The Healthy Eating Index: Design and Applications
Section snippets
Overall Structure of Healthy Eating Index
The HEI has 10 components, which are based on different aspects of a healthful diet. For each component, respondents receive a score ranging from 0 to 10. Thus, the overall index has a range from 0 to 100. The components are defined as follows and described more fully in Table 1. Components 1 through 5 measure the degree to which a person's diet conforms to the serving recommendations of the USDA Food Guide Pyramid (12) for five major food groups: grains, vegetables, fruits, milk, and meat.
Results
The mean HEI score for 1989 and 1990 combined was 63.9 (Table 4). Few people scored very high or very low on the HEI. Only 2% to 3% of the sample had a mean score below 40. Similarly, 11% to 12% of the sample had an HEI score higher than 80.
No one category contributed disproportionately to the mean score (Table 5). Mean component scores were lowest for fruits (4.0) and saturated fat (5.1). Mean component scores for grains, vegetables, and total fat were similar, ranging from 6.1 to 6.3. The
Discussion and Applications
The HEI was developed using the most current scientific information available including the Dietary Guidelines. The HEI is a mechanism that allows individuals to assess the overall quality of their diets, not simply isolated components. Development of the HEI involved a number of key design decisions, which are discussed next.
Obesity is an ever-increasing public health problem in the United States, and during the early development work for the HEI, the possibility of including a component that
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