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Skillstooluniverse-nutrition-food-composition

tooluniverse-nutrition-food-composition

Design & creation

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Updated 10-16 01:16

About this skill

Nutrition & Food Composition Lookup

Looks up what's actually in a food or branded product — nutrient values, ingredients, allergens, additives, processing classification — from two complementary sources. Does not itself perform toxicological or epidemiological analysis; feed the retrieved data into tooluniverse-toxicology (food additive/allergen safety questions) or tooluniverse-epidemiological-analysis (dietary-exposure questions) for that.

LOOK UP, DON'T GUESS: Never state a nutrient value, ingredient list, allergen, or Nutri-Score from memory — both sources are live and current; query them.

When to Use This Skill

  • "How much [protein/sodium/vitamin C/...] is in [food]?" -> FoodDataCentral
  • "What's the full nutrient profile of [generic or USDA reference food]?" -> FoodDataCentral
  • "What are the ingredients/allergens in [branded product]?" -> OpenFoodFacts
  • "Look up this barcode" -> OpenFoodFacts_get_product
  • "Find products with/without [additive, allergen, Nutri-Score grade, label]" -> OpenFoodFacts_filter_products_by_tags

NOT for: assessing whether an additive/ingredient is toxicologically safe (-> tooluniverse-toxicology, e.g. CTD/AOPWiki/EPA CompTox for the additive's own chemical hazard data — this skill only tells you a product contains it); population-level dietary-exposure or disease-association analysis (-> tooluniverse-epidemiological-analysis); clinical nutrition guidelines or diet-disease management recommendations (out of scope for both tools here — they're data lookups, not guideline sources).

1. USDA FoodData Central — Authoritative US Nutrient Values

The USDA's official nutrient database: Foundation Foods (analytically measured reference values), SR Legacy (the historical USDA standard reference), Survey/FNDDS (foods as reported in national dietary surveys), and Branded (commercial products, including label-declared values).

Tool Use for Key params
FoodDataCentral_search_foods Keyword search across all data types, or one filtered type query, page_size (max 200), page_number, data_type ("Foundation" | "Branded" | "SR Legacy" | "Survey (FNDDS)")
FoodDataCentral_get_food Full nutrient profile (70+ nutrients) for a known fdcId fdc_id

Optional FDC_API_KEY (free, register at https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide.html) — without one, calls fall back to a shared, rate-limited DEMO_KEY, which is what this skill's live verification used successfully; register a personal key for any workload beyond occasional lookups.

Verified live: FoodDataCentral_search_foods {"query": "raw banana", "page_size": 3, "data_type": "Foundation"} returned real Foundation-food records (e.g. fdcId 1105073, "Bananas, overripe, raw") with full topNutrients arrays and totalHits: 164 across 55 pages. FoodDataCentral_get_food {"fdc_id": 1105073} returned the complete real nutrient profile for that same food, confirming the two tools are consistent. (The tool's JSON description previously cited a different, stale example fdcId that had drifted to return "Starfruit, raw" instead of the banana it claimed — this has been corrected in the tool definition; still, prefer an fdcId you actually got back from search_foods in the same session over any example ID, since USDA's own IDs can be reassigned or deprecated over time.)

2. Open Food Facts — Crowdsourced Global Product Database

3M+ products worldwide, contributed by users and scanned from packaging — broader branded/international coverage than FoodDataCentral's Branded category, but not centrally curated: expect gaps or inconsistencies in any individual product record (missing nutrient fields, unverified ingredient lists) more often than in USDA's data. No API key required for any of the 3 tools.

Tool Use for Key params
OpenFoodFacts_search_products Free-text search by product/brand name search_terms (required), page_size (max 100, default 50), page
OpenFoodFacts_get_product Full record for a known barcode (EAN-13/UPC) barcode (required)
OpenFoodFacts_filter_products_by_tags Faceted search by controlled-vocabulary tags — answers queries free-text search can't additives_tags, allergens_tags, categories_tags_en, brands_tags, nutrition_grades_tags, labels_tags, countries_tags, fields, page_size, page (all optional; combine with AND)

Verified live:

  • OpenFoodFacts_search_products {"search_terms": "nutella", "page_size": 2} -> real results (count: 1038), including full ingredients_text and nutriments for the top match.
  • OpenFoodFacts_get_product {"barcode": "3017620422003"} -> the real Nutella 400g record: additives_original_tags (en:e322, en:e322i — lecithins), full _keywords, ingredient text in French.
  • OpenFoodFacts_filter_products_by_tags {"allergens_tags": "en:peanuts", "page_size": 2} -> real peanut-allergen products (count: 38821) with additives_tags, allergens_tags, categories_tags_en, labels_tags per record — this is the right tool for "find products containing/excluding X," which search_products' free-text search cannot do reliably.
  • One transient failure observed: search_products returned an HTML "Page temporarily unavailable" error on a first attempt, then succeeded identically on immediate retry — treat a single such failure as a transient upstream hiccup and retry once before reporting the tool as broken.

When to Use Which

Need Use
Rigorous nutrient values for a generic/reference food (clinical dietary calculation, research) FoodDataCentral (Foundation or SR Legacy)
A specific branded product's nutrient label as declared by the manufacturer Either — FoodDataCentral's Branded type or OpenFoodFacts, cross-check if precision matters
Ingredients, allergens, additives, Nutri-Score, or NOVA processing level for a branded product OpenFoodFacts (FoodDataCentral's ingredients field is a plain string only, no structured allergen/additive tags)
Scanning/looking up a physical product by barcode OpenFoodFacts (get_product) — FoodDataCentral has no barcode lookup
"Which products contain/avoid additive X or allergen Y" OpenFoodFacts filter_products_by_tags — no equivalent in FoodDataCentral
Global/international branded products (non-US) OpenFoodFacts — FoodDataCentral's Branded coverage skews US market

Common Pitfalls

  • Don't trust an fdcId from memory — USDA IDs can drift over time (this skill's own reference example was found and fixed once already, see above). Always source the ID from a search_foods call in the same session.
  • OpenFoodFacts data is crowdsourced, not centrally curated — a missing or odd-looking field (absent Nutri-Score, sparse nutrients) may just reflect incomplete community contribution for that specific product, not a tool malfunction. Don't assume the record is exhaustive.
  • filter_products_by_tags's tag fields use a controlled vocabulary (en:peanuts, en:e322, not free text) — get exact tag values from a product's own tag fields (e.g. allergens_tags in a prior get_product/search_products result) rather than guessing the tag string.
  • Retry once on a transient OpenFoodFacts HTML error page before concluding the API is down.

References