How your recommendations work

A full day, three sizes

Each day the engine plans four meals — breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner — and offers ten options for every meal in three calorie tiers. On mobile the app pre-selects the tier that fits your day's activity; on the web you pick. Everyone gets a balanced plan — your health data only personalizes it.

Built on public science

Targets and limits are real numbers from public references, in the same units the recipe nutrition data uses — so the engine compares like with like, never a guess:

Daily nutrient targets are the sex- and age-specific RDA/AI values from the Dietary Reference Intakes. The calorie budget uses the IOM Estimated Energy Requirement equation (age, height, weight, activity), falling back to a reference value when height/weight aren't set. Protein is 0.8 g per kg of body weight. "Eat-less-of" caps — saturated fat and added sugars (≤10% of energy), sodium, cholesterol — come from the Dietary Guidelines and FDA Daily Values, and intakes are bounded by the Tolerable Upper Intake Levels.

A priority-weighted nutrition score

A few rules are absolute — your diet, allergies, intolerances, cultural/religious rules, anything you've thumbs-downed, and the meal's calorie band. Everything that survives is given a single, transparent score by how well it fills your day's still-open nutrient gaps, weighted by priority: safety caps and protein carry the most weight, then your measured markers, then the rest of your micronutrients, then taste. Higher-priority goals dominate the score — but it's a balance across all of them, not a hard veto. The shortlist is then re-ranked for variety.

flowchart TD
  A([Eligible recipes]):::edge --> F["Hard filters
· diet
· allergies
· intolerances
· cultural / religious
· dislikes
· calorie band"]:::filter
  F --> S["Priority-weighted score
· safety caps + protein — most weight
· your blood markers
· remaining micronutrients
· taste · variety · effort — least"]:::score
  S --> R{{"Diversity re-rank
· vary protein source
· rotate away from the last 14 days"}}:::rerank
  R --> O([Your 10 options]):::edge
  classDef filter fill:#FFFCF3,stroke:#1F1A14,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#1F1A14;
  classDef score fill:#EFE6CF,stroke:#1F1A14,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#1F1A14;
  classDef rerank fill:#FFFCF3,stroke:#1F1A14,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#1F1A14;
  classDef edge fill:#1F1A14,stroke:#1F1A14,color:#FFFCF3;
      

Hard filters run first; the rest is one weighted score, then a variety pass — no opaque "relevance" number.

Filling the gaps, then breaking the monotony

Within a meal, each recipe is scored by how much of the day's still-open need it fills — a nutrient you've already met earns nothing, which spreads nutrition across the day instead of piling it onto one number. Each nutrient's per-serving credit is capped, so a single dish that maxes one easily-met nutrient (marine omega-3 has a tiny daily target) can't out-score a dish that fills many goals a little.

The top candidates are then diversity re-ranked (maximal marginal relevance) so your ten options vary by main ingredient and protein source — not just cuisine — and anything you've eaten in the last 14 days is rotated to the back.

Optional, never required

Without any of the below you still get a balanced reference-value day. Each signal you add sharpens the plan:

Every pick says why

Each recommendation carries a plain-language reason using the FDA's %DV framing (capped at 100%), so you can see the nutritional case at a glance — no opaque "relevance score":

As a rule of thumb, the FDA calls 5% of the Daily Value "low" and 20% or more "high" for a given nutrient.