Catalog
Where the food numbers come from
Last updated
Aham.Fit is a calorie diary for Indian plates and the packets you actually buy. The catalog is a licensed composition set plus an unmarked member long tail — not a copy of anyone else’s 19-million-row database.
What the green tick means
A tick means the values came from a list we ingested: an official composition table, or a packaged-product label already in Open Food Facts. It does not mean “complete”, “popular”, or “three people agreed”.
Foods without a tick are unmarked on purpose. That includes every food a member typed and chose to share. We do not add an “Added by users” chip. Absence of a tick is the signal.
Named sources
- Aham curated kitchen list — dishes and ingredients we maintain for Indian home cooking (household names, aliases, katori / roti measures). These stay first in search.
- USDA FoodData Central — Foundation, SR Legacy, and FNDDS (Survey), FoodData Central. CC0 1.0. Official tick. We do not ingest USDA Branded.
- Open Food Facts — packaged products from a country-filtered dump (India, Gulf, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom), under the Open Database Licence 1.0. Brand-list tick. Attribution: each product’s Open Food Facts page. The United States dump is not loaded.
- UK CoFID 2021 — McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset, Public Health England. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Official tick as a UK table. Rows that cite Gopalan / ICMR are stored and searchable but are not used as a second Indian official source.
- Canadian Nutrient File — Canadian-origin foods only (source codes 20 / 23 / 24 / 26 / 28), open.canada.ca. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Official tick. USDA-borrowed CNF values are not ingested as nutrition items.
- Norwegian Food Composition Table — Matvaretabellen, Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD). Official tick.
- Swiss Food Composition Database — FSVO / naehrwertdaten.ch. Official tick.
- Swedish Food Composition Database — Livsmedelsverket Livsmedelsdatabas, CC BY 4.0. Official tick.
- German BLS 4.0 — Max Rubner-Institut Bundeslebensmittelschlüssel, CC BY 4.0. Official tick.
- Taiwan TFND — Taiwan FDA food composition table, Open Government Data Licence. Official tick.
- Foods you add — private unless you share them. Shared member foods stay unmarked forever.
Importing a diary you already kept
You can upload a MyFitnessPal file export of your own diary — the CSV zip they email you (Reports → Export). We store the meals you logged as unmarked custom foods. That is your data, not their catalog. We do not copy, scrape, or ingest MyFitnessPal’s public food database, and imported rows never get a green tick.
Sharing a missing food
If search misses a dish, you can save it for yourself. Sharing to the public catalog is a second, optional step. You say how you know the numbers (own recipe, typed from a label, own measurement, or a label photo). We block shares whose calories are more than 40% off the protein / carbs / fat arithmetic, and we refuse obvious duplicates. We do not promote shared foods to a tick.
What we do not ingest
- The IFCT / INDB / NIN composition file (no licence to store it)
- MyFitnessPal’s public food database, or any scrape of it (a member may still upload their diary export)
- Nutritionix, Edamam, FatSecret, or other commercial API mirrors
- USDA Branded (US shop SKUs; almost no Indian barcodes)
Search order
Curated Indian dishes (puttu, appam, and the rest of that kitchen list) stay above generic USDA rice, above non-India packaged products, and above other people’s unmarked shares. Search also hides rows with incomplete macros or calories that disagree sharply with protein, carbs, and fat unless you typed that food’s exact name.