This is the most important page on this site. If you read one legal document here, read this one. It covers the website and the Foodose iPhone app equally: neither is a medical service, and the app's coach is an assistant, not a clinician.
1. foodose is not a doctor
It is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent anything. It does not prescribe, and it does not adjust a prescription.
It is a calculator, a library and, in the app, a place to record what happened. It does arithmetic on numbers you type in and shows you the arithmetic. Everything it produces is educational, and every one of those numbers belongs in a conversation with the person who prescribes for you rather than in place of one. Nothing in the app sets a dose: it records the dose your prescriber gave you.
2. What it actually does
- Estimates your resting and daily energy needs from a published equation.
- Estimates how much you are likely to manage at your medication and dose.
- Sets protein, fibre, fat, carbohydrate and fluid targets from those figures.
- Builds three days of meals from a food database, within those targets.
- Cites the research behind each step and links to it.
That is the whole list. There is no monitoring, no alerting, no clinical oversight and nobody watching.
3. It is a model, and models are wrong at the edges
Every number here comes from population equations applied to the answers you gave. Your resting metabolic rate is an estimate with real variance around it. The appetite suppression figures come from trial averages, and you are not an average. The nutrition values come from public food databases and vary with how food is grown, stored and cooked.
We show the working precisely so you can see where a figure would be wrong for you, and so your clinician can too.
4. When a deficit is not for you
The calculator gives most people the same kind of result: a calorie target with a deficit in it, the working behind it, and three days of food. On its last screen it asks whether you are pregnant, breastfeeding or trying to conceive; whether you take insulin or a sulfonylurea; whether you have a history of an eating disorder; whether you have had pancreatitis, gallbladder disease or gastroparesis; and whether your kidney function is reduced. Three of those answers change the result. Pregnancy, and insulin or a sulfonylurea, hold your calories at maintenance instead of a deficit and say why. Reduced kidney function turns protein into a limit at the level kidney guidelines use, and the three days are built to stay under it. The other answers do not change the numbers.
If any of those apply to you, a calorie deficit is a conversation for your clinician before it is a plan from a website. A deficit is not appropriate in pregnancy. Eating less while taking insulin or a sulfonylurea, without your prescriber adjusting the dose, can cause dangerously low blood sugar. The calculator is also not meant for anyone under 18, and past 75 it should be read with your clinician too.
This list is not exhaustive. Plenty of situations are unsafe for an unsupervised deficit and are not on it. If you are not sure whether yours is one of them, assume it is and ask.
5. Call someone now if
- You have severe or persistent abdominal pain, particularly pain radiating to your back, which can indicate pancreatitis.
- You cannot keep fluids down, or you have signs of dehydration.
- You have persistent vomiting, or vomiting with severe pain.
- You have symptoms of low blood sugar and take insulin or a sulfonylurea: shaking, sweating, confusion, a racing heart.
- You have severe or worsening constipation, or no bowel movement for several days with pain or bloating.
- You have a severe allergic reaction: swelling of the face, lips or throat, or difficulty breathing.
- You have thoughts of harming yourself.
Any of these can be serious. Do not wait, and do not check a website first. Contact your prescriber or your local emergency service.
6. Nutrition targets are not prescriptions
A protein floor is a floor, not a dose. A calorie target is an estimate, not an instruction. If you have kidney disease, liver disease, diabetes, an eating disorder history, or any condition where intake is clinically managed, the numbers on this site may be actively wrong for you, and only your clinician can say.
7. The content
Articles are researched and cited, and every PubMed identifier is checked against the original record before publication. They are still journalism about medicine rather than medicine. They are not reviewed by a clinician unless the article names one, and where no name appears, no such review has happened.
Research changes. An article accurate when written may not be accurate when you read it.
8. Your responsibility
By using foodose you accept that you are responsible for decisions about your own health, that you will not use this site in place of professional medical advice, and that you will raise anything it shows you with your prescriber before acting on it.
9. Questions
ceo@foodose.co. A real person reads every email. If something on this site is wrong or unsafe, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.