How Zayvo's food numbers are made

Every figure is per 100g of the food as it is eaten: cooked, with its usual oil and ingredients. That matters most for swallows. Eba, amala and pounded yam are made with a lot of water, so their cooked values are far lower than the dry flour or garri they are made from. Zayvo uses the cooked figure because that is what is on the plate.

Each page lists calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat, and fibre where it is recorded.

A food is marked verified only when a published reference table has an entry for that food itself, and Zayvo's values match it. A similar dish or a related ingredient does not count. Today that is 78 foods:

• 18 from the FAO/INFOODS Food Composition Table for Western Africa (2019), the reference table for West African foods.
• 52 from USDA FoodData Central, mostly for widely eaten foods that are not specific to West Africa, like fruit.
• 8 from the manufacturer's own nutrition label, for packaged foods such as Peak milk and Capri-Sun.

The West African table lists ingredients more often than finished dishes, so it will never contain most soups and stews as they are served. That is why most Nigerian dishes are still estimates, and why Zayvo does not borrow a nearby entry to mark them verified.

An estimate is Zayvo's best figure for a dish that no reference table covers. It is labelled as an estimate on the food page, in the app, and in the data Zayvo shares with AI assistants. Estimates are being checked against the West African table one by one, and a food is relabelled verified only when that check passes.

195 of the 195 foods have a typical Nigerian serving recorded: a ladle of soup, a wrap of swallow, a plate of rice, a piece of fruit. The figure “per wrap” or “per ladle” on a page is that serving's weight multiplied by the per-100g values, nothing more.

Your portion will differ. A home ladle, a buka wrap and a party plate are not the same size, so for an exact figure, weigh your food and use the per-100g column.

“On a plate” figures, such as egusi soup with eba, add one standard serving of each food together. Rankings sort foods by calories per 100g, because serving sizes differ between foods and ranking by serving would rank portion sizes instead. Where a food page says it is lower in calories than other soups, it is counting the soups Zayvo publishes, not every soup that exists.

Where a page shows how much of a food's energy comes from fat, carbohydrate and protein, it uses the standard 4, 4 and 9 calories per gram. That split is shown only when those three add up to within 15% of the stated calories. Alcoholic drinks never qualify, because alcohol supplies calories of its own.

Recipes vary: more palm oil, more meat or a different thickener changes a soup's calories, sometimes a lot. Every figure is an average for a typical preparation, not a measurement of your pot.

These pages describe food. They are not medical or dietary advice, and they make no claim that a food is healthy or unhealthy for you.

If a number looks wrong or a dish is missing, email hello@zayvofitness.com. Corrections are checked before anything changes. Every food page is regenerated daily, so a corrected value appears within a day.