Where our numbers come from.

Supper estimates the energy you burn at rest from your sex, weight, height and age, using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, then multiplies that by your activity level. It is an estimate drawn from a population, not a measurement of you.

Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1990;51(2):241–247.

Each level multiplies that resting estimate, from 1.2 for sedentary up to 1.725 for very active. Those four multipliers are a widely used convention rather than a published standard. The report below sets out the underlying idea of a physical activity level, and uses bands of its own that differ from these numbers.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2023.

Choosing to lose subtracts 500 calories a day from your goal, and choosing to gain adds 300. A fixed daily change is an approximation: as your weight changes so does the energy you burn, so real weight change slows over time instead of continuing in a straight line. The paper below quantifies that.

Hall KD, Sacks G, Chandramohan D, Chow CC, Wang YC, Gortmaker SL, Swinburn BA. Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight. The Lancet. 2011;378(9793):826–837.

Your fiber goal is 14 grams for every 1,000 calories in your calorie goal. That ratio is the adequate intake set in the report below, where it was derived from the relationship between fiber intake and heart disease risk.

Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005.

Your protein goal is 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. The review below found that eating more than roughly that amount added nothing further to muscle gained through resistance training, which makes it a sensible amount to aim for rather than a minimum you must hit.

Morton RW, Murphy KT, McKellar SR, Schoenfeld BJ, Henselmans M, Helms E, Aragon AA, Devries MC, Banfield L, Krieger JW, Phillips SM. A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of the effect of protein supplementation on resistance training-induced gains in muscle mass and strength in healthy adults. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2018;52(6):376–384.

Your fat goal is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. The report below gives an acceptable range of 20 to 35 percent of daily energy from fat, and at typical weights and calorie goals this works out inside that range. The report sets the range; the figure per kilogram is ours.

Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005.

Supper sorts each ingredient into one of the four NOVA groups, then reports the share of your calories that are not in group 4, the ultra-processed group. An ingredient Supper could not classify is counted as not ultra-processed rather than left out, so the share is an estimate rather than a tally of ingredients actually checked. The paper below defines the groups and explains how to tell them apart. You can correct any ingredient's group yourself, and your correction changes only your own numbers.

Monteiro CA, Cannon G, Levy RB, Moubarac JC, Louzada ML, Rauber F, Khandpur N, Cediel G, Neri D, Martinez-Steele E, Baraldi LG, Jaime PC. Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them. Public Health Nutrition. 2019;22(5):936–941.