Volume I · Founded 18 November 2025 · Edited by James Oliver
The editorial reference for measurement accuracy in nutrition.
A working glossary of the terms that actually determine whether a calorie figure is credible: USDA FoodData Central releases, FDA label regulation, kitchen-scale precision, laboratory reference meals, and the statistical measures — MAE, MAPE, RMSE — that a serious publication uses instead of adjectives.
House rules
Numbers, not adjectives
"Accurate" is not a claim. Every accuracy assertion on this site carries an error figure (MAE, MAPE, or RMSE), a reference meal set, and the sample size that produced it.
Primary sources only
Entries cite the USDA FoodData Central release, the FDA regulation, the peer-reviewed paper. No blog-post authority, no re-reported figures.
Named alongside, not named alone
When a consumer app is mentioned, it's mentioned in a field of at least three, with each app's accuracy number attached. No endorsements.
Recently filed
View the full index →- Dietary Assessment USDA FoodData Central The U.S. Department of Agriculture's integrated food-composition database, comprising five source datasets and serving as the reference ledger for mos…
- Dietary Assessment Liquid Volume Conversion The conversion between liquid volume units (millilitres, fluid ounces, cups) and mass (grams), with the wrinkle that U.S. and U.K. fluid ounces are di…
- Biochemistry Stock Absorption The uptake of cooking liquid — water, stock, wine, fat — by porous ingredients during cooking, which increases their mass and dilutes their per-gram n…
- Dietary Assessment Top-1 vs Top-5 Accuracy The convention for reporting classification performance at the strictest threshold (top-1, the single best prediction) and a more permissive threshold…
- Dietary Assessment Foundation Foods The USDA's current-generation analytical food-composition dataset, distinguished by documented sampling protocols, nutrient uncertainty estimates, and…
- Dietary Assessment Label Rounding Rules The FDA-specified rules for rounding nutrient quantities on Nutrition Facts labels — increments that differ by nutrient and magnitude and that introdu…
Editor's note
"I spent a decade reading food-policy copy that treated a calorie number as though it had been handed down from the manufacturer's lawyer rather than measured. The truth is shabbier and more interesting. A credible calorie figure is the end of a chain — Atwater factors, laboratory calorimetry, a specific USDA release, a regulated rounding rule, a kitchen scale with a tolerance printed on the box, a photo-logging model with a validated MAPE. This publication covers that chain, one term at a time."
— James Oliver, Editor