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Health claims policy

Status: policy, 2026-10-04 (RFC-0004, action plan C23). Applies to every document, page, rule pack, tool and demo that carries the Cookwala name.

1. What Cookwala may say #

  • General nutrition guidance from public health bodies, cited: sodium, free sugars, total and saturated fat, trans fat, fruit and vegetables, fibre, energy ranges by broad age band, protein minima.
  • Food-safety rules from public guidance and national codes: cooking temperatures, hot-holding, cooling, time out of temperature control, date marks, allergen labelling, foods to avoid for vulnerable groups.
  • Care variants for children under five, pregnancy, older adults and immunocompromised people, when they come from the same public sources.
  • Measured outcomes of programs that used the tools, with the method under each number.

2. What Cookwala never says #

  • That it diagnoses, treats, prevents or manages any condition.
  • That a recipe or menu is "healthy" without saying which rule it passed.
  • That a diet for a condition (diabetes, kidney disease, allergy management beyond avoidance) is computed by Cookwala. Clinician-set targets are entered locally and belong to the clinician.
  • Anything about infant formula, therapeutic feeding or clinical nutrition.
  • That any health organization endorses, reviews or uses Cookwala, unless it has said so in writing.

3. How rules carry their status #

Every rule pack has status (draft, reviewed, adopted, retired), reviews with the reviewer's profession and outcome, jurisdiction, and a disclaimer. The website shows the status next to every pack and never shows a draft pack as reviewed.

4. Personal nutrition #

Per-person data (PersonNutrition) is sensitive, stays on the household's device (RFC-0001), and never reaches a rule pack, a provider or a dataset. Weight goals are opt-in; the default is "eat well". Nothing produces a score of a person.

5. Where this policy comes from #

Concern C23 in docs/ACTION-PLAN.md: health claims are close to medical-device rules in most jurisdictions. Staying with population-level public guidance and clinician-entered targets keeps Cookwala out of that territory and keeps the content reviewable.