Introduction

The Building H Index rates and ranks popular products and services on the impact they have on their users’ health. The Index focuses specifically on products and services that lie outside of the health and health care industries – the consumer products and services that millions of people consume or interact with as they live their daily lives. These products and services do not have health as their purpose, but they shape the behaviors that strongly influence people’s health. These products and their impact on health – in an era of relentlessly growing chronic diseases – is enormous and deserves scrutiny.

The 2024 Index covers more than 75 products and services, across four industries – entertainment, food, housing and transportation – and 12 product categories. We  review each product/service and assess how it influences five important health behaviors – eating; physical activity; sleeping; engaging socially and time spent outdoors. These particular five behaviors have each been shown to strongly influence both physical and mental health. This results in an overall health score, or H-Score, for each product. The H-Score is a 0 to 100 scale, where 100 indicates a strong positive influence on all five behaviors, 0 a strong negative influence on all five and 50 a net neutral influence.

Full profiles of each product/service in the Index, as well as findings in each of the four industries are available by clicking on the links in the table.

Overall Rankings

2024 Building H Index Report

Read the 2024 Building H Index report to learn the key takeaways, how products can have better health impact, how we came up with the ratings, and more.

Product Profiles

Results by Industry

Findings across each industry and detailed profiles of each product are found in the following sections:

Your Personal Product Environment

Building H rates popular products and services on how they affect people’s health behaviors. Take a short quiz on which products you use to see how healthy your personal product environment is.

Acknowledgments

TEAM

Steve Downs and Thomas Goetz, co-founders at Building H, conceived and developed the Building H Index and wrote the report.

Sara Singer, MBA, PhD, Professor of Health Policy and Medicine and, by courtesy, Organizational Behavior at Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford Graduate School of Business, served as a methodological advisor throughout the project.

Research, analysis, development and writing of the product profiles was done by Cheryl Collins (chain restaurants and meal kits), Evan Cook (game consoles/platforms, game publishers), Onelia Hawa, MPH (apartment managers/developers, single-family home builders), William Henry, MPH (chain restaurants), Alec McMorris, MPH (social media platforms), Lorena Moreno Aguilar (game consoles/platforms), Vanessa Rogers (automobiles, bicycles), and Steve Downs (food/grocery delivery services, mapping & directions services, mobility services, video streaming services.)

Gracianna Breault assisted the volunteer recruiting effort and supported the reviewer scoring process. She and Evan Cook also built pages for the Building H Index website.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, Carla Perissinotto, MD, MHS and Matthew Smith, PhD, MPH from the Foundation for Social Connection’s Scientific Advisory Council, lent their expertise to the development of survey questions and the analyses of the influences on social connection and the identification of opportunities across all product categories. Abigail Barth, MPH from the Foundation for Social Connection, coordinated their efforts and provided valuable input.

VOLUNTEER RATERS

Building H is grateful for the contributions of its community of volunteer raters, who reviewed and scored the profiles we drafted. These raters include: Jaime Adler, Angela Alaniz, Gabrielle Anglade, Eliah Aronoff Spencer, Hassina Bahadurzada, Ileana Balcu, David Ball, Fady Barmada, Susan Barrett, Ellen Beckjord, Anita Berger, Vinny Black, E. Susanne Blazek, Amber Brandner, Meghan Brauch, Miranda Brillante, Maribet Brute, Amy Bucher, Casey Bukowski, Alison Byrne Fields, Shannon Cain, Lacey Caywood, Alexandra Cheek, Alex Chen, Joanne Cheung, Bianca Chun, Rachel Cometa Estuar, Sara Coon, Emily Culbertson, Sandra Curtis, Sanjana Dasgupta, Ashlee Davis, Emmanuella Demosthenes, Reanna Edgerton, Whitney Ellington, Carly Erickson, Tara Fitzpatrick, Erica Frenkel, Danny Freund, Samuel Fuchs, Liza Fuentes, Jan Gierzyński, Pedro Luis González Sanz, Heather Goss, Clint Grant, Andrea Gray, Sarah Greene, Aline Holzwarth, Luna Homsi, Julia Hooker, Zak Hyde, Marta Induni, Emma Jeter, Jennifer Jimenez, Vishaka Kalra, Janice Kao, Jhansi Katteboina, Samir Khanna, Natalie Kish, Shelby Kommes, Shandria Labon, Sandy Lam, Colleen Lampron, Austin Le, Deb Levine, Matt Lewis, Courtney Lewis, Alan Lieber, Neranga Liyanaarachchige, Ramon Llamas, Nicole Lordi, Katherine Ly, Manuel Madamba, Jonathan Madamba, Harshitha Madhavan, Johnny Magdaleno, Roopa Kalyanaraman Marcello, Olga Maslova, Brett McClung, Kimberly McDowell-Henri, Patty Medina, Melissa Menke, Ashley Miller, Bobby Milstein, Rebecca Mitchell, Sabah Mohammed, Melissa Muncy, Lydia Muse, Liz Nelson, Mari Nicholson, Maya Nirmalraj, Ivy Opoku-Nti, Zakari Osheku, Tina Park, Sandeep Patel, Karla Pearcy-Marston, Ashley Pfeifer, Madhura Phansikar, Linda Pippin, Mary Pittman, Melody Presswood, Saqib Rabbani, Ernesto Ramirez, Kayla Rathi, Linekie Redd, Isabella Redding, David Reeves, Amanda Richer, Barbara Roberts, Marc Rubenstein, Katie Russell, Brittany Ryan, Samuel Sarmiento, Deborah Savage, Julie Schafer, Jason Schulist, Chris Schulz, Sherry Schweighardt, Alexandra Schweitzer, Maren Sederquist, Samuel Seward, Brittany Sigler, Lisa Silverman, Sara Singer, Madelyn Slamka, Sandy Slater, Miranda Smith, Laverne Snow, Rachel Sodhi, Gina Soloperto, Ann Somers Hogg, Susan Song, Rachel Steinhart, Angela Stoltzenburg, Kyle Stuart, Aswathi Surendran, Alex Tam, Rachel Thero, Oliver Thompson, Ben Tingey, Nancy O'Hara Tompkins, Tiffany Turner, Ihunanya Ukaigwe, Erica VanLandingham, Cat Walker, Marie Wallace, Benjamin Weitz, Phylene Wiggins, Megan Winkler, Susan Woods, Kita Wright-Chandler, Vanessa Zeigler, and Anna Zendell.

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT

Einhorn Collaborative provided funding support for the 2023 consumer research that informed our analyses and partial support for the development of the Building H Index. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided funding support for previous surveys cited in the report and for the early conceptual work on the development of the Building H Index.

Abigail Horn, PhD, Research Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California, provided access to the Restaurant Nutrition Quality (RNQ) scores for the chain restaurants we profiled and collaborated with us on developing modifications to the RNQ.

Jared Hanley and the team at NatureQuant provided support for calculating NatureScores for our analyses of housing companies.

Rahul Gottimukkala developed and coded the interactive presentation of the Index on www.buildingh.org.

Leila Tredemeyer designed the report.

Abby King, PhD from the Stanford Prevention Research Center reviewed the methodology for the initial Building H Index report.