How your targets work

Every day card in Food Moments compares what you ate with that day's targets. This page says where each target comes from, what you can change, and who these values are not meant for. In short: every number starts at a published reference, the app says which one, and you move it to how you like to eat. Food Moments informs; it does not police. It is not a medical device, and nothing here is medical or dietary advice (section 12).

1. The idea: facts, a sensor, and your choices

Your targets are built from three things, and Settings keeps them apart. Facts about you — birth year, sex, weight, height and how active you are — give a starting point for your energy need; until you set them, standard values fill in (born 1985, 75 kg, 175 cm, medium activity), so there is always something to compare a day with. A sensor — Apple Health, if you switch it on — knows how much you burn better than any formula. And your goals are choices: a calorie goal, and how much protein, fibre, fruit and vegetables, free sugars, fat and salt suits you. Same inputs, same numbers: the targets are computed on your iPhone or iPad by fixed rules, and no AI model is involved in them.

2. Energy: how much you burn

Without Apple Health, the app estimates your resting energy need with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation — the most reliable of the common equations, within 10 % of the measured value for about four in five people (Frankenfield et al., 2005) — and multiplies it by an activity factor (low 1.3, medium 1.55, high 1.8).

With Take activity data from Apple Health switched on, a day's energy target follows the resting and active energy Health recorded, which is most informative with an Apple Watch or when your gym and sports apps write their workouts to Health. Past days use what was measured. Today is what you have burned so far plus your own last week's average for each hour still to come, so the target settles on the day's real burn as the day ends. A reading far off your last week — a watch left at home, a glitching sensor — is replaced by that week's average, and a day without usable data falls back on the formula — as does a day whose total is far from what the formula expects for you (more than 40 % either way, or outside 1,000–6,000 kcal), because a reading that far off is more often a sensor problem than a day. The "typical day" shown in Settings uses the same baseline: your average burn over the last seven full days. Apple Health readings stay on your iPhone or iPad; only the day's computed targets are stored with your account.

Be aware of the precision: a formula is good to about ±10 %, and wrist-worn devices measure energy less accurately than anything else they measure (Shcherbina et al., 2017). The meal estimates are estimates too. Read the energy bar as a place to stand, not a budget.

3. Your calorie goal

Body weight follows mostly energy balance, over weeks: eat less than you burn and you lose weight, eat more and you gain. The calorie goal shifts the day's energy target by the amount you choose, from −1000 to +1000 kcal a day; your activity is already counted in the burn. The far ends of the wheel are labelled as extreme because they are; the app offers them and does not recommend them.

4. Protein

A goal to reach, set per kilogram of your body weight. The wheel starts at 0.8 g/kg, the European reference intake for adults, which covers the needs of nearly all healthy adults (EFSA, 2012: 0.83 g/kg). Other named stops: 1.2 g/kg, the upper end of the PROT-AGE group's reference for healthy people over 65 (Bauer et al., 2013); 1.4 g/kg and 2.0 g/kg, the two ends of the range the International Society of Sports Nutrition gives for people who exercise (ISSN, 2017). The wheel stops at 2.0 because that is where the published references for the general public stop.

5. Fibre, and fruit and vegetables

Fibre is a goal to reach. 25 g a day counts as adequate (EFSA, 2010; WHO, 2023); the wheel starts at 30 g, the UK advice (SACN, 2015) and the lower end of the Dutch guideline of 30–40 g (Gezondheidsraad, 2006), in line with a large review that found the clearest benefits at 25–29 g and signs of more above 30 g (Reynolds et al., 2019). You can choose less. Some people simply eat that way, and a bar that can never be reached helps nobody.

Fruit and vegetables are a goal too, counted in grams as eaten. The wheel starts at 400 g a day, WHO's advice (WHO); the Dutch advice of 450 g — 250 g of vegetables and 200 g of fruit (Gezondheidsraad, 2015) — is a named stop. What the app counts, and why:

• Counted: fruit and vegetables fresh, frozen, cooked or dried, including those cooked into a sauce, a soup or a filling, and pulses — beans, lentils, chickpeas, peas — whole, in a soup or puréed as in hummus. The UK's 5 A Day counts pulses too, but only once a day however much you eat (NHS); we count them in full, because a bowl of lentil soup is, for this purpose, a bowl of vegetables.
• Not counted: potatoes and other starchy roots, as in WHO's definition and the Dutch one: they are eaten as the starch of a meal, not as a vegetable.
• Not counted: juice and smoothies. The UK counts one glass a day as a portion; the Dutch advice does not count juice at all, and we follow the Dutch advice. The sugar in a glass of juice already counts in full towards free sugars (section 6), and the same glass should not also turn the fruit bar green.
• Not counted: fruit or vegetables that are only a flavouring in a processed food — the fruit in a sweet, the tomato in ketchup.

The app estimates these grams from your photos and notes, component by component. Food labels do not state them. Measured before the feature was built, the estimates were exact for a plate of only fruit or only vegetables and for meals without any, and within about 6 % of the meal's weight for mixed dishes such as a curry or a pasta sauce.

