Scientific Methodology

We ranked all 455 foods (identified in over 60,000 studies we looked at), based on the prevalence of the 100 diseases they were said to be good for, and took the top 100 of them for the book.

To determine prevalence, we needed to find the number of people in the United States who had each condition at any point in 2022 and then divide that number by the total U.S. population of 333.3 million in 2022.

We then multiplied this figure by 1,000, as prevalence is defined by how many people out of 1,000 have a given condition. It’s important to note that age and gender were not considered in this calculation.

For example, even though only women can be pregnant, we still divided the number of pregnancies by 333.3 million. If the prevalence of pregnancy is 11.1, it means that 3.7 million people in the United States experienced pregnancy in 2022.