Attribution

Data sources and licences

Dietect does not hold a nutrition database of its own. When you search for a food or scan a barcode, it asks two public databases and shows you what they return. Both are credited below, under the terms each one asks for.

USDA FoodData Central

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central. fdc.nal.usda.gov

FoodData Central is a work of the United States government and is in the public domain, released under CC0 1.0. No permission is needed to use it. The USDA asks to be credited as the source, which is what the citation above is for.

Dietect searches three of FoodData Central’s datasets — Foundation, SR Legacy and Survey (FNDDS). These are the USDA’s own laboratory analyses and survey data. It does not search the Branded Food Products database, whose records come from food-industry data providers rather than from the USDA, so none of those records reach you through this app.

Neither the USDA nor the Agricultural Research Service endorses Dietect, and nothing here should be read as suggesting they do.

Open Food Facts

Contains information from Open Food Facts, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0.

Open Food Facts is a collaborative database built by volunteers. Its licensing has two parts: the database is under the ODbL 1.0, and the individual records inside it are under the Database Contents License (DbCL) 1.0. Re-users have to credit Open Food Facts, name the licence, and link back — the three things the box above does.

What Dietect takes from it is text and numbers only: the product name, the brand, the pack and serving quantities, and the nutrient figures. It does not use Open Food Facts photographs, so the separate Creative Commons licence covering those images does not come into it.

Nothing is kept. Each lookup is a live request, and the answer is shown to you and then forgotten. No food or nutrient table exists on our servers, so Dietect neither stores nor republishes any part of either database. What you choose to log is written to your own phone, as the privacy policy describes.

The ODbL asks that a derived database be shared on the same terms. That would start to matter if Dietect ever cached or redistributed Open Food Facts data in bulk rather than querying it live. It does not today, and this page should be revisited by whoever reviews the legal pages if that ever changes.

The figures are estimates

Both databases describe foods in general, not the particular thing on your plate. Portion size, preparation and brand all move the real number, and a photograph is read by a model that is guessing. Treat every figure as an estimate.

Something wrong here?

If you maintain one of these databases and this page credits it incorrectly, please write to [email protected] and it will be corrected.