Which countries have the healthiest alimentation ?

One of the information provided by the OpenFactFood platform is the Nutri-score, a nutritional score that goes from A to E and indicates how ‘good’ (in terms of health), a product is. Those grades take into account the energy, unsaturated fat, sugar, sodium (high proportions are considered ‘bad’) and also the proportion of fruits, vegetables, nuts, fibers and proteins (high values are considered ‘good’). The closer the grade is to an A, the healthier the product is, and the closer the grade is to an E, the less healthy the product is. For the beverages, the grade A is only attributed to mineral and spring water.

First, we decided to calculate the overall proportion of each Nutri-score for different countries. We chose to focus on the twenty countries that have the biggest number of products on the platform, so that the analysis stays significant. France is the country with the greatest number, 446394, followed by the United States of America with 175478 available products. Hungary, the 20th and last country we decided to analyze has only 643 available products. It is quite a small number, but we decided to keep the countries up to this one anyway, to have an idea of the Nutri-score distribution for the Eastern countries.

It is important to precise that the numbers we are dealing with are the numbers of products available in the market and present on the OpenFactFood platform. Thus, it does not include all the products present on the market. And it is also important to underline that it does not give us real information about how popular they are, and how much people buy or consume each of them.

Global distribution of products by Nutri-Score in different countries

On the following graph you can click on the countries on the right to hide them from the comparative map, and thus compare as many as 20 to only 2 countries, depending on the precision you want to reach.

Based on this first graph, we selected some countries to analyze in more depth, based on the observed values. First, we chose France, more as a ‘reference’, because it is the top one country based on number of products, and because looking at the graph it seems to be an ‘average country’. The United States and Switzerland were also selected because we are particularly interested in those two countries. Indeed, we are living and studying in Switzerland, thus it is a country we are directly concerned with, and, The United States, because people usually have a lot of prejudices about American food, and we wanted to look deeper into that. Then, we chose Spain, because it has a surprisingly high proportion of grade A products. And finally, the four countries with the highest proportion of E grade products: Czech-Republic, Denmark, Russia, and Romania. We observed, surprisingly, that Russia is both in the top-3 of the countries that have the healthiest products (category A), and in the top 3 of the countries that have the least healthy products (category E).

It is easier to see the differences of distribution if you select only those eight countries on the graph.

Top 8 product tags for selected countries

The following graph shows the top-8 product categories for those eight previously selected countries. The category tag is a feature from OpenFactFood that allows the user to classify the products.

Indeed, we are now interested in knowing if the differences observed for these countries in term of Nutri-score distribution are mostly due to different (or typical) types of products, and thus different main categories, or to important differences of Nutri-score distribution inside a single category (which would mean the same type of products are available, but with better or worse nutritional composition).

On this graph, we can see which categories are present for every country in important proportions: Plant-based-foods-and-beverages, Plant-based-foods, and Sugary-snacks. Other categories that are present for several countries and that look important are Beverages, Dairies, Meals, and Cereals-and-potatoes.
On the other hand we also observe categories that seem to be more specific to a particular country. For example, the last four categories visible for Czech-Republic do not appear in the top-8 categories for any other country. Furthermore, three of these four categories are Sodas, Confectioneries and Sugared-beverages, which are all pretty unhealthy in terms of sugar content. That could easily explain the high proportion of E grades observed for this country on the first graph.
For Russia, three of the top-8 categories are Chocolates, Dark-chocolates and Milk-chocolates. That could also easily explain its important proportion of grade E observed on the previous graph.
Finally, we observe that the proportion of Sugary-snack for the four countries chosen due to their high proportion of unhealthy products (Romania, Russia, Denmark and Czech-republic) are higher (between 17 and 23%) than for the other four (between 9 and 13%).

Distribution by Nutri-Score of the most common tags for selected countries

We will now look into the differences of Nutri-score distribution inside given, popular categories.

To go further with this analysis, we decided to keep only five countries, for more clarity. France, Switzerland and the United States were kept. Spain as well, to try to explain its high proportion of grade A products. And finally, we decided to keep only one country among the four with high proportion of grade E products: Romania.

On this third graph, we observe the distribution of the Nutri-score for the five selected countries, for several popular categories noted previously. The tags Plant-based-food and Plant-based-foods-and-beverages, were redundant, thus we kept only one of them.

Choose the product tag:

Notable observations, categories ordered by importance (the more important the category, the more significant the observations):

1- Plant-based-foods: The United States have significantly fewer grade A products than the other countries, while Romania has significantly fewer grade B products. For grade E products, we notice many more products (in proportion) for Romania and the United-States.
Globally, Romania and the United Sstates have unhealthier products in this category compared to the other countries.

2- Sugary-snacks: Unsurprisingly, the Nutri-scores for this category are mainly D and E, regardless of the country.
However, the proportion of grade E products is still a bit higher for Romania.

3- Beverages: Spain has a very important proportion of grade A products, compared to the other countries. Its proportion of grade E products is also much lower. That category could, at least partially, explain why Spain is so well ranked on the very first graph.

4- Dairies: Spain and the United States have quite high proportions of grades A and B products. France and Switzerland have quite high proportion of grade D products. And Romania has quite high proportion of grade B and E products. Finally, Spain and the United States seems to have better products in this category, compared to Romania, France and Switzerland.

5- Cereals-and-potatoes: Surprisingly, we observe that the proportion of grade A products is very high for Romania, compared to other countries. However, we only have data for a very small number of products from Romania for this category (12), thus this may not be very significant, and the results for Romania are probably skewed (indeed, this category was not present in Romania’s top-8 categories).
When we remove Romania from the graph (by clicking on the country’s name on the right), we observe that the United States have a lower proportion of grade A products and a higher proportion of grade E products. But we also observe a higher proportion of grade B products compared to France, Switzerland and Spain. American products for this category are still a bit less healthy than the ones from the other three countries, but the difference is not so important.

In conclusion, we see that the differences of Nutri-score distribution across countries are not only due to the different types of products available, but also to the differences of quality for the same type of products. It seems that, proportionally, Eastern countries and the United States have more unhealthy products available, compared to Western Europe. However, it also depends on the categories, and every single country studied could improve its products’ quality in some points, and learn something from the other countries.