The short version
- Each is used under an open licence that permits commercial use and requires us to credit the source. This page is that credit.
- Where a product's label doesn't declare a nutrient, we may estimate it from these sources. Estimates are marked with a tilde (~) in the app.
Open Food Facts
Packaged and branded foods, barcodes, ingredients, and additive and allergen labelling. Open Food Facts is a collaborative, crowd-sourced database: entries are contributed by the public and are not independently verified.
Licence: Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0, contents under DbCL v1.0. Source: world.openfoodfacts.org.
USDA FoodData Central
Laboratory-analysed generic and whole foods, and the reference values behind our micronutrient estimates.
Licence: Public domain (CC0 1.0). Source: fdc.nal.usda.gov.
Anses. Table de composition nutritionnelle des aliments Ciqual
Micronutrient composition used to estimate vitamins and minerals a product label does not declare. Anses has not reviewed and does not endorse Nurelio or the way this data is used here.
Licence: Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab). Source: ciqual.anses.fr.
International tables of glycemic index and glycemic load values: 2008
Glycemic index, and the glycemic load shown under carbohydrate. Atkinson FS, Foster-Powell K, Brand-Miller JC. Diabetes Care 2008;31:2281-2283. Values are laboratory measurements of specific tested foods; where no tested food matches, we show the median for that kind of food as an estimate.
Licence: Open access (Diabetes Care / PMC). Source: doi.org/10.2337/dc08-1239.
McCance and Widdowson’s The Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset
Iodine and biotin — the two nutrients the other databases do not publish. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: www.gov.uk/government/publications/composition-of-foods-integrated-dataset-cofid.
How estimates work
Most packaged foods declare only the handful of nutrients their nutrition label legally requires — typically calories, macronutrients, sodium, and one or two minerals. The remaining vitamins and minerals are simply absent from the data, which is different from being zero.
Rather than show you a misleading 0%, Nurelio does one of two things. If nothing is known, the nutrient reads as “—”. If the food can be matched to a comparable generic food in the databases above, we show a typical value for that kind of food, marked with a tilde (~).
An estimate is a reasonable approximation for a category of food, not a measurement of the product in your hand. Nurelio never uses estimated values when looking for patterns in your health data — only figures that came off an actual label or laboratory analysis.