Where Nality gets its nutrition data

Every food in Nality shows where its numbers came from. These are the sources, and the rules for choosing between them.

AFCD

The Australian Food Composition Database is published by Food Standards Australia New Zealand. It is a government database of the nutrient content of foods eaten in Australia and New Zealand, including raw and cooked forms. For searches in Australia, Nality looks here first.

USDA FoodData Central

FoodData Central is the United States Department of Agriculture's food composition database. It includes lab-analysed reference foods, survey foods used for typical mixed dishes, and a large catalogue of branded products.

Open Food Facts

Open Food Facts is an open database of packaged products, built by contributors and published under the Open Database Licence. It is used when matching barcodes. Its data is contributed by people, so it is treated as product data, not as a reference database.

Nutrition label scans

When you photograph a nutrition panel, Nality reads the values printed on the pack. Those values can be reused when someone scans the same barcode.

How a food is chosen

• For everyday foods, reference databases are used. In Australia the Australian database is tried first, and the others are used when it has no match.
• A match has to be the food you asked for. A different food that shares a word, such as French toast for toast, is not accepted.
• If you say a food is cooked or raw, a row in that state is preferred, and a row in the opposite state is not used.
• You can always change the amount, and the numbers scale with it.

When a value is missing

Databases do not know every nutrient for every food. When a value is not known it is shown as missing, never as zero, and totals do not pretend to be more complete than they are.

When there is no match

If no database has the food, Nality can give an AI estimate. It is always labelled as one. See how AI estimates work.