Cardiologists agree that some of the most harmful dietary factors include saturated fats, trans fats, and sodium. A perfect “heart health index” would take all of these factors into account.
However, very few meal kit companies or restaurants provide information on trans fats. Also, there is not yet an accepted daily allowance for trans fats.
Therefore, our Heart Health Score is based on saturated fats and sodium. For each meal, we compute the percentage of the accepted Daily Values (DV) for both saturated fats and sodium, and add these values. We believe the combination of these two values is a good indication of the supplier’s commitment to hearth health.
The Heart Health Score formula is:
(200 – ((SatFat/20 + Sodium/2300) * 100)) / 2
This yields a value from 0 to 100. A score of 100 is perfect; it indicates no saturated fat and no sodium.
You can quickly compute the score for a product, dish, or entire meal using our Heart Health Score Calculator.
To compute the Heart Health Score for an entire meal kit company:
- We select a week, and download the nutrition data for each meal offered that week.
- We compute the Heart Health Score for each meal.
- We select the ten meals with the lowest scores. Most meal kit companies offer some unhealthy meals, but you can avoid those, as long as there are plenty of healthy choices.
The average score of the ten healthiest meals is the Heart Health Score for that company.
Request a Review
Meal kit companies may request a review of the data and analysis presented on our Healthiest Meal Kits page.
