How we verify our US nutrition data

Every calorie and macro figure on our US 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:

• USDA FoodData Central — the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food composition database. For a generic food we take the value from SR Legacy or Foundation Foods; for a prepared dish, from FNDDS (the survey database behind What We Eat in America); for a named product, from Branded, which mirrors the label.
• 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.
• Other government sources — FDA for label rules and Daily Values, MyPlate and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans for portion and intake context.

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, where shown: kJ = kcal × 4.184
• Sodium is given in milligrams, the US label convention — we do not convert it to grams of salt
• %DV: percentage of the Daily Value on the US Nutrition Facts label (2,000 kcal; 78 g total fat, 20 g saturated fat, 275 g total carbohydrate, 50 g added sugars, 50 g protein, 28 g dietary fiber, 2,300 mg sodium)
• Serving figures use US household measures — cups, ounces, tablespoons or pieces — with the gram weight of that serving named on each page, so the arithmetic can be checked

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• We do not publish a figure we could not trace to USDA FoodData Central or a manufacturer label.

Other regions

These rules cover our United States guides, which use USDA FoodData Central and US labels. Our United Kingdom guides use CoFID, UK portion sizes and reference intakes: how we verify UK data →

Spotted an error?

Tell us at support@bodypalapp.com and we will re-verify the page.