emacsen's journal - Eat for Heath: Calculating ANDI and MANDI scores
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Eat for Heath: Calculating ANDI and MANDI scores
Having a father pass away at 57 and a family history of health issues, along with my own ongoing health issues (obesity and high blood sugar), I've always been conscious of, if not involved in, my diet.
I've dieted in the past with varying degrees of success. My weight is relatively stable, but it stabilizes high, just below the BMI measure for obesity, and as I see friends my age suffer from full diabetes or heart attack, I've become accurately aware that something needs to change.
To that end, I'm following ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) annecognito's advice and reading Eat for Health, Joel Fuhrman's book on nutrition and eating. One can distill the book into two basic statements: Eat lots of plants and don't each much else.
To that end, the book offers some excellent suggestions on how to go about this process. The only problem I've had is with the mysterious "ANDI" and "MANDI" scores. These are scores he gives foods based on their nutritional quantity per calorie, or in his words, nutritional density of foods. These scores range from 1000 to .05, and he offers a book (which I recently purchased) giving the values of these foods. What he doesn't do is go into a great deal of detail in how these scores were calculated. He does say they were done by taking nutritional information from a database (which he mentions by name), adding some values and doing a calculation, but never goes into depth on what that calculation is or where he added weights in order to derive his scores.
I did find that in the book, the ANDI scores are footnoted as "Patent Pending". A sidenote...
The patent system was designed in order to protect one from having people copy their work and resell it. For example, if you came up with a better wheelbarrow, you could patent is, and then be giving a limited time monopoly on producing such wheelbarrows. It would seem, then, that one would want a patent right away. What patent attorneys have found, on the other hand, is that it's often better for a patent to be put in the application process and then let it linger there. A patent in process is given much of the same protections as an actual patent, but delays the clock to expiration. This is also important because in the past (before the Internet) it was very difficult to do a patent search. One had to contact the PTO or find a patent attorney with the right contacts. Without a patent number, this would be more difficult.
The great thing about patents is that while you do get protection from your competitors for a limited time, you must also document how your invention works. So, thanks to the Internet, here is the patent application Joel Fuhrman put in for his entire program, including the scores.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20080177572&OS=20080177572&RS=20080177572
There doesn't appear to be any great secret in this document, the dietary program is quite transparent, but it does provide the missing pieces to calculating these scores.
Tags: health, personal
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