Food quality and nutrition

The Food quality panel describes the nutrition of the Bolus meals you actually ate.

Only the meals you ate

The panel is headed “From the Bolus meals you ate”, and that is the whole rule. Meals you ate out or skipped are not counted, so a busy week never drags the figures down. Bolus is not trying to account for everything that passed your lips; it is describing the food it planned and you cooked.

Two ways to read it

• Typical day combines your average breakfast, lunch and dinner into one day.
• Average meal is the average of the individual meals.

Underneath, the figures: calories, carbohydrate, protein, fat, saturated and unsaturated fat, fibre, and plant variety.

Plant variety

A count of the different plants you ate across the week, out of 30. It is a rough measure of diversity rather than quantity, and it comes from research into gut health rather than from a government intake figure.

What the numbers are compared against

Where a comparison is shown, it is a UK reference intake, for example “max 31g” against saturated fat, or “of 30g” against fibre. These are population reference figures, not targets Bolus has set for you, and Bolus deliberately does not show a target for carbohydrate or calories.

Nutrition values are calculated from ingredients using McCance and Widdowson’s The Composition of Foods, and manufacturers’ labels where that dataset does not cover a product.

These describe the food. They are not a prescription, and they are not dosing guidance. See Bolus’s approach to nutrition.