Food Data Sources

1. What this covers

The food database behind the diary, the recipe builder and the barcode lookup is compiled from four public food composition sources, one for each region the app serves. Every row in the app names the source it came from and the region it was published for. We publish nothing of our own as a nutrition figure: each value is the figure the source published, per 100 g, or a conversion of it that the source itself defines (energy in kilocalories from kilojoules, salt from sodium).

2. The sources

• United States. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, 2026 release. fdc.nal.usda.gov. Public domain (CC0 1.0). Branded rows are the nutrition labels manufacturers file with the USDA.
• United Kingdom and Ireland.McCance and Widdowson's The Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID) 2021, Public Health England. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Ireland has no national composition table, so Irish generic foods use CoFID.
• Australia. Food Standards Australia New Zealand, Australian Food Composition Database Release 3 (2025) and AUSNUT 2023. foodstandards.gov.au. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Packaged foods in the UK, Ireland and Australia. Data from Open Food Facts, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Individual contents are available under the Database Contents License. Open Food Facts rows are crowd-sourced label transcriptions. When you log one, the app keeps the figures you logged together with the row's source id, so every diary entry can be traced back to the row it came from.

3. The subset we use

The compiled database is a subset: rows with a complete energy, protein, fat and carbohydrate panel per 100 g, published for the regions the app serves, with each source's nutrient names mapped onto one shared list. A copy of the Open Food Facts subset we use, in the form the ODbL asks for, is available on request from support@myhealthengineer.com.

4. How to read a row

Government composition tables are laboratory analyses of a typical sample. Manufacturer labels are what the maker declared for one product at one time, and a crowd-sourced label can carry a transcription error. Each row in the app carries its source so you can weigh it. Where two sources carry the same barcode, the app shows the one held by a government database first. The figures are education, not medical advice: see the Medical & Health Disclaimer.