Chronic Inflammation Test — Diet & Lifestyle Score

Guide: how your inflammation score is calculated

Low-grade chronic inflammation is a silent risk factor linked to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. This calculator evaluates 7 dimensions of your lifestyle to estimate your overall inflammatory risk through a weighted average.

Methodology

This is an educational score, not a validated clinical index — and not the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII) itself, which needs a full dietary record of 45 food parameters. The diet questions are inspired by the DII (Shivappa et al., 2014) and the Dietary Inflammation Score (DIS; Byrd et al., 2019); the other dimensions draw on Byrd’s Lifestyle Inflammation Score (activity, alcohol, smoking, BMI) and the factors reviewed by Furman et al. (2019). The points per answer and the dimension weights are our own simplification. Each dimension is scored from 0 to 10 (10 = least inflammatory) and the weighted sum is scaled to 0-100. It does not measure inflammation in your body: only a blood test such as hs-CRP can.

The 7 dimensions and their weights

• Diet (30%): How often you eat leafy greens, fruit, whole grains, oily fish, nuts and seeds, legumes and olive oil, versus processed meats, refined sugars and fried or ultra-processed foods.
• Physical activity (15%): Minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per week, minus a penalty for hours spent sitting each day.
• Body composition (15%): BMI, calculated from your weight and height.
• Sleep (10%): Hours of sleep per night and how well you sleep.
• Stress (10%): Perceived stress level and how often you practise relaxation.
• Substances (15%): Tobacco and alcohol use.
• Hydration (5%): Glasses of water per day.

Score interpretation

The overall score ranges from 0 to 100. A score of 75-100 indicates low inflammatory risk (your habits are anti-inflammatory). 50-74 indicates moderate risk (there is room for improvement). 25-49 indicates high risk (multiple factors are promoting inflammation). 0-24 indicates very high risk (consulting a healthcare professional is recommended). Each dimension also receives its own score, allowing you to identify the specific areas that contribute most to your inflammatory risk.