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 voluntarily adopted by 7 countries so far (France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland). 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.

Even when nutrition looks good on paper, processing still matters. A landmark 2019 NIH trial (Hall et al., Cell Metabolism) found that people eating an ultra-processed diet spontaneously ate about 500 more calories a day and gained weight — compared to people on a minimally processed diet matched for the same calories, sugar, fat, and fiber. That's why processing gets scored separately from nutrition: a clean label doesn't fully capture this effect. Source: NIH

One exception: salt and sugar alone don't count against a product's processing score when the amount is within Nutri-Score's own recommended range — seasoned food isn't the same as industrially transformed food. However, if salt or sugar is genuinely high, it is considered in the scoring.

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. See our full additive safety citations for the specific source behind every one of these.
• 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.

How we handle new science

Nutrition and food-safety research moves constantly, and a single new study is not the same as an established finding. We don't shift a rating the moment one observational study makes headlines — correlation in one cohort isn't causation, and reacting to every new paper would make scoring noisy and unreliable rather than trustworthy. At the same time, we don't think it's right to wait for a multi-year completed regulatory ban before treating something as worth watching — that process can take a decade or more.

Our actual bar: emerging science plus an active regulatory signal — a body like EFSA formally opening a re-evaluation or call for data on that specific additive — is what tells us a finding has enough weight to revisit a rating. That combination triggers a human review, not an automatic change. We track new findings on a rolling basis; see our citations page for the specific source and reasoning behind every current rating.

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.