There are many ways to define ‘healthy eating’,  however at Verdify we strongly believe that a healthy diet is not about counting calories, rigid limitations or avoiding the foods you love. Rather, it is about improving your wellbeing and immune system, preventing chronic conditions, boosting mood and energy levels, and of course feeling great!

Verdify aims to make healthy eating the easiest choice and this is the reason why we have created SwapMeals and Noory to enable this. 

Swapmeals is an AI-powered platform filled with healthy recipes, and Noory is a nutrition profile for personalised nutrition. Noory safely collects personal information about your dietary patterns, including: eating preferences, allergies and specific dietary requirements.By creating a Noory profile you will get highly personalised recipes that are fully in line with the guidelines for healthy eating. Our data is based on extensive research that is regularly reviewed by scientific experts and updated with the latest high-quality literature on nutrition, dietary patterns and health outcomes.

Verdify has based its work on the Dutch Richtlijnen Goede Voeding and the British Eat Well Guide. However, within Noory the future plan is to include an-ever-increasing number of new countries. This will not only ensure that people from all around the world can follow the nutritional guidelines of their local country, but will also guarantee local interpretation and adaptation of the diet so that it can reflect the culture, geography and demography of the population and individuals. 

Starting from the guidelines for healthy eating, Verdify offers healthy recipes on SwapMeals as well as several diet options for more specific conditions through Noory. You may be asking: what are the foundations behind SwapMeals’ healthy recipes? And what are the principles of the healthy eating diet on which Noory relies? As mentioned, the recommendations may vary between countries, but the main diet principles are as follows:

• Eat at least 5 portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables a day or at least 200 grams of vegetables and at least 200 grams of fruit daily;
• Base meals on potatoes, bread, rice, pasta or other starchy carbohydrates and choose higher fibre wholegrain varieties;
• Replace refined grain products with whole grain products;
• Have some dairy or dairy alternatives (such as soya drinks and yoghurts) and try to go for lower-fat and lower-sugar products where possible;
• Eat legumes weekly;
• Aim for at least 2 portions of fish every week, 1 of which should be oily;
• Eat at least 15 grams of unsalted nuts per day;
• Replace butter, hard margarine and cooking fats with soft margarine, liquid cooking fat and vegetable oils;
• Limit the consumption of red meat, especially processed meat;
• Limit the intake of table salt to a maximum of 6 grams per day;
• Drink plenty of fluids.

The general aim of these principles is to increase the intake and the diversity of plant-based foods, lower animal source foods consumption, choose unsaturated rather than saturated fats, limit the amounts of highly processed foods, refined grains, and free sugars and guarantee an optimal caloric intake.

Verdify starts from these recommendations to ensure that recipes contain the right amount of calories and nutrients as well as a wide variety of fruit, vegetables and fibre-rich products. Furthermore, Verdify makes sure that recipes don’t exceed the recommended intakes of free sugar, salt, saturated and trans-fats. Verdify’s attention is highly focused on these nutritional factors because they are related to a higher risk of developing metabolic diseases, such as diabetes type II and cardiovascular diseases as well as some types of cancer. 

References:

1. World Health Organisation (2020). Healthy diet. Consulted on 10 February from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/healthy-diet 
2. The EAT-Lancet commission.(2020). Healthy Diets From Sustainable Food Systems. Consulted on 10 February from  https://eatforum.org/content/uploads/2019/07/EAT-Lancet_Commission_Summary_Report.pdf 
3. Food and Agriculture Organization (n.d). The state of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. Consulted on 12 February from: http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html# 
4. Gezondheidsraad. (2015). Richtlijnen goede voeding 2015. Den Haag: Gezondheidsraad (publication nr. 2015/24).
5. National Health Service (2019). The Eatwell Guide. Consulted on 10 February from https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-eatwell-guide/
6. Van Dooren, C. & Kramer, G. (2012). Food patterns and dietary recommendations in Spain, France and Sweden. LiveWell for Life.