6. Free sugars

A limit, set as a share of your energy. Free sugars are what the sugar advice is actually about: sugar added by the manufacturer, the cook or you, and the sugar in honey, syrups and fruit juice. The sugar inside whole fruit and vegetables and the milk sugar in plain milk and yoghurt are not free sugars. WHO advises keeping free sugars below 10 % of your energy, and sees a further benefit below 5 % (WHO, 2015); the UK advises 5 % (SACN, 2015). The wheel starts at 10 % and goes from 5 to 15 %. On a day of 2,000 kcal, 10 % is 50 g.

Which logic we follow, and which not:

• We follow WHO's definition, and where it leaves a question open we follow the UK's: smoothies and blended or puréed fruit count as free sugars, like juice — blending releases the sugar from the fruit in the same way pressing does (SACN, 2015). Dried fruit does not count, as in WHO's definition.
• We do not use a limit for total sugars. Until 19 September 2026 the app measured total sugars against the EU food-label reference of 90 g. That figure is about labels, not health, and the health advice is about free sugars; now that the app estimates them, it uses the advice itself. The total sugars of every meal are still estimated and kept, and they are in your data download.
• We do not use the US "added sugars" figure. It leaves out the sugar in juice, which WHO counts.

European food labels state total sugars only, so the app estimates free sugars from what a food is — a glass of cola is all free sugar, an apple none, a fruit yoghurt part of each. Measured before the feature was built, the estimates were right for clear cases (fruit, milk, juice, sweets, soft drinks, dried fruit) and about 2 g off for mixed foods such as fruit yoghurt, cereal or a slice of pie. Meals from the two weeks before you updated the app had their free sugars and fruit and vegetables added afterwards, from their existing descriptions and without changing any other number; days before that keep the sugar bar they had.

If you want to keep sweet things down, choose 5 %; if you have a sweet tooth, choose more.

7. Fat, and saturated fat

Total fat is a limit, chosen as a share of your energy. The European reference range is 20–35 % (EFSA, 2010); WHO advises 30 % or less (WHO, 2023). The wheel starts at 35 %, and the bar begins to turn at 30 %. If you feel good on a Mediterranean way of eating, choose 40 %: in the PREDIMED trial, the Mediterranean groups ate about 41 % of their energy as fat — mostly olive oil and nuts (Estruch et al., 2018).

Saturated fat is not a choice in the app: its limit stays at 10 % of energy (WHO, 2023) whatever fat level you pick — the PREDIMED diets were high in fat and still at about 9 % saturated. So choosing more fat means choosing more unsaturated fat. There is a real scientific discussion here: foods such as cheese and yoghurt do better in long-term studies than their saturated-fat content predicts (Astrup et al., 2020). That argues for not judging a single food by this number — which is why the app holds only the whole day against it — and not for a higher number.

8. Carbohydrates

Not a choice, and neither a goal nor a limit: carbohydrates are the energy that remains after your protein and your fat. That keeps the bars honest — together they add up to your energy target, so it is possible to fill them all. With the starting values, carbohydrates come out inside the European reference range of 45–60 % of energy (EFSA, 2010); choose more protein and more fat, and you get a lower-carbohydrate day.

9. Salt

A limit, and the one where references and real life are furthest apart. WHO advises less than 5 g of salt a day (WHO), which the European authority calls safe and adequate (EFSA, 2019); European food labels use 6 g (Regulation (EU) 1169/2011). What people actually eat is another matter: in almost every European country the average is higher (systematic review, 2022), and measurements in the Netherlands found a median above 8 g for women and above 11 g for men (RIVM, 2020–2021).

So the wheel starts at 8 g — a typical European intake, not a recommendation — and the bar begins to turn at 6 g, the label reference. Both numbers are on the bar; you see the reference without being told off for an ordinary day. You can set 5 or 6 g if you want to follow the guidelines, and up to 10 g for days of heavy sweating: a litre of sweat carries roughly 3 g of salt, with large differences between people (Barnes et al., 2019).

The science, honestly: every guideline body agrees that eating less salt lowers blood pressure, and a large randomised trial found fewer strokes and deaths when people replaced part of their salt (Neal et al., 2021). One large observational study reported the lowest risk at intakes well above the guidelines (Mente et al., 2016), but its way of measuring salt has been shown to be able to produce that pattern by itself (He et al., 2018). The direction — less is better than the average — is well founded; how strict an individual healthy person needs to be is less certain. If you have raised blood pressure, this is a question for your doctor, not for a wheel in an app.

10. How to read the bars

Energy and carbohydrates are references: the bar fills and stays white. Protein, fibre and fruit and vegetables are goals: the bar turns green once reached. Free sugars, fat, saturated fat and salt are limits with two ends: a full bar is the upper end you chose; the bar turns orange from the lower end — the next stricter reference, or 90 % where there is none — and red beyond the upper end. The zone between the two ends is lightly marked on the empty bar, so you can see where a limit begins before you get there. Low bars early in the day are the point: they show where you stand before you choose the next meal. A red bar is information about one day. The app keeps no streaks and gives no grades.

