To all of you who thought comparing apples and oranges was impossible – think again.  Scientists at Yale University’s Griffin Prevention Research Center have developed a food scoring system intended to help consumers make better decisions about the food they eat.  Using a scale from 1-100, the algorithm scores foods ranging from apples to oranges to hamburgers to tomato soup to…

This Overall Nutritional Quality Index (ONQI) is based on an algorithm that accounts for over 30 variables, including nutrients, vitamins, sugar, and salt among other factors.  For example, broccoli = 100, while soda = 1.  Okay, these are obvious examples.  But are you surprised that orange juice (39) has less nutritional value than whole milk (52)?  And raisins (26) fall below NY strip steak (44)?

How brilliant!  These developers turned all of the “nutrition” numbers that are relatively meaningless to the average eater into something easy to swallow (pun intended).  Every day, we hear claims that carbs make you fat, sugar gives you diabetes, and high fructose corn syrup will kill you.  It’s nearly impossible to avoid all of these food sins all the time, so how do we know what to eat?  The answer: boil it down to one simple number.

‘Cool idea,’ you might say, ‘but my work is too complicated to be boiled down to one number.’  Is it?  Our nonprofit and grant-making clients ask us questions like:  How can we know if one program is more effective than another?  How do we know if our organization is getting the visibility it needs?  How can we know if our partnerships are working?  There are so many variables wrapped up in these questions that they seem impossible to compute.  The good news is that they’re not.  You just need to simplify the situation:  identify the important variables, weigh them according to their importance, track the results, and calculate the “score.” 

The ONQI was developed in response to the US Secretary of Health’s call for ideas to improve Americans’ diets, in a particular effort to stop the spread of epidemic obesity.  What is your call to action?  The ONQI enables the average shopper to choose foods “at a glance” based on their overall nutritional quality.  It’s not just another one for the textbooks; you will start to see it in grocery store aisles, product packaging, and restaurant menus starting this year.  How can you make measurement work for you?

The next time you’re staring at the mind-numbing shelf of cereal options, your decision of which type of cheerios to buy may be made a little easier.  And it may make you consider how something this simple could transform the way you look at your work.

Reference:  www.onqi.org, National Geographic – Sep-08 – “Shopping by the Numbers”