Where our guidance comes from
Last updated: 30 July 2026
Bolus is food and lifestyle support. It is not a medical device, and it does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, treatment recommendations, or insulin or medication dosing guidance. Always speak to your healthcare professional about your diabetes care and any medication changes.
This page sets out where every number and goal in the programme comes from, and how strong each source is. Where a figure is an official UK reference intake, we say so and link it. Where a goal is ours rather than official guidance, we say that too.
Our recipes
Every recipe is developed in-house. We write them with the nutrient reference intakes below in mind: a good range of vegetables across the week, and enough protein. We also write them for taste, and for whether you can realistically make them on a weeknight. That second half of the job matters as much as the first, because a meal you never cook does nothing for you.
Recipes are not held to a numeric threshold, and they are not certified against any standard by us or by anyone else. The reference intakes are what we aim at and what we measure against. They are not a test each recipe has to pass.
Daily nutrient targets
These are the daily targets shown on the Food Quality card in the programme. They are published reference intakes for adults aged 19 to 64. Each value has its own source, listed alongside it.
Men, adults 19 to 64
On a basis of around 2,500 kcal a day.
| Nutrient | Daily target | Type | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Protein | 55.5 g | Goal | UK Reference Nutrient Intake for men 19 to 50 (0.75 g per kg of body weight, against a 74 kg reference weight), COMA 1991 Dietary Reference Values |
| Total fat | 97 g | Maximum | SACN: no more than 35% of food energy |
| Saturated fat | 31 g | Maximum | SACN: no more than 11% of food energy |
| Unsaturated fat | 54 g | Goal | Derived from SACN: monounsaturated around 13% of food energy, plus polyunsaturated around 6.5% |
| Fibre | 30 g | Goal | SACN recommendation for adults (AOAC fibre) |
| Carbohydrate | No target shown | None | Deliberately not shown |
| Calories | No target shown | None | The basis for the figures above, not shown as a target |
Women, adults 19 to 64
On a basis of around 2,000 kcal a day.
| Nutrient | Daily target | Type | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Protein | 45 g | Goal | UK Reference Nutrient Intake for women 19 to 50 (0.75 g per kg of body weight, against a 60 kg reference weight), COMA 1991 Dietary Reference Values |
| Total fat | 78 g | Maximum | SACN: no more than 35% of food energy |
| Saturated fat | 24 g | Maximum | SACN: no more than 11% of food energy |
| Unsaturated fat | 43 g | Goal | Derived from SACN in the same way as above |
| Fibre | 30 g | Goal | SACN recommendation for adults. Fibre is not sex specific, so this figure is the same in both tables |
Carbohydrate and calories have no daily target shown in either table. The programme picks which table to show from the sex you give when you sign up. Where that is not known, the reference intakes for men are shown.
The published sources behind those figures
- SACN, Carbohydrates and Health (2015)
- Government Dietary Recommendations, the UK government reference tables for energy and nutrients (PDF)
- COMA, Dietary Reference Values for Food Energy and Nutrients for the United Kingdom (1991). The report itself is not published online, but the Department of Health summary is: Dietary Reference Values: A Guide (PDF)
Nutrition figures for individual meals
Nutrition figures come from McCance and Widdowson's Composition of Foods (CoFID), the UK government reference dataset. Where CoFID does not cover a specific product, such as a particular brand of stock pot or seed mix, we use the manufacturer's own pack label instead. CoFID covers most of what we cook with.
These are reference figures for the ingredients in a recipe, so treat them as close rather than exact. Real portions, brands and how much you actually cook all move the numbers.
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.
How your meals are chosen
Choosing your meals is not a clinical calculation. It is based on:
- what you have told us you like and dislike
- what you have actually cooked before, and what you keep skipping
- how much time you have on a given day
- keeping the week varied rather than repetitive
- who you are cooking for
Glucose data does not feed into which meals you are offered.
Questions, or something we have got wrong
If you want more detail on any of the above, or you think we have a figure or a source wrong, tell us and we will look at it.
Bolus LTD
Email: [email protected]