Disclaimer
This site gives you estimates for general information. It is not medical advice, it is not dietary advice, and it is not a substitute for either.
Talk to someone qualified before you change your diet
If you are going to act on anything you read here — cutting salt, cutting saturated fat, changing how much protein you eat, changing what you feed somebody else — talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian first. That matters more, not less, if any of the following is true:
- you are managing a health condition, including diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease, coeliac disease or an eating disorder;
- you are pregnant or breastfeeding;
- you are feeding a child, or cooking for someone whose diet is being managed by somebody else;
- you take medication that interacts with food — anticoagulants and vitamin K, MAOIs and tyramine, and many others;
- you have a food allergy or intolerance.
Nothing on this site knows any of that about you, because it is not told and does not ask. A number here is a fact about a recipe, not a recommendation about a person.
Allergens
Do not use this site to decide whether a food is safe for someone with an allergy. It does not read allergen information from recipes, it does not know about cross-contamination, and an ingredient it could not match contributes nothing at all to the totals — which looks exactly like an ingredient that was not there. Read the packet.
The one exception is the label scanner, which transcribes the allergen line off a photograph of a packet. That is a transcription, and it can be wrong: a blurred line, a cropped panel, a word misread. Check it against the packet in your hand.
What the numbers actually are
Every figure comes from multiplying a USDA FoodData Central value by a weight. Both halves carry error:
- The database value is an average. USDA figures are sampled across producers and seasons; the specific thing in your kitchen differs.
- The weight is often inferred. A volume converted through a density, a count converted through a typical item weight, a container assumed to be a standard size. Rows where the weight was guessed are tagged est. weight, and every row says which food it was matched to, because that match is where the number came from.
- Cooking is not modelled. Fat absorbed by frying, liquid boiled off, fat drained from mince — none of it is accounted for automatically.
- Servings are a setting, not a fact. Every headline number is per serving, and the serving count is whatever it is set to.
How accurate is this sets out the size of each of those, in order of how much they move the numbers. It is worth reading before you rely on anything here.
What this site does not do
- It does not diagnose, treat, prevent or cure anything.
- It does not tell you what to eat, or score your recipe as good or bad.
- It does not know your age, weight, activity, medication, allergies, conditions or goals.
- It does not account for glycaemic response, bioavailability, or how a food actually affects you as opposed to what it contains.
The percentages shown against Daily Values are the FDA’s reference figures for a general adult population on a 2,000 kcal diet. They are a labelling convention, not a target set for you.
The suggestions
The “Improve recipe” panel proposes ingredient swaps and shows what each one would do to the numbers. Those are cooking suggestions computed from a food database — the effect shown is the recipe re-totalled with the change applied, and nothing more. They are not clinical recommendations, they are not tailored to you, and the site has no way of knowing whether a change is a good idea for your circumstances.
No warranty
This site is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The data may be incomplete, out of date or wrong, and the site may be unavailable. To the fullest extent the law allows, no liability is accepted for any loss or damage arising from use of this site or reliance on anything in it.
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
Found something wrong?
Every match and every number can be reported from the results page, and mistakes are worth telling us about — a wrong food match is fixed by the report itself once enough people agree, and a wrong nutrient value is queued for a person to check against USDA. Send a suggestion for anything else.