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Calk

See how varied your eating actually is

Table of Contents

Most of us return to the same handful of foods without noticing. Calk turns a month of your meals into a map of what you eat regularly and which food groups are missing.

A Variety Map: a periodic table of nutrient-rich foods grouped into nutrient families. Foods eaten this month show in color; the rest stay faded.
One person's month of recorded meals, laid out like a periodic table of foods. Foods in the diary appear in color; the rest stay faded. Click to enlarge.
62SpSpinach Each square is a food. The number is its nutrient-density score. A higher score means the food provides a broader range of nutrients.
Color means you ate it this month. A faded square means it was not in your log. The map offers suggestions without grading your diet.
+3 +N counts more. Foods you ate in that family beyond the ones the table has room to show.

Why a wider plate matters
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A wider range of foods means a wider range of nutrients — without counting any of them. Different colours and species carry different things: the pigments in a red pepper aren’t the ones in kale, a grain isn’t a nut, and oily fish brings omega-3 that no plant does. Eat the same narrow set for weeks and the same gaps stay open.

A week of varied eating as real food: a rainbow of fruits and vegetables across the top, and a row of fish, nuts, seeds, grains, legumes and fermented foods below.
The same idea in real food: a week of color across the top, with the foods that round it out below.

This isn’t only intuition. People who eat 30 or more different plants a week carry noticeably more diverse gut microbiomes than those eating fewer than ten — and that held whether or not they called themselves vegetarian (the American Gut Project). Across populations, a more varied plate tracks with better micronutrient coverage, which is why several national guidelines frame the goal as a number of different foods rather than a short list of “good” ones (WHO). The framing is additive, not restrictive: the useful question is rarely what to cut, but what one new thing to add.

The map is not a checklist, and you do not need to fill every square. Use two simple guidelines: eat from more food groups and choose higher-scoring foods more often. For the same space on your plate, spinach at 62 provides more nutrients than cucumber at 10. Start with variety, then consider nutrient density.

What the number means
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Each number is a nutrient-density score. Calk adds up how much of the daily reference intake a food provides across two dozen nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, omega-3, and fiber. Each nutrient is capped at 100%, so foods with a broad nutrient profile score higher than foods that contain a large amount of only one nutrient.

62SpinachA broad mix of folate, vitamin K, magnesium, lutein, and iron.
10CucumberMostly water. Refreshing and useful for volume, but lower in nutrients.

A high score means that a food provides several nutrients at useful levels. For more on the scoring method and the relationship between food variety and the gut microbiome, read food variety and your gut and Variety, Produce & Plants.

How you get yours
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The map is part of your Calk Nutrition Report and is built from the meals you log. The first month includes 30 days of full access at no charge. The report unlocks after at least 20 complete food-log days and weight data on at least 10 different days within that period.

Join the early-access list and get your first Calk Nutrition Report, including this map, for free.

iOS & Android — coming soon

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