Vertree

How Pull works

Pull is the number at the center of Vertree. It answers one question about a food: how hard does this pull? How much does it keep calling you back, and how easy is it to keep eating past the point where you’d normally stop.

It is not a calorie count, not a health grade, and not a score for you. A plate of fries pulls hard whether you eat two of them or the whole basket. Pull describes the fries.

Why can’t I stop eating chips?

Nobody sits down to a bowl of plain boiled potatoes and loses track of how many they’ve eaten. Plenty of people do exactly that with a bag of chips. Both are potatoes.

The usual explanations don’t cover the gap. Calorie counting treats them as roughly the same food with different numbers attached. “Chips are processed” falls apart the moment you press on it: butter, sugar and flour combined in your own kitchen aren’t processed by any sensible definition, and a warm cookie is still very hard to put down.

What’s actually different is the combination. Research into which foods people find hardest to stop eating found that the answer wasn’t fat, or salt, or sugar, or starch on their own. It was particular pairs of them, together, in the same bite.

The three mixes

Vertree checks every food against three mixes:

A mix is only active when both halves are past their line. Olive oil on vegetables is very fatty and entirely unremarkable — one half. Cheese on a cracker is fat with refined starch and salt, and suddenly the packet is empty. Same fat, different mix.

This is why the usual villains are innocent on their own. Salt on your own cooking isn’t the mechanism. It becomes the mechanism when something else is active alongside it.

Drinks are handled separately, because the research above was built on solid food. A drink’s pull comes from its added sugar — which is why a soft drink or a juice reads as tempting while whole fruit doesn’t.

How the number is built

Each active mix adds to the food’s Pull. How much it adds depends on how far past the lines the food is — and, importantly, on the
weaker half. A food that is far past the fat line but barely over the salt line pulls only mildly, because a mix is only as strong as its weaker half. Being a little under a line still counts a little: the lines are the middle of a band, not a cliff, so a food sitting just under one is partly active, and Vertree says so (“about 40% active”).

Mixes stack. Something with all three active — a lot of snack food — lands near the top of the scale.

A meal is the average of its foods, weighted by calories. A rich sauce that makes up a tenth of the plate can’t sink a big bowl of pasta and mince. A steakhouse dinner where the steak dominates the calories reads low even with fries on the side. That’s deliberate: the meal’s Pull is about what you mostly ate.

A day is the same idea across the day’s meals. Pull runs from
0% — nothing pulling — upward. Zero isn’t an achievement; it’s an absence.

Why the four words

Every food and meal also gets one of four words, and the words come from which mixes are active and how strongly — not from where the number happens to land. Two foods can share a Pull for completely different reasons, and the word says which.

Grounded — nothing pulls, and it fills you up. Eggs, plain potatoes, lentils, whole fruit, most vegetables, plain yogurt.

Tasty — real pleasure, and it still fills you up. A well-seasoned roast chicken. A dressed salad. Something is a little active, and that’s fine — this is a compliment.

Tempting — a mix is properly active. It keeps calling you back, or it’s easy to keep eating. White rice under a salty sauce. Juice. A soft drink. Buttered toast with jam.

Irresistible — more than one mix active, or one very strongly. Chips, fries, ice cream, most packaged snacks. Also, quietly, a lot of things that don’t look like junk food — a canned tomato soup can read Irresistible, because carbs + salt and fat + sugar are both active in it.

Tap any word in the app and it tells you exactly which mix is doing the pulling and how much of the Pull it accounts for.

What Pull is not

Not a calorie count. Calories measure amount. Pull measures how hard it is to stop. Both are useful; they answer different questions. A large plate of grounded food reads beautifully.

Not “processed vs. whole”. Home-baked cookies pull. Aged cheese on its own barely does. Pull looks at what’s in the food, not at where it was made.

Not a grade. Pull describes food. It says nothing about willpower, discipline or what you should have done. The point of seeing the pull is that the choice becomes yours again — most of what’s on the shelf pulls, and palates get used to it, so the pull is easy to miss until you can see it.

Why most things pull

When researchers applied the mix definition to the food supply, most of it qualified — not a few junk foods, most of the shelf. So if a lot of what you log reads Tempting, Vertree isn’t being harsh. It’s describing the environment accurately. That’s the whole reason to make the pull visible: you can’t plant on purpose in a grove you can’t see.

For the curious: where the lines are

The lines come from published research and Vertree uses them as they’re published:

How much an active mix adds, and where the four words change over, are Vertree’s own tuning. Those numbers aren’t published because they’re still being calibrated against real meals, and a published number becomes a promise.

See it on real meals

Settings → Explore with sample data shows two weeks of a real, fully scored log — every word, every Pull, every explainer, on ordinary meals. It’s the fastest way to get a feel for the scale.