Intake calculator
Pick ingredients and amounts, and it adds up the nutrients against both the daily value and the upper limit. Not only whether you have met a target, but whether you have reached a line you should not cross.
Choose ingredients
Start from an example
Add an ingredient and the table appears here
Search above, or try one of the example combinations below.
How to use it
Search for an ingredient, add it, and type the grams. The field starts at that ingredient's usual serving — a tablespoon of flaxseed at 10 g, a cup of milk at 200 g, the amount people actually eat at once.
Click an ingredient's name to go to its nutrition table and its evidence.
The most important column is not the total
Look at the far-right column. It says how many of your chosen ingredients actually carry a figure for that nutrient.
If you picked five ingredients and the vitamin C row reads 2/5, it does not mean the other three have no vitamin C. It means their nutrition tables do not list it, and the total is smaller than reality by that much.
Most nutrition calculators hide this and treat a blank as a zero. The total then looks precise, but it has quietly reported something unmeasured as absent. This one shows you the number.
Where the numbers come from
The daily value is the US FDA Daily Value (adults and children 4+). Recommendations differ by country, and Korea's reference intakes split by sex and age — but a table cell holds one number. So the figure with a single source was the one to use.
The nutrient figures follow the basis stated on each ingredient's page. Most are per 100 g of the raw edible portion; processed items like doenjang or tofu are per that product. The basis can differ from one ingredient to the next, so check the ingredient page.
Cooking changes the numbers. Blanching pulls water-soluble vitamins into the water; roasting drives off water so the same weight carries more of everything. This calculator does not model any of that.
Upper limits — why this calculator exists
Show only a percentage of the daily value and every big number looks good. Yet a broth with 10 g of kelp and 20 g of sea mustard carries iodine at 947% of the daily value and, at the same time, 129% of the upper limit. The first number reads like good news. The second is the one that tells you what is happening.
So there is a ceiling as well as a floor here. It follows the US National Academies (NASEM) tolerable upper intake levels for adults 19 and over.
Not every nutrient gets a warning. Upper limits differ in which form they apply to. The limits for magnesium, folate, niacin and vitamin E apply only to supplements and fortified foods, not to what occurs naturally in food. Including them would raise alarms about something that is not on the plate, so they are left out.
Vitamin A is filtered once more. The figure in a nutrition table is µg RAE, which mixes retinol from animal foods with beta-carotene from plants. But the 3,000 µg limit applies to retinol alone — the body converts only as much beta-carotene as it needs, so it does not cause toxicity. The share coming from beta-carotene is therefore subtracted, and only the retinol share is judged. Eating a lot of sweet potato will not raise a warning.
What this calculator cannot tell you
It does not model absorption. Iron from spinach and iron from beef are not the same iron, milligram for milligram. Vitamin C alongside raises absorption from plant sources; tannins in tea lower it. These numbers are what you ate, not what you absorbed.
Supplements are not in here. If you take any, add them separately. Exceeding an upper limit usually happens through supplements, not food.
It does not account for you. A daily value is one number standing in for one adult. Age, sex, pregnancy, illness and medication all change both what you need and what you should watch.
It is not a medical judgement. If you take warfarin, talk to your clinician about vitamin K; with kidney disease, about potassium and phosphorus; with thyroid disease, about iodine. This table is nothing more than an addition of nutrient figures.