How Amla scores your food

Two questions, one score

Every product gets scored on two things:

Is it nutritionally balanced? We use Nutri-Score — a nutrition scoring system developed by public health researchers and used across multiple countries. It looks at what's actually good for you (fiber, protein, fruits and vegetables) against what to watch (sugar, salt, saturated fat).

How processed is it? We use NOVA — a classification developed by researchers in Brazil that groups food by how much industrial processing it's been through, from fresh and whole to ultra-processed.

Neither one alone tells the whole story. A diet soda can score well on nutrition while being heavily processed. A bag of nuts can look “high fat” while being one of the healthiest things you can eat. We combine both, weighted toward nutritional quality, so you get a fuller picture than either measure gives on its own.

Some things always bring a score down

A few things are serious enough that they cap a product's score no matter how good everything else looks:

• Processed meat (bacon, sausage, deli meats, and similar) — the World Health Organization classifies this with the same strength of evidence as tobacco for cancer risk. We don't let a good nutrition profile offset that.
• Certain additives with real regulatory action behind them — things that are actually banned in major markets, or carry a specific cancer classification from international health bodies.
• Industrially-produced trans fats — the WHO links these to hundreds of thousands of heart disease deaths worldwide every year.

When any of these apply, we always show you exactly what triggered it and why — never just a lower number with no explanation.

What we don't do

• We don't penalize meat, dairy, or any food group on ideological grounds. Every negative in our score traces to a real, cited health finding — not a belief system.
• We don't hide behind a black box. Every score can be explained.
• We don't take shortcuts on data we can't verify. If we don't have enough information to score something honestly, we'll tell you that directly instead of guessing.