How Calometer keeps its nutrition data honest

A lot of calorie numbers on the internet are guesses wearing the confidence of facts. Calometer tries to do the opposite: say plainly where a number came from, and how sure it is.

Four kinds of provenance, never blurred together

Every food record in the catalogue carries a verification status: verified means every value was checked against a specific, citable source record — mainly USDA FoodData Central and Open Food Facts. Unverified means the values are plausible reference figures with no single source record behind them. Estimated means the values came from something generative, like a photo. User-created means you typed them yourself for a custom food.

These labels are not cosmetic. A record is never marked verified just because it was imported, and an estimate is never allowed to claim the verified label — that distinction is enforced in how the data is written, not just in how it's displayed.

Photo scans are always estimates

When you photograph a meal, the numbers you get are an AI estimate of what's on the plate — never presented as a verified figure, because it isn't one. You review and can correct the result before anything is saved to your diary, so an estimate never quietly becomes a fact in your records.

A number the source never gave stays unknown

If a food's source doesn't report its fiber content, Calometer shows that as unknown — not as zero. A stated zero and an unreported value are different facts, and collapsing them into the same "0" would be a quiet kind of dishonesty baked into the math.

Why this is worth caring about

A calorie tracker is only useful if you can trust what it tells you, or at least know how much to trust it. Treating "verified," "estimated" and "unknown" as genuinely different things — instead of rounding them all down to a single confident-looking number — is slower to build and less flattering to look at, but it's the only version that doesn't quietly mislead you.

You can read more about this in our FAQ, or just search a food on the homepage and see the labelling for yourself.