Data and sources

Food composition

Nutritional values come from CIQUAL, the French food composition table published by ANSES, the national agency for food, environmental and occupational health safety. It is distributed under the Licence Ouverte. All values are per 100 g of the food as described.

Daily reference intakes

The percentages shown next to each nutrient are shares of the adult daily reference intakes set out in Annex XIII of EU Regulation 1169/2011, the same figures printed on food labels. Fiber is absent from that regulation, so it uses the EFSA adequate intake of 25 g and is flagged as such in the data.

Badges such as "high fiber" follow the thresholds defined by EU Regulation 1924/2006 on nutrition claims, rather than being assigned by hand.

Nutrient descriptions

The plain-language explanations shown when you click a nutrient are written for this site from public references, chiefly MedlinePlus from the US National Library of Medicine and the health claims authorized by EU Regulation 432/2012. Every description carries its sources. They have not been reviewed by a nutrition professional, and that review is still outstanding.

Icons

Food icons come from the Noun Project: 2,042 under Creative Commons Attribution and 7 in the public domain. Each icon credits its author on the food page it appears on.

What the data does not cover

  • Vitamin B12 is absent from the dataset entirely, and vitamin K2 is recorded for only 32 foods.
  • Energy is missing for about 29% of foods. Rather than calculate it from the macronutrients and present a computed figure as a measured one, it is simply not shown for those foods.
  • Portion weights are not available. Everything is per 100 g, which flatters dried herbs, spices and oils in any ranking, since nobody eats 100 g of thyme.
  • Values below the detection limitappear as "< 0.5 g" and traces as "traces". They are never treated as zero, because an unmeasurably small amount is not the same as none.
  • Averages, not your food. A real carrot varies with variety, soil, season and storage.

This site

The source code is available on GitHub under the MIT licence, including the normalized data files and the script that produces them. Corrections are welcome. See also the about page.