Our view on nutrition tracking, why track what you eat and tips on how to get the most out of it.

Philosophy of Tracking What You Eat

If you are here, then you care about what you eat. Whether it is for health, or to improve your quality of life, or to simply optimise your nutrition footprint.

Tracking nutrition is not easy. You need the data, you need to be consistent, and you need to understand what to track. In order to succeed you need all three.

Nutrition science is still new, and the data is not easily available. For many processed products the data simply does not exist at all.

It is also difficult to stay consistent, it requires a bit of effort every day. And understanding what to track means educating yourself.

Nutriely attempts to help with all three, and it provides you with the tools to make the best out of this situation.

Imagine this scenario.

You register to a new nutrition app. You are excited to start tracking. You configure your profile and nutrition targets and go to the diary to start logging.

But the first product you want to add isn’t there. For most people that is enough to give up.

Just as frustrating is to add a product and see only macro elements calculated. What about iron or calcium, or selenium? Or what about vitamins?

Scanning a barcode works well if you are only interested in macro elements like protein, fat and carbs. For trivial use-cases that might be good enough. Unfortunately barcode databases simply don’t have data about minerals and vitamins.

This data just does not exist, anywhere. At the moment there are no laws or regulations that would encourage manufacturers to publish this information.

So if you are interested to track more than just macro elements you might get frustrated very quickly. There are many amazing apps that provide you with a vast range of features, and large databases. Scanning a barcode is fast but it limits your insights significantly.

In the perfect world we would have all of the products with all the vitamins and minerals accounted for, but that is not the case. Yet.

Our philosophy

Tracking nutrients will never be 100% precise. While we have nutrition data on foods, it is impossible to chemically test every single cookie or apple that you eat to see if indeed there are as many carbs and minerals as you think. It is also unlikely we are going to weigh absolutely everything, know how much water was lost in the cooking process, or know exactly what we ate every single meal.

So we approximate.

Approximation is good enough because it allows us to see the big picture, the trends and glaring problems in our patterns, which is exactly the main goal of nutrition tracking.

In order for that to work we don’t need to be perfectly precise, but we do need to be consistent. We need to be consistent in how we enter the data, when we do it, and what information we log.

Instead of relying on incomplete data, or waiting on someone else to fill in all the blanks you can use Nutriely. Learn about our nutrition tracking app here.

In addition, our tools are also built to encourage you to educate yourself by verifying the data yourself. Whether it is confirming the nutrition data, verifying the ingredients or simply reading the references, we are working to set up a transparent platform for your nutrition insights.