Nutrition glossary

The terms that mean something specific in Australia, defined the way the app actually treats them. Several of these are where an app built for another country gets an Australian answer wrong by default.

Australian tablespoon: 20 mL. Almost every other country uses 15 mL, so a recipe written overseas means the smaller spoon. On oil the difference is a third more energy than the recipe intended.
Australian cup: 250 mL, against 240 mL in the United States. Small per cup, and it compounds across a batch.
Density: How much a food weighs for a given volume, which is why a cup of oil and a cup of flour are not the same weight. Turning a cup into grams needs a figure per ingredient, and where there is none the app falls back to a band for fats, syrups and watery liquids. The band is a starting point, not a measurement.
Kilojoule: The energy unit Australian food labels are printed in. One kilocalorie is about 4.184 kilojoules, so a figure quoted in calories is roughly a quarter of the same figure in kilojoules.
Atwater factors: The energy a gram of each nutrient supplies: protein 4, carbohydrate 4, fat 9 kilocalories. Australian labels need three more terms, because fibre carries about 2, alcohol 7 and polyols 2.4, while the carbohydrate line already leaves fibre out. Check an Australian label with 4/4/9 alone and high-fibre cereals and sugar-free products look wrong when they are right.
Nutrition information panel: The table on an Australian pack, with a per 100 g column and a per serve column, and energy in kilojoules. A capture flow built for a differently shaped label asks for rows an Australian pack does not carry.
Available carbohydrate: What the carbohydrate line on an Australian label means: carbohydrate excluding fibre. A validator written for a label that includes fibre in that line double counts fibre on every fibre-bearing Australian food.
Polyol: The bulk sweeteners behind most sugar-free labels, sorbitol and maltitol and xylitol among them. They still carry energy, about 2.4 kilocalories a gram against 4 for sugar, which is why a sugar-free product's kilojoule figure looks higher than its carbohydrate line suggests.
Macronutrient: Protein, carbohydrate and fat: the nutrients you eat in gram quantities and draw energy from. Platify puts fibre next to them as a fourth figure on every food, every meal and every daily total, written the same way as the other three, so fibre is something you can see rather than something you have to work out.
Dietary fibre: Platify counts fibre as a fourth macro alongside protein, carbohydrate and fat, on every row and every total. A zero means the food genuinely has none; an unknown is a data gap to fix at the source, never a zero to display.
Ultra-processed food: The fourth group in the NOVA classification: industrial formulations built from refined ingredients and additives rather than from foods you would recognise whole. Platify's internal food score trims a group 4 item slightly and lifts an unprocessed one slightly, so processing counts as well as nutrients. It changes the ranking, it does not ban anything.
Australian Food Composition Database: The reference tables Food Standards Australia New Zealand publishes for generic Australian foods, currently Release 3. Platify loads it as the trusted spine for whole foods, so the numbers behind an apple or a chicken breast come from a national dataset rather than from a photo of a pack.
AUSNUT 2011-13: The second Food Standards Australia New Zealand dataset Platify loads, for household measures rather than nutrition: what a cup, a slice or one whole item of a food weighs, plus its density. It is why a portion can read as one medium apple instead of a gram figure you would have to guess.
Resting metabolic rate: The energy your body uses at complete rest, and for most people the largest part of daily use. Estimated here from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation rather than measured, which needs a lab.
Maintenance energy: Resting rate multiplied by an activity figure: what your body uses to stay where it is, before any change for a goal. The resting half comes from a published equation, the activity half is a starting point.
Energy deficit: Eating less energy across a stretch of days than your body uses in it. Platify takes the opening reduction as a share of your own maintenance figure rather than as one flat number, so a smaller person is not handed the same cut as someone much larger and left eating too little to keep it up.
Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Range: The Australian nutrient reference values' energy-share bands: protein 15 to 25 percent, fat 20 to 35 percent, carbohydrate 45 to 65 percent. Platify fills carbohydrate and fat to these bands after protein is set against bodyweight.
Protein per kilogram: How protein research states its recommendations: grams per kilogram of bodyweight. Setting protein as a share of energy instead lowers the target when someone eats less, which is when holding onto muscle matters most.
Trend weight: A smoothed line through your weigh-ins, roughly a ten-day average, instead of this morning's reading. The scale moves with salt, fluid and timing, so the trend is the part that tells you which way you are heading. A day with no weigh-in carries the trend forward and leaves the scale figure blank rather than inventing one.
Logging adherence: The share of days in a window where you logged anything at all, kept separate from how close your intake sat to your targets. Neither reading takes sides on direction: above and below a target score the same, and a target you have not set never drags the number down.