11. Vitamins and minerals

Tap a day's card and its vitamins and minerals appear over the timeline; tap again and they go away. A meal's own page lists them under its estimate and under each dish. They are not on the timeline itself: they matter to how well you eat, but most people look at them now and then, not before every meal.

Which ones, and why. Fourteen, chosen because they are known gaps in the countries whose languages the app speaks — Europe, the United States and Latin America — not because they are easy to estimate:

• Vitamin D — intakes are low across Europe, above all in winter.
• Iron — the commonest deficiency worldwide, especially for women.
• Iodine — several European countries, Germany and the Netherlands among them, are only just sufficient.
• Folate — important for women who may become pregnant.
• Calcium — often short where little dairy is eaten.
• Vitamin B12 — found almost only in animal foods: vegetarians, vegans and older adults.
• Potassium — the counterpart of salt for blood pressure, low almost everywhere.
• Magnesium, vitamin E and selenium — often below the reference in European surveys (European soils are poor in selenium).
• Zinc and vitamin A — gaps in parts of Latin America, and for zinc in plant-based diets.
• Vitamin C — easily reached with fruit and vegetables, and a good sign that you are.
• Omega-3 (EPA and DHA) — the long-chain fats from fish; too little fish is eaten nearly everywhere. Plant omega-3 (ALA, in walnuts or linseed) is not counted, because the reference is for EPA and DHA.

The reference. Each bar compares the day with the European Food Safety Authority's Dietary Reference Values for adults (EFSA DRV Finder), for the age and sex you entered: the population reference intake where EFSA set one, the adequate intake otherwise. Two depend on age: calcium (1000 mg until 24, 950 mg from 25) and, for women, iron (16 mg until 50, then 11 mg). Every bar is a goal: white while it fills, green once reached. A single day is never red: a high day from a portion of liver or seaweed says nothing about your health. Averages are different. Under 7 days, 30 days and All time, six of them are also held against EFSA's tolerable upper intake level — the most that is safe to take in every day for a long time — and the bar turns red past it: vitamin D 100 µg, calcium 2500 mg, iodine 600 µg, selenium 255 µg, zinc 25 mg, and iron 40 mg (EFSA's "safe level of intake", as it set no upper level for iron) (EFSA overview of upper levels). The other eight have none that applies to food: vitamin A's covers preformed retinol only (our number includes the carotenes in vegetables), folate's and magnesium's cover supplements and fortified foods only, vitamin E's is out of reach of food and under review, and vitamin C, B12, potassium and omega-3 have none at all. Supplements are not part of a meal and are not counted.

How precise. We measured it before building it: 48 foods in the portions a household actually eats, with the model's answers compared against official food-composition tables (USDA FoodData Central; iodine from the USDA/FDA/NIH iodine database). For a known portion, vitamin C, calcium, magnesium, potassium, folate, iron and selenium came out close to the table (half of the answers within about 12 %); vitamins A, B12 and D and zinc were good (within about 15–21 %); vitamin E, iodine and omega-3 are rough (within about 23–52 %) — iodine because it depends on the salt a food was made with, which no photo shows (iodised salt is counted where it is stated or customary, such as bakery bread in the Netherlands and Germany), omega-3 because fish differ so much. The larger uncertainty is the same as for calories: how much was on the plate. Treat these numbers as a guide to your eating over days, not as a measurement.

A barcode on its own is entered at once from the product's database record, which almost never lists vitamins or minerals; those follow a moment later, and the card says Analyzing… until they have. If they cannot be worked out, that product counts as zero for the day.

12. Who these values are not for — and what they are not

The references on this page are general values for healthy adults. They do not apply as they stand during pregnancy or breastfeeding, to anyone under 18, or to anyone with a medical condition or on a medical diet — for example kidney disease (where protein may need to be limited), raised blood pressure, diabetes, or a current or past eating disorder. If that is you, set your targets only together with your doctor or a registered dietitian, or ignore the bars altogether.

Under 18. The app adjusts the numbers, roughly: resting energy comes from the equations for children and adolescents in the FAO/WHO/UNU report instead of Mifflin-St Jeor; fibre, fruit and vegetables, salt, and vitamins and minerals are the adult values scaled down with energy need, their upper limits with body weight. This is an approximation of ours, not a set of values made for children.

Food Moments is a general wellness app. It is not a medical device, and it does not diagnose, treat, monitor or prevent any disease. The targets are general reference values adjusted by your own choices; they are not personal medical or dietary advice, and a named stop on a wheel says where a number comes from — it is not a recommendation to you. The nutritional values of your meals are AI-generated estimates, not measurements. Talk to a qualified professional before making significant changes to how you eat. The legal side of this is in the Supplemental Terms, section 2.

13. Changes

When a reference or a rule on this page changes, the change is listed on the support page. Questions: info@smart-backoffice.nl.