"Balanced diet" is the vaguest phrase in health. We tried to make it concrete: every food you log, cross-referenced against UK NRV targets — with honest confidence levels baked in.
UK NRV (Nutrient Reference Value) is the daily vitamin/mineral intake that meets most healthy adults' needs. Four micronutrients commonly run low in UK diets per NHS/Public Health England surveys: vitamin D, iron, iodine, vitamin B12. We estimate your daily intake from what you log against McCance & Widdowson UK food composition data — useful signal, not a blood test.
"Nutrient Reference Value" is the figure on the back of your cereal box — "25% of your NRV of vitamin B12". It's set by UK/EU food law and it represents the daily intake that meets the needs of most healthy adults. Not every adult — but the statistical middle of the bell curve.
It's a labelling benchmark, not a clinical threshold. You don't suddenly become deficient at 99% of NRV, and you're not necessarily safe at 100%. The point of tracking against NRV is to catch the pattern of falling short repeatedly — that's when it starts to matter.
Full UK NRV tables and what they're based on: FSA nutrition labelling guidance.
These aren't our opinion. They're the ones that consistently show up as dietary shortfalls in the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) and NHS guidance.
Limited food sources (oily fish, egg yolks, some fortified cereals and spreads) and low UK sunshine for half the year. The NHS recommends everyone in the UK considers a 10 μg supplement between October and March, and some people year-round. This isn't food failure — it's geography.
Especially for women of menstruating age and people eating plant-based. Haem iron (from meat) absorbs about three times more efficiently than non-haem iron (from plants), so vegetarians/vegans typically need higher total iron intake to hit the same absorbed amount. Pairing plant iron with vitamin C helps absorption. Tea/coffee with meals hurts it.
The quiet one. UK iodine comes largely from dairy (cows eat iodine-supplemented feed), eggs, and white fish. Shifting away from those — without deliberately replacing them — commonly drops iodine below NRV. Most UK table salt isn't iodised, unlike in many other countries.
Essentially absent from plant foods unless they're fortified. For plant-based eaters, B12 comes from fortified plant milks, breakfast cereals, nutritional yeast, or a supplement. It's the single most-discussed shortfall in UK plant-based diets — and the easiest to address once you know.
Every food you log gets matched to UK food composition data (McCance & Widdowson / CoFID). We total your day, compare it against NRVs, and show you what's high, what's middling, what's low.
We tag each estimate with a confidence level — high, medium, low — based on how specific the food match is and how well the composition data covers it. A generic "banana" is high confidence. A home-made curry with ten ingredients is medium at best. A branded protein bar with a long ingredient list we haven't cross-referenced in depth is low.
We don't hide the confidence — it sits on the view, labelled. The numbers are most useful as a trend across weeks. A single day's panel can be off by more than it reveals.
What our numbers are not. They're not measurements. Actual absorption varies with your gut, with what you ate alongside, with cooking losses, with your genetics. Iron in the same spinach absorbs differently in different people's bodies. Our NRV view is a useful signal, not a clinical test. If something's running low repeatedly, that's a pharmacist or GP conversation — they can test, we can't.
We don't recommend supplements. We show you where you might be short. What you do about it is your call (or your clinician's). We're not writing prescriptions and we're not selling vitamins.
Food logging is on the free tier (25/day). The vitamin and mineral insights against UK NRVs, with confidence levels and trends, sit inside NutraSafe Pro at £3.99/month.
Get NutraSafe on the App Store