Logging rules — how does it count?

What credits a plant, what ticks a category.

A note is something eaten + a date. Each note can credit two counters, independent of each other:

• Categories — the rotation of the main categories (Crucifers, Fermented foods, Resistant starch…). They drive the green / gold / red dots.
• Plants — diversity, that is the number of distinct plants over 7 days, 4 weeks and 12 months. This is the “30 plants a week” counter.

And the two do not have the same requirement. A plant is credited with no quantity threshold: as soon as something of it reaches the colon intact, the plant is counted, whether it is a plate of lentils or a saffron pistil. A category has to be earned: it is only ticked if a usual serving is in the same order of magnitude as its target dose. Hence notes that credit a plant without ticking any category — a carton almond drink brings almond, not a serving of nuts. And the reverse: saffron is counted under Other polyphenols, not Spices, because you use a hundred times less of it than the 5 g this category targets.

The principle — and there is only one

A single question, from which everything else follows: does something reach the colon intact?

Your bacteria live at the very end of the digestive tract. They only see what has escaped digestion: fibers, polyphenols still bound to their matter, resistant starch, and the micro-organisms that survived the journey. Everything absorbed before — simple sugars, fats, purified molecules — does not concern them: it passed into the blood long before reaching them.

So the app never asks “is it healthy”, nor “does it work”. It asks “what reaches the end?”.

The deciding question: what was removed?

The trap would be to ask “is it processed?”. Almond butter is highly processed and counts fully; almond-flavored water barely is and does not count. What decides is what the process removed. Three categories:

• Those that remove nothing — grinding, cooking, mashing, drying, freezing, fermenting. The matrix is damaged, not absent. It counts.
• Those that separate — pressing, filtering, sifting. Part goes off with the liquid, or with the residue. It depends on what remains, and the percentage is often written on the label.
• Those that purify — refining, clarifying, extracting. Only a molecule, or fat, is left. It does not count.

Everything below applies this rule, one form at a time.

Grinding and milling — nut butters, flours, powders

It counts. Grinding removes nothing: the whole seed is still there. Almond butter is worth the almond.

Two nuances, which do not change the decision but deserve to be known. First, grinding releases: in a whole almond, part of the fat stays trapped behind cell walls that digestion does not open, and ends up in the colon. Reduced to a butter, those walls are broken — more is absorbed higher up, a little less reaches the end. The fiber, for its part, does not move. Second, the skin carries most of the polyphenols: whole almond butter is not white almond butter, whole tahini is not white tahini. Hence separate entries.

Cooking and mashing — compotes, soups, vegetable purées

It counts. Cooking softens fibers and destroys part of the vitamins, but it removes nothing: the pulp is still in the bowl. Apple compote is apple.

It can even create: a potato or pasta cooked then chilled makes resistant starch that did not exist in the raw food. And the skin counts here too — a compote made with the skin keeps polyphenols that the peeled version left with the peelings.

Soups and smoothies are not in the catalog, because they are different every time: log the vegetables or fruits that make them up instead, and the app will count them all.

Drying — dried fruits, dried herbs, plant powders

It counts. Water is removed, and water never fed anyone. Fibers and polyphenols remain, simply concentrated — so does the sugar, which concerns your blood sugar, not your bacteria.

One meaningful exception, though: a fresh herb and the same herb dried do not play in the same category — not because one is worth more than the other, but because they do not deliver the same thing. Fresh, the herb brings its volatile terpenes (thymol, carvacrol, menthol, linalool), 30 to 70% of which are lost in drying, plus the lactic bacteria that live on the raw leaf; these terpenes are not polyphenols, they select the flora rather than feed it. Dried, it loses these volatiles but concentrates its non-volatile polyphenols (rosmarinic acid, flavonoids) and then plays, gram for gram, the role of a spice. Hence “Fresh basil” among the fresh herbs and “Dried basil” among the dried spices.

Two honest clarifications. First, vitamin C, often invoked to defend fresh herbs, has nothing to do with this decision: it is absorbed well before the colon. Second, this is the most fragile distinction in the app: the other categories separate classes of sugars that different bacteria know how to digest (fructans, GOS, arabinoxylans, fungal β-glucans…), whereas here we separate two profiles within a single axis.

Freezing and canning

It counts, without reservation. Nothing is removed. Frozen peas are worth fresh peas — often better, since they are frozen within the hour after harvest. No need to look for a “frozen” entry: just log the food.

Pressing — juices, plant milks, coconut milk

It depends on what remains. Pressing separates a liquid from a residue, and the whole question is which side the interesting part went to.

Juices, in three cases:

• Pome fruits — apple, pear, grape: cloudiness decides. They are the only ones that get clarified: pectinolytic enzymes, then fining with gelatin or bentonite. That process precipitates precisely the polyphenols — the very ones that formed the haze and browned the juice. A cloudy apple juice carries several times more than the same juice clarified. Cloudy = counts, clear = no.
• Citrus, pineapple, tomato, carrot, beet, berries: it always counts, with or without pulp. They are never clarified. An orange juice is opaque either way — its color comes from suspended carotenoids — and hesperidin, its main polyphenol, is dissolved in the liquid, not attached to the pulp. Removing the pulp removes a little fiber, not the polyphenols.
• From concentrate, or nectar: does not count, whatever the category.

Coconut milk and plant drinks raise exactly the same question, and the label answers it: the percentage of plant decides. Canned coconut milk is 60 to 90 % pressed pulp — it counts fully. Soy milk (8 to 10 %) and oat drink keep a real share of their plant — soy's proteins and GOS, oat's beta-glucans: they credit their plant and tick their category, because what you swallow decides, drunk or eaten. A 6 % “coconut drink” carton, or a 2 % almond drink, does not: it is not a serving of nuts or grain, so no category, and the plant goes into your collection without counting towards diversity, like an infusion. And okara, what stays in the filter, is precisely the matrix that was removed: it counts too.

