Nutrient density
the proportion of any array of a single nutrient or nutritional factor, or of numerous nutrients in foods, often ordered by different scalar indices
Nutrient density identifies the amount of beneficial nutrients in a food product in proportion to e.g. energy content, weight or amount of perceived detrimental nutrients. Terms such as nutrient rich and micronutrient dense refer to similar properties.
Currently there is no universal standard for the term nutrient density, nor an agreed unit with which to measure it.
Several different national and international standards have been developed and are in use (see Nutritional rating systems).
Definition and usage
According to the World Health Organization, nutrient profiling classifies and/or ranks foods by their nutritional composition in order to promote human (and/or animal) health and to prevent disease. Ranking by nutrient density is one such nutrient profiling strategy. Ordering foods by nutrient density is a statistical method of comparing foods by the proportion of nutrients in foods. Some such comparisons can be the glycemic index and the overall nutritional quality index.
When the density is defined in proportion to energy contents, nutrient-dense foods such as meats, fruits and vegetables are the opposite of energy-dense food (also called "empty calorie" food), such as alcohol and foods high in added sugar or processed cereals.
“Nutrient density” enters the record as the proportion of any array of a single nutrient or nutritional factor, or of numerous nutrients in foods, often ordered by different scalar indices. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nutrient, density and proportion can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7878716. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nutrient density” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.