About Nutri-Matic
A machine, built with total scientific confidence, that analyses what's in front of you and tells you exactly what it found. That premise has one famous ancestor — and one very different ending.
The name
Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a machine that takes its job extremely seriously — analysing molecular structure, spectral signatures, and personality in order to synthesise exactly the beverage you're craving — and, having done all that genuinely impressive science, gets the one thing that matters completely wrong. It's a joke about instruments that are rigorous everywhere except the part you actually needed.
This app borrows the premise, not the punchline. Nutri-Matic takes a bowl of chickpeas as seriously as a mass spectrometer would — provenance-tracked amino acid profiles, digestibility coefficients cited to the study, reference values checked against a primary source — and then tries very hard not to get the one thing that matters wrong. Where it can't be sure, it says so, tagged and visible, rather than quietly serving you a confident number. No Hitchhiker's Guide text, characters, or branding appear anywhere in this app; the inheritance is the tone of the joke, not its content.
What it actually does
Nutri-Matic is a protein-quality and micronutrient analysis tool — not a calorie counter. Log a food or a meal and it computes DIAAS/PDCAAS (how complete and digestible its protein actually is), tracks bioavailability-adjusted vitamins and minerals against your personal reference values, and — if a food falls short somewhere — suggests a real pairing or swap, simulated and scored against your own data rather than pattern-matched from a generic list.
Every one of those numbers traces back to a USDA FoodData Central record, a named study, or an explicitly-labelled category estimate. See Data & Methodology for the full chain.
Measure, don't guess
The operating rule is simple: a number is either sourced or it doesn't appear. Missing amino acid data isn't silently treated as zero; an estimated digestibility coefficient is labelled estimated, never presented the same way as a measured one; a food with an incomplete profile is reported as unscorable rather than given a number that understates it. "We don't know" is a valid, frequently-used answer in this app.
That standard is described in full, nutrient by nutrient, on the Data & Methodology page — including where the science itself is still genuinely unsettled (bioavailability modelling, in particular, is a deliberately simplified estimate of a very complicated reality, and is labelled as such throughout).