Edamam nutrition

About Edamam nutrition

The Nutrition Analysis API from Edamam is accessed via HTTPS requests to api.edamam.com and provides natural language processing for extracting food entities, measures, and quantities from unstructured text. It performs full analysis of food recipes in real time, including nutrition computation, health and diet label assignment, and recipe classification by cuisine, meal, and dish type. The API adjusts ingredient quantities to account for cooking processes, such as calculating oil absorption in fried recipes or excluding solids from stock and broth recipes.

A food logging mode can be enabled via a "nutrition-type" parameter, allowing submission of food items without specified quantity (matched to expected serving sizes) and restricting matches to foods ready for direct consumption. The API supports active user tracking through a configurable app_id and a mandatory user ID header, with user IDs restricted to alphanumeric characters, hyphens, underscores, and periods up to 30 characters. It is also integrated into the Edamam Platform Assistant, a chatbot interface that translates natural language queries into API calls.

Responses include structured nutrient data (absolute amounts and percent daily values across nutrients like calcium, protein, vitamins, and fatty acids), ingredient details (food ID, quantity, measure, weight, and shopping aisle category), and generated diet and health labels. Diet labels describe nutrient-level characteristics such as balanced, high-fiber, high-protein, low-carb, low-fat, and low-sodium. Health labels describe ingredient-level characteristics such as allergen-free status (dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, peanut-free, and others), diet compatibility (keto-friendly, paleo, kosher, Mediterranean, DASH), and other attributes like alcohol content. The API is intended for developers building recipe analysis, food logging, or conversational food-query applications.

Key features

• Extracts food entities, measures, and quantities from unstructured text using NLP
• Computes full nutrition analysis for recipes in real time
• Generates diet labels (e.g. Balanced, Low-Carb, High-Protein) and health labels (e.g. Gluten-Free, Kosher, Vegan)
• Adjusts ingredient quantities for cooking effects like oil absorption in fried recipes
• Supports food logging mode for matching consumable items without specifying quantity
• Includes a Platform Assistant chatbot for constructing API calls from natural language queries

Frequently asked questions