear in each of these quadrants...

If you're trying to lose weight, you probably already realize that you can eat relatively large portions of vegetables and lean meats without harming your diet, but you need to limit the amount of butter and cake that you consume. As you can see from the Nutritional Target Map above, vegetables and lean meats will appear in Quadrant 3. These foods are much more filling per Calorie than butter or cake (which appear in Quadrant 1), and they also supply higher levels of nutrients. There's nothing particularly "bad" about butter or cake. It's just that they're very easy to overconsume because they're less filling, and they don't do a very good job of nourishing your body.

 

More Nutritional Target Map Examples
The discussion above used common foods that you're already familiar with. You obviously don't need a fancy graph to tell you that vegetables are better for weight loss than cake! However, the Nutritional Target Map is the most helpful for exposing the strength or weakness of foods that fall between these extremes. Consider these two examples of misguided dieting:

Example 1: The Delicious New Diet Food
Bob has embraced the low-carb diet trend, and is buying every low carb product he can find. His current favorite is a new low-carb brownie. He takes them to his office, and eats at least one at every coffee break. Is Bob's choice of snacks a good one?

Probably not. When a food manufacturer turns a high-carb food (like brownies) into a low-carb food, something has to take the place of the carbohydrates that were removed from the original product. Usually that something is a combination of fiber, fat, and artificial sweeteners. While the additional fiber can be helpful, additional fat can greatly increase the total Calories in the product while decreasing its ability to satisfy hunger. It's still a Quadrant 1 food; it's easy to overconsume, and it supplies minimal nutritional benefit to Bob's diet.

Example 2: The Overloaded Salad
Margaret knows that fresh vegetables are good for her diet, so every day she eats her lunch at the salad bar. In addition to the lettuce and spinach, she douses her salad with creamy ranch dressing, and sprinkles it liberally with sliced almonds, raisins, and sesame seeds. Is this an effective approach to dieting?

No. In Margaret's salad, all of the Quadrant 1 (ranch dressing) and Quadrant 4 (almonds, raisins, and sesame seeds) additions have the effect of shifting this food completely out of Quadrant 3. Her salad may still be very healthy from the standpoint of total nutrients, but it supplies too many Calories and doesn't adequately suppress her hunger.

If Bob and Margaret had used ND to analyze their meals, they could have quickly seen that their current food choices fell well outside of Quadrant 3 on the Nutritional Target Map, and, therefore, were not very supportive of their weight loss goal.

 

The Power of the Nutritional Target Map
One of the greatest features of the Nutritional Target Map is that it can be instantly generated for ANY food, because it relies on the very same set of nutrients that appear on a Nutrition Facts label. This means that you can use it to analyze any food from ND's database, any food that you enter with ND's Custom Entry Tool, and any recipe that you create with ND's Pantry.