Data Sources & Accuracy

Every nutrition figure is an estimate — here and in every other tracker. It's worth being straight about why.

The biggest variable isn't the database. It's the food. Your dal isn't the same as your neighbour's, or the one at the restaurant down the road. Recipes differ, ingredients change with the season, and how much oil goes in moves the calories more than any composition table ever will. Then there's the katori question: yours might not be the same size as ours.

So use the numbers for what they're genuinely good at — spotting patterns and comparing choices over weeks. Not for treating any single figure as exact, and not anywhere an exact figure matters: dosing insulin or any other medication, managing a diagnosed condition, or avoiding an allergen. Thali is not built for those uses and must not be relied on for them.

Foods in Thali carry values obtained in one of four ways:

• Measured — a laboratory analysis of that food, published in a national food composition table.
• Calculated from ingredients — worked out from a dish's ingredients using published values for each one. This is how composite dishes are handled, and it's the method the underlying research databases use themselves.
• Known to be zero — vitamin B12 is produced by bacteria, not plants. Recording zero for a plain potato sabzi is a fact about the nutrient, not a guess about the dish. We apply this only where nothing in the food is animal-derived; anything containing milk, ghee, curd, egg, fish or meat is excluded from it.
• Based on a similar food — packaged products list calories and macros but rarely vitamins or minerals. Where a label is silent, we use a published food of the same type. Calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat are never handled this way; those always come from the product itself.

We record which of these applies to every food, and treat them differently where it counts. In particular, nutrient alerts will raise a possible shortfall from a value based on a similar food — but they won't tell you a shortfall has cleared on that basis alone.

Foods we cannot trace to one of the sources below are not shown. Where a nutrient has no value we can stand behind, the app leaves it blank rather than filling it with a zero, and the nutrient alerts stay silent instead of measuring you against incomplete data.

Two things in the app are not checked by us, and it is worth knowing which.

Crowd-sourced product data. Packaged and branded products come from Open Food Facts, a collaborative database whose entries are contributed by the public — usually by photographing a label. We only show entries with a usable name and a complete macronutrient panel, and we exclude the rest. We do not independently confirm that a contributor transcribed the label correctly, or that the label is the current one. Where a product's own packaging disagrees with Thali, the packaging is right.

Foods you add yourself. Foods and recipes you create are stored as you enter them. We don't check them, and they are visible only to you.

Allergens. Allergen information carries the same limits, and the consequences are more serious. Thali is not an allergen-avoidance tool. If you have a food allergy or intolerance, check the product's own packaging every time and do not rely on anything shown here.

Thali is a food diary. It doesn't diagnose, treat or prevent any condition, and its nutrient alerts aren't a clinical assessment. The reference intakes shown in the app are population-level figures, not personal targets.

If you're managing a health condition, are pregnant, or are thinking about taking a supplement, please talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian.

Every food shown in Thali traces to one of the following. Datasets were accessed in July 2026; all are living datasets and may have been revised since.

Thali is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any of the organisations listed above.

We have attributed each dataset in the form its publisher asks for. If you hold rights in any material referenced here and consider an attribution incomplete, incorrect, or a use outside its licence, write to support@ameliorlabs.ca and we will correct or remove it promptly.

The nutrition information in Thali is provided as is. We compile it in good faith from the sources above and correct errors when we find them, but we do not warrant that any value is accurate, complete, or current, and we do not warrant that a food's entry matches the product in front of you. Values change when a source database is revised or a manufacturer reformulates a product, and we may update or remove any entry at any time.

Nothing on this page adds to or varies the limitations of liability in our Terms of Service, which apply in full to everything described here.

If something in the app looks wrong, tell us — we'd rather know. Reach us at support@ameliorlabs.ca.

This page forms part of the Thali Terms of Service and is subject to the limitations of liability set out in them. Where this page and the Terms differ on how nutrition data is sourced, this page governs.