The readable criterion, in order: the label first — “pure juice” or “from concentrate”, percentage of fruit or seed; it is written, and it applies to everything. The glass next, but only for apple, pear and grape, the only three the industry clarifies. For an orange juice, the eye is no help: it is opaque anyway.

Filtering and clarifying — clear juices, carton drinks

It ticks no category. Filtering means deliberately removing what clouds — and what clouds is precisely the fibers and polyphenols. What remains is free sugar, without matrix.

And for diversity? A clarified juice is no more than dissolved sugar — fining precipitated the polyphenols on purpose: it does not credit its plant. A carton of plant drink is diluted purée: its plant goes into your collection, without counting towards diversity. Wine counts for the grape neither red, white nor rosé; only red ticks Other polyphenols, and in every case alcohol remains a cost for the gut barrier.

Refining and extracting — oils, standardized extracts, isolated molecules

It does not count. This is the next level up: no longer removing a part, but keeping only one thing.

• Extra virgin olive oil: cold-pressed, it carries the fruit's polyphenols → it counts. Refined oil: refining destroys them, only fat remains → no.
• Turmeric powder → counts. Curcumin capsule → no. Same split for ashwagandha, ginseng or rhodiola. Tribulus, sold only as an extract, therefore never counts.
• Whole grain versus refined grain: the bran and the germ carry the fibers and arabinoxylans. Hence oat bran with its own entry, and refined rye with no category at all.

Fermenting — the only process that adds

It counts, if it is alive. Fermentation removes nothing: it adds micro-organisms and pre-digests part of the fibers. Provided the microbes survived the factory.

• Unpasteurized kombucha → ticks Fermented foods. Pasteurized kombucha → credits the plant Tea, nothing more.
• Vinegar with the mother → counts. Without the mother → no longer ticks Fermented foods.
• Unfiltered craft beer, on lees → live yeasts, lactobacilli for sour beers, hop polyphenols and barley arabinoxylans: it ticks Fermented foods. Industrial beer → counts nowhere: filtered and pasteurized, nothing alive is left in it, and you no more eat the barley than you eat the grape of a wine. In both cases alcohol remains a cost for the gut barrier: it is a trade-off, not a green light.

Why does yogurt count and not the probiotic capsule, when both bring live bacteria? Because a fermented food does not only bring microbes. It brings the matrix that protects them from the stomach — the milk, the cabbage, the tea —, and everything fermentation made along the way: organic acids, peptides, vitamins, fibers already pre-digested. And above all, on the ground that interests this app: eating fermented foods is associated with an increase in the diversity of the microbiota, whereas capsules generally do not move it — the strains pass through and leave. That does not mean a capsule is useless: simply that it plays a different game from this one.

What counts nowhere — and is logged anyway

Standardized extracts, probiotic capsules, refined oils, clarified juices, seitan: nothing reaches the colon, so they touch neither the categories nor diversity. Seitan is the clearest example: it is wheat dough washed in water until only the gluten remains — the starch and the bran went down the drain, all that is left is a protein digested well before the colon. You can still log them — they then appear in the entry history with the note “counts toward no goal”, right next to the daily gut feeling: enough to see what you took, and when. They do not, however, appear on the Plants page, which remains the list of what feeds.

A plant stays a plant, whatever the part

The diversity counter counts plants, not organs or preparations:

• Oat bran counts for Oats, broccoli sprouts for Broccoli, tops for their vegetable.
• Except when you would never eat one in place of the other. Grape leaves, blackcurrant, mulberry and fig leaves have their own plant: nobody says “I ate grapes” when eating a grape leaf. The rule stops there — we do not separate the stages of the same organ, a sprouted seed remains its seed.
• Sprouting, cooking, drying or fermenting never creates a new plant. But it can move the food into a new category: a chilled potato joins Resistant starch, a fermented cabbage joins Fermented foods.
• A fermented dairy ticks a category without crediting a plant — a yogurt is not a plant. Likewise GOS, made from milk lactose.
• Conversely, some notes credit a plant without ticking a category: plain olives count for diversity without belonging to a rotation category.

That is why some notes raise a category without moving diversity: the plant was already counted.

A recipe: “a lot” or “a little”

In a recipe, each ingredient says whether it weighs in the dish. “A lot”: its categories are ticked, like the lentils of a dhal or the cabbage of a sauerkraut. “A little”: its plants count for diversity, without ticking their category — this is what stops a pinch of parsley from passing the herbs off as a whole dish. A rich dish can have several “a lot”.

The rest of the rules

• The app does not record quantities. A note says “I had some that day”, not how much. It is not that volume does not matter — a microgram of saffron and 50 g of lentils obviously have nothing in common — it is that the app does not measure it. That is what the target doses shown on each category are for (200 g of green vegetables, 30 g of legumes, 5 g of spices…): they state the serving to aim for, and the app trusts you on that.
• The same food logged twice on the same day therefore counts only once: the second note teaches the app nothing more.
• The category dots (green / gold / red) compare the date of the category's last note to its target frequency “every X days” (adjustable in Settings → Category rhythmss).
• Late-evening note: if you set an “end of day” in Settings, a note entered before that time counts for the day before.
• Food missing from the catalog? You can log it for the record when you enter it: it then counts toward nothing. If it is a plant, tick “It's a plant”: it will count like the others.

The limit to keep in mind: in the diversity counter, a pinch of saffron weighs as much as a plate of lentils. That is the price of a journal you fill in three seconds. The categories' target doses are there to catch what the plant counter does not see — but they rely on your honesty, not on a measurement.