Our approach to nutrition

Last updated: 14 September 2026

Healthy eating isn't just about knowing what to eat. It has to work with your preferences, routines, available time, goals and the realities of everyday life.

Bolus uses a nutrition framework developed by a specialist diabetes dietitian and informed by established UK nutrition guidance. The framework is designed for general healthy eating for adults living with type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes and prediabetes.

There is no single diet that everyone with diabetes should follow, and there is no separate "diabetic diet". What matters is the overall quality and composition of the food you eat, including fibre, the types of fat and the sources of carbohydrate.

Bolus uses these principles to set the nutritional direction for your plans, then balances them with what works for you.

Healthy eating that works in real life

A nutritionally good meal isn't particularly useful if it doesn't fit your life.

A meal might take too long to prepare, contain foods you don't enjoy or simply be something you repeatedly skip. That's why Bolus considers nutrition alongside practical factors such as your preferences, available time, previous choices and the meals that have worked for you.

As you use Bolus, your plans can adapt around these signals while continuing to follow our nutrition framework.

We don't expect every meal to be perfect. Some aspects of nutrition are more meaningful when considered across a day or an entire week. For example, fibre can vary considerably between individual days, while saturated fat is better considered across the overall pattern.

The aim is not to create a theoretically perfect diet that's difficult to follow. It's to help make a healthy eating pattern easier to sustain in real life.

What we focus on

Fibre

Fibre is one of the most important parts of our nutrition framework.

Bolus favours fibre-rich foods including vegetables, fruit, wholegrains, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds. UK guidance recommends around 30g of fibre a day for adults, but that doesn't mean every meal or every day needs to contain exactly the same amount. We look at the overall pattern across the week.

Fat quality

We focus on the type of fat, rather than simply trying to make meals as low-fat as possible.

Bolus favours sources of unsaturated fat and aims to limit saturated fat across the overall eating pattern. An individual meal can be relatively high in saturated fat and still fit within a healthy diet if the overall pattern remains appropriate.

Protein

Bolus aims to include useful sources of protein throughout the day.

Rather than expecting every meal to hit an identical number, protein is used to help shape balanced meals while allowing reasonable variation between meals and days.

Carbohydrates

There is no single ideal carbohydrate intake for everyone with diabetes.

Bolus doesn't prescribe a fixed percentage of your diet that should come from carbohydrate. Instead, we emphasise the quality of carbohydrate sources, favouring foods such as higher-fibre wholegrains, beans and pulses, fruit, vegetables and dairy as part of a balanced overall eating pattern. The underlying framework recognises that appropriate carbohydrate intake varies between individuals.

Bolus shows the carbohydrate content of its meals so that you have the information available when you need it.

Salt

Bolus considers the amount of salt in its meals as part of the overall eating pattern.

UK guidance recommends limiting salt to no more than 6g a day. Our framework allows for normal variation: an occasional higher-salt day isn't treated in the same way as a consistently high-salt pattern.

Food quality

Healthy eating is about more than macronutrients.

Our framework favours a varied, plant-rich eating pattern with plenty of vegetables and fruit, higher-fibre carbohydrate sources, beans and pulses, and predominantly unsaturated fats. It also aims to limit foods high in saturated fat, salt and free sugars.

We don't automatically treat a food as unhealthy simply because it is processed. Foods such as frozen vegetables, tinned pulses and wholemeal bread are processed too and can form useful parts of a healthy diet.

Weight goals and energy

Energy needs are different for everyone. They depend on factors including body size, activity and goals, so Bolus doesn't use a single calorie target for everybody.

If weight loss is one of your goals, Bolus estimates your energy needs and takes them into account when shaping your plans.

We keep that calculation in the background so that you don't have to spend your day counting calories. You'll still see calorie information for meals, but the planning happens for you.

How Bolus builds your plan

Our nutrition framework provides the nutritional foundation. But nutrition is only one part of deciding whether a meal is right for you.

When building your plans, Bolus can also take into account things such as:

This means two people don't necessarily need the same plan, and your own plan doesn't need to stay the same forever.

The nutritional framework provides the direction. Bolus combines that with what it learns about what works in your life to make healthy eating easier to put into practice.

Plant variety, and why 30 is our own number

The programme sets a goal of 30 different plants a week. That goal is ours. It is not official dietary guidance, and no UK government body recommends a plant count.

It comes from observational research. The American Gut Project (McDonald et al., mSystems, 2018) compared people eating more than 30 different types of plant a week against people eating 10 or fewer, and found the first group had more diverse gut bacteria.

That is an association found in a large group of volunteers who signed themselves up. It is not proven cause and effect, and it is not a clinical target. We use it because 30 plants is a concrete, memorable nudge towards variety, and because we would rather show you where a number came from than present it as settled science.

Time in range

If you connect a CGM, the programme shows the share of your readings that fall between 4 and 10 mmol/L.

That range comes from the International Consensus on Time in Range (Battelino et al., Diabetes Care, 2019), which set a target range of 3.9 to 10.0 mmol/L for adults with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. UK guidance commonly rounds that to 4 to 10 mmol/L, which is what the programme shows.

Different ranges apply to some people, including during pregnancy and for some older or higher risk adults. Your care team is the right place to find out what range applies to you.

Your glucose readings are shown next to what you ate so you can look at the two together and draw your own conclusions. They are there for your own review. They are not used to decide what goes in your plan, and Bolus does not give any dosing or treatment guidance.

Where our approach comes from

The Bolus nutrition framework was developed by a specialist diabetes dietitian.

It draws on established UK nutrition guidance and evidence, including the NHS Eatwell Guide, recommendations from the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), UK Dietary Reference Values and evidence-based nutrition guidance from Diabetes UK.

Key sources underlying the framework include:

These are among the references used in the specialist-developed Bolus nutrition framework.

Important information

The Bolus nutrition framework is intended to support general healthy eating. It is not individualised nutrition therapy and doesn't replace assessment or advice from a registered dietitian, doctor or your diabetes team.

Bolus doesn't provide insulin dosing or medication advice. Your individual dietary needs may be different, particularly if you use insulin or other glucose-lowering medication or have another health condition that affects your nutritional requirements.

If you're considering a significant dietary change that could affect your medication or insulin needs, speak to your healthcare team.

Bolus LTD
Email: [email protected]

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