 To combat the growing health threat of obesity, experts focused on the nutrient density concept during the 20th International Congress of Nutrition held in Grenada. It's a new tool for achieving a healthier diet by avoiding empty calories. What nutrient density is, is the ratio of nutrients to calories. Foods contain both nutrients and calories and some foods contain empty calories and some foods contain more nutrients than calories. So nutrient profiling tries to distinguish between those foods which are energy rich and those foods which are nutrient rich. We're making a contrast here between energy and nutrients. Nutrient density is also a way of unmasking so-called hidden hunger in a diet. The diets of many people have become full of energy, empty calories, but are poor in nutrients and people are beginning to refer to this phenomenon as the hidden hunger. In America, many people are overfed in terms of calories but effectively undernourished in terms of nutrients. So what we need to do is to improve the nutrient to calorie ratio of the total diet. And there are two ways of doing that. Either you increase the nutrients or you take away the calories. So on one hand you can consume nutrient dense foods and beverages, yogurt, milk or you take away calories by drinking either plain or bottled water. There are a number of scoring systems for nutrient density, some of which are very simple, others very complicated. All of those scores really deal with the ratio of nutrients to calories. The qualifying nutrients and the disqualifying nutrients. And what we do is we add up the qualifying nutrients and we subtract the disqualifying nutrients. And among the qualifying nutrients will be protein and fiber and calcium and some of the vitamins and minerals. And the disqualifying nutrients will be added sugars and saturated fat and sodium and we're trying to look at the balance between the two. It's actually very simple. But when you're buying groceries you can easily calculate nutrient density. It's actually very simple to use it in practice because if you look at the food labels you can immediately tell if the food contains largely empty calories and does not contain protein, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron, potassium, zinc those are the nutrients that you want. If none of those are present chances are the food or the beverage contains calories but few nutrients. So look at the label and then start looking at the food groups. Some food groups are very nutrient dense. They contain more nutrients than calories. And among those food groups will be animal products, dairy, milk and meat and also vegetables and fruit.