The 12 food groups Bellynote tracks, and why grouping matters

· 6 min read

Bellynote doesn't stop at "chicken" or "toast." Every ingredient you log also gets sorted into a food group. That extra step is what makes a pattern visible across meals that look nothing alike, and it's the unit most of the diet research actually works in.

Why the group is the useful unit

A slice of pizza, a bowl of pasta, and a sandwich have almost nothing in common on a plate. To your gut, they're all a dose of grains and gluten. If you only track named foods, you have to eat the exact same thing over and over before a pattern can emerge. Track the group, and the pattern shows up even when Monday's meal and Thursday's meal share zero ingredients.

The clearest example is FODMAPs: fermentable carbohydrates spread across wheat, onion, garlic, legumes, milk sugar, some fruit, and sugar alcohols. In a controlled feeding trial, people's gut symptoms tracked the total FODMAP load across everything they ate, not whether any single food was present1. You can only see that if you're adding up a category.

Grouping also mirrors how the evidence-based approaches are built. A low-FODMAP diet is a category-level restriction, and it comes out ahead of several comparison diets for IBS symptoms in a network meta-analysis2; a randomized trial found it worked about as well as careful traditional dietary advice3; and the American College of Gastroenterology includes a time-limited trial of it as a conditional recommendation4.

The 12 groups

Bellynote sorts what you log into these, automatically:

  • Grains & Gluten: wheat, barley, rye, and foods made from them
  • Dairy: milk, cheese, yogurt, cream, butter
  • Nightshades: tomato, potato, pepper, eggplant
  • Legumes: beans, lentils, chickpeas, peanuts, soy
  • Cruciferous: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale
  • FODMAPs: fermentable carbs including onion, garlic, certain fruits, and sugar alcohols
  • Added Sugar: sugar and syrups added to foods and drinks
  • Caffeine: coffee, tea, energy drinks, cola, chocolate
  • Alcohol: beer, wine, spirits
  • Fermented: yogurt, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, aged cheese
  • Spicy / Capsaicin: chili, hot sauce, and other capsaicin-containing foods
  • Tree Nuts & Peanuts: almonds, walnuts, cashews, peanuts, and nut butters

Some foods land in more than one group. A soy latte is dairy or a legume plus caffeine, and kimchi is fermented and spicy. That's fine, and on purpose: it means whichever angle turns out to matter for you is already being tracked.

What Bellynote does with them

As you log, Bellynote tallies each group and, around your symptom flare-ups, ranks them from most to least frequent. Tap into any group to see every food you've logged in it and every symptom recorded nearby, so you can look at the actual entries behind the ranking before you change anything.

A group showing up often around bad days isn't proof it's the cause. It might just be something you eat a lot. The way to check is to ease off that group for a couple of weeks and then bring it back on purpose.

Bellynote is a self-tracking tool, not a medical device, and this isn't medical advice. Cutting out whole food groups long-term can affect your nutrition, so do restriction-and-reintroduction with a registered dietitian where you can, and rule out conditions like celiac disease with a doctor before going gluten-free.

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References

  1. Halmos EP, Power VA, Shepherd SJ, Gibson PR, Muir JG. A diet low in FODMAPs reduces symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. Gastroenterology. 2014;146(1):67–75.e5. doi:10.1053/j.gastro.2013.09.046
  2. Black CJ, Staudacher HM, Ford AC. Efficacy of a low FODMAP diet in irritable bowel syndrome: systematic review and network meta-analysis. Gut. 2022;71(6):1117–1126. doi:10.1136/gutjnl-2021-325214
  3. Böhn L, Störsrud S, Liljebo T, Collin L, Lindfors P, Törnblom H, Simrén M. Diet low in FODMAPs reduces symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome as well as traditional dietary advice: a randomized controlled trial. Gastroenterology. 2015;149(6):1399–1407.e2. doi:10.1053/j.gastro.2015.07.054
  4. Lacy BE, Pimentel M, Brenner DM, Chey WD, Keefer LA, Long MD, Moshiree B. ACG clinical guideline: management of irritable bowel syndrome. Am J Gastroenterol. 2021;116(1):17–44. doi:10.14309/ajg.0000000000001036