What Is a Good Diet Diversity Score?

How dietary diversity is measured, what the benchmarks mean, and what a good score looks like in practice.

Diet diversity scores translate the idea of eating a wide range of foods into something concrete and measurable. Rather than relying on a general sense of whether your diet is varied, a diversity score gives you a specific number that reflects how many different foods you are eating and how that range compares to recommended benchmarks.

Different tools measure diversity differently, but the underlying principle is the same: more distinct food species or food groups consumed over a given period produces a higher score, and a higher score is associated with better nutritional outcomes.

How diet diversity scores are measured

The most established research frameworks measure dietary diversity in one of two ways:

Food group diversity counts the number of distinct food groups included in the diet over a reference period, typically 24 hours or seven days. The Minimum Dietary Diversity Score (MDD), used in public health research, assesses whether a diet includes foods from at least five of eight food groups: starchy staples, dark green leafy vegetables, other vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables, other fruits and vegetables, organ meats, flesh meats and fish, eggs, legumes, nuts and seeds, and milk and dairy. This is a binary threshold measure used primarily in population health research and developing world nutrition assessment.

Plant food species counts are more commonly used in consumer health and gut microbiome research. These count the number of different plant species consumed per week. This is the framework behind the 30 plants per week benchmark from the American Gut Project, and it is the most practically useful measure for health-motivated individuals in well-nourished populations.

What a good diversity score looks like

In plant food diversity terms, the research suggests the following approximate benchmarks:

The 30-plant threshold is the most widely referenced because it is the clearest inflection point in the American Gut Project data. Moving from fewer than 10 to 30 or more plant foods per week produces a measurably different gut microbiome. Moving from 30 to 50 produces a smaller incremental benefit.

How Boone measures diet diversity

Boone's diet diversity score tracks the range of different foods you eat each week through the food log and food scanner. Rather than requiring manual counting, the score is updated automatically as you log meals, giving you a running total of distinct food species consumed across the current week.

The score is connected to your micro nutrition picture, showing you not just how many different foods you are eating but which nutritional areas benefit most from the foods you are including. A high diversity score with consistent inclusion of seeds and leafy greens will show up differently in your magnesium and folate scores than a high diversity score built primarily around fruits and wholegrains.

Improving your score: practical approach

For most people in the UK, moving from a typical diet to a consistently diverse one is a matter of intentional rotation rather than wholesale dietary change. The most effective single changes for increasing a diversity score are:

• Adding seeds to an existing daily meal: pumpkin, hemp, or chia seeds add three distinct plant foods with minimal change to the meal
• Swapping one vegetable each shopping trip for a different one you have not had recently
• Including two different legumes per week: lentils and chickpeas on separate days are two distinct plant foods
• Using three to four different herbs and spices in a meal rather than one: each counts as a separate plant food
• Adding a different wholegrain: oats at breakfast and brown rice at dinner are two distinct plant foods

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These changes alone can move a typical UK diet from the 10 to 15 range to 25 to 30 within a week, with no dramatic change to meal structure or food budget.

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