How We Verify Data

Every value on Kidney Disease Foods is prepared, checked and published through a data-editorial pipeline. No page is written by an AI pretending to be a person, and no page is signed by a doctor who never saw it. What you get instead is the actual process that produced the number you are reading.

How the data is prepared

Our work is limited to what we can verify: taking measured values from public government food databases, applying a published rating rule, and keeping every step auditable. We are not doctors or dietitians, nothing on this site is medically reviewed, and we say so on the medical review policy page.

The verification pipeline (what actually happens)

• Every record starts from the USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy 2018 release, downloaded in full and loaded locally — not scraped from a summary page.
• Each food carries its original USDA fdc_id, so any value can be traced to the source row.
• Nutrients used in ratings (phosphorus, sodium, potassium) are cross-checked against a second USDA release for a sample of foods before publication.
• Every data batch runs two automated checks: internal consistency (no missing or swapped values, no duplicate IDs) and source traceability (every value has a source, estimates are labelled, and a "no data" is never filled with a guess).
• Estimated values are explicitly marked "category estimate" and are never presented as measured data.

Corrections & updates

We log corrections publicly through the corrections policy. Because pages are generated from one database, a fix propagates to every page that uses the record — there is no such thing as a one-page patch. The rating methodology, daily limits and tier rules are all public on the methodology page, so any visitor can re-derive a rating from the raw values.

What this means for you

Ratings on this site are data, not prescriptions. The data side is ours and is verifiable; the clinical side — your stage, your labs, whether a food fits your plan — belongs to you and your nephrologist or renal dietitian.

Back to the food database →