A fried chicken sandwich and a plate of salmon, rice and greens can land on exactly the same number. Every tracker we used showed us that number, ticked it off, and stopped there.
That tunnel vision is the whole problem. Most nutrition apps reduce your health to a single daily limit. They will happily let you set a goal weight that is medically underweight. And they treat 500 calories of ultra-processed fast food exactly like 500 calories of whole food, because a calorie is the only thing they can see.
We built Gourmang to be the assistant we could not find: one that works out what your body actually needs, and then has an opinion about the food behind the number.
What we actually built
The number is calculated, not looked up
Your targets start from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation — the resting-energy equation dietitians use for healthy adults — scaled by how much you really move, then adjusted for the pace you picked. That pace is a share of your body weight rather than a flat kilo a week, because a kilo is 0.7% of one body and 1.8% of another.
Then the floors land on top. Gourmang refuses to plan toward a target weight below a BMI of 18.5, the WHO underweight threshold — a refusal, not a warning. Beneath the pace, hard calorie floors of 1,500 kcal for men and 1,200 for women apply after the deficit, whatever rate you choose. Protein follows the ISSN position stand — between 1.4 and 2.2 g per kilo, depending on your approach and on whether you are losing, holding or gaining.
None of this happens behind a curtain. The app has a screen that shows the arithmetic and links the papers.
Quality sits beside the calories, not underneath them
Food carries two marks, because they answer different questions. A Nutri-Score grade from A to E is about what is in the food; a NOVA level from 1 to 4 is about how much industry went into it. A food can be nutritious and still ultra-processed.
Barcoded products bring both from Open Food Facts. Generic foods are scored from the ANSES-Ciqual composition tables, and their processing level is left unknown rather than assumed — unless the category alone rules out any addition, as it does for a raw carrot. Grades then roll up from entry to meal to day, weighted by calories, so one biscuit cannot sink a good day and a salad cannot rescue a bad one.
And when Gourmang has not seen enough of your day to judge it — under 60% of the calories from graded food — it says so instead of inventing a letter. Same for a food whose label is too thin to score: unrated beats a guess wearing a suit.
20 nutrients, and no invented verdicts
Gourmang carries every nutrient its sources publish through each serving, and shows the ones a food actually declares. It sets a daily target for two of them beyond your plan: sodium, and saturated fat.
No vitamin or mineral gets one, and the app will never tell you that you are short of one. A European label is only obliged to publish seven figures, and in our database of 1.35 million packaged products, iron appears on 20% and vitamin B12 on 12%. A daily total built from that is a floor of unknown depth, not an intake — a product with no zinc number is not a product without zinc. Nor is a single day the right unit even with perfect data: micronutrient intake swings enormously day to day, and a reference intake is set to cover 97% of people, so days below one are normal in a good diet.
A ceiling survives all of that, which is why sodium and saturated fat keep theirs: what you logged is a floor on what you ate, so going over is a fact however patchy the label.
Logging that survives real life
Photograph the plate, describe it in a sentence, or scan the barcode. AI works out the foods and the portions, then matches them against the same Ciqual and Open Food Facts entries used everywhere else — so most of the numbers are table data, and the portions are the estimate. Anything estimated is labelled as an estimate, on the ingredient and on the meal above it, and you can correct it before it is saved.
What we won’t do
- Sell your log, or use it to target advertising. No ads, no third-party analytics, crash reports carrying neither your account nor your IP, and an AI that is never told whose meal it is looking at.
- Help you starve. The bounds are refusals, not warnings you can click past. The targets are built for adult bodies, so Gourmang is 18 and over.
- Show a confident number we do not have. An estimate says “estimate”; a food we cannot grade stays unrated.
- Hide the method. Every equation, source and threshold above is named inside the app.