How we verify our nutrition data
Every calorie and macro figure on our food pages is traceable to a named source. This page explains where the numbers come from, how we check them, and what we refuse to do.
Where the numbers come from
We use a fixed hierarchy, in this order:
- CoFID — the UK government’s Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (McCance & Widdowson), the official reference for food eaten in the UK. It is our first choice for every generic food, because its values reflect British recipes and portions.
- Manufacturer labels — when a page names a branded product, the numbers come from the producer’s own label or official nutrition guide, with the product named next to the figure.
- USDA — the US Department of Agriculture database, used only when a food has no UK value, and flagged when US and UK values differ meaningfully.
Some pages also show which brands of a food are popular. That ranking comes from the BodyPal food database — over 3.3 million products — and reflects how widely each product appears across the database’s sources and the countries it is sold in. It is not a measure of what BodyPal users log. Calories for those branded products come from the manufacturer’s label, as above.
How we check
Before a number is published we cross-check it against a second independent source. Where sources disagree by more than a rounding difference, we investigate which entry actually matches the food on the page — most errors in nutrition data are not wrong values but right values for the wrong food. Each page carries a “Last verified” date, and we re-check pages on a rolling basis.
How we calculate
- Kilojoules: kJ = kcal × 4.184
- Salt: grams of salt = sodium (mg) × 2.5 ÷ 1,000 — shown in grams, the UK label convention
- %RI: percentage of the reference intake for an average adult (2,000 kcal; 70 g fat, 260 g carbohydrate, 90 g sugars, 50 g protein, 6 g salt)
- Portion figures are calculated from weighed typical UK portions, named on each page
What we do not do
- We do not copy figures from other calorie websites.
- We do not let an AI model estimate or generate a nutrition value.
- We do not publish a figure we could not trace to CoFID, a label, or USDA.
Other regions
These rules cover our United Kingdom guides, which use CoFID and UK labels. Our United States guides use USDA FoodData Central, US serving sizes and % Daily Value: how we verify US data →
Spotted an error?
Tell us at support@bodypalapp.com and we will re-verify the page.