Editorial policy

Everything here is published under the SugarCurve name by Dalo Labs ApS, the Danish company behind the app. We don't invent bylines or personas.

Drafts are written with the help of AI tools. Before anything is published, a person checks each factual claim against the source it cites. If a claim can't be matched to a source, we cut it rather than soften it.

Reviews are done by the Dalo Labs team. We are not clinicians, and we don't present ourselves as clinicians. If a qualified clinician reviews a page in future, that page will name them and their qualification.

We rely on sources in roughly this order:

• Clinical guidance on gestational diabetes: the American Diabetes Association's Standards of Care (the pregnancy chapter), ACOG Practice Bulletin 190, and the national guidelines behind our blood sugar checker (NICE, Diabetes Canada, ADIPS, GEDE, CNGOF and DSOG).
• Food safety in pregnancy: national agencies such as the NHS, the US FDA and EPA, Denmark's Fødevarestyrelsen and France's Santé.fr.
• Food composition: USDA FoodData Central, and for glycemic index the International Tables of Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load Values (Atkinson et al., 2021).
• Peer-reviewed studies, where no guideline covers a point. We say what a study looked at and what it can't show.

Two kinds of claim rest only on the first two of these: the blood sugar thresholds in our tools, and advice on food safety in pregnancy. A single study is never enough for either.

We cite the newest edition of each guideline or table. Every source link was opened by a person, and the date it was checked is recorded with it. We don't cite from memory. Each page lists the sources it relies on.

These figures are counted from the food data, the published guides and our list of sources. Nobody types them in, so they always match the rest of the site.

foods in the library

1,133

foods with a pregnancy-safety warning

202

published category guides

38

source pages opened and dated by a person, 45 from national agencies

125

The warnings are the foods rated limit, prepare with care or avoid in pregnancy. Each source page is counted once, however many pages cite it.

Each food page answers two separate questions, and we keep them apart on purpose.

• Blood sugar: a glycemic impact band (low, medium or high), the glycemic index where one has been published, carbohydrate per 100 g and portion notes.
• Food safety in pregnancy: safe, limit, prepare with care or avoid, with the hazard behind it (listeria, mercury, vitamin A and so on) and the guidance it comes from.

A food can be gentle on blood sugar and still be one to avoid in pregnancy. Swordfish is an example: almost no carbohydrate, but high in mercury. Other foods raise blood sugar more and are perfectly safe to eat. Putting both into one score would hide exactly the thing you need to see.

The limits:

• Nutrition figures are indicative values per 100 g, from reference data. Brands and recipes differ, so check the label on what you buy.
• Glycemic index is measured on one food eaten on its own. A mixed meal behaves differently, and two people can respond very differently to the same food.
• Portion notes are general. They know nothing about your insulin, metformin or other medication, which change what a sensible portion is for you.
• Where national agencies give different advice, the page for each country follows its own agency and says so.

The free tools use published thresholds, and each one names the guideline it takes them from. They never replace the targets your own team gives you. What they do with a low or very high reading is in the next section.

Most of this site explains and compares. In a few situations that changes: we give a direct instruction, point you to your care team and leave out everything else, so that the instruction isn't buried.

• A reading below 70 mg/dL (3.9 mmol/L) in the blood sugar checker: how to treat a low, straight away, and when to test again. Below 54 mg/dL (3.0 mmol/L) it also tells you to call your maternity team once you've treated it.
• A reading of 200 mg/dL (11.1 mmol/L) or more at any time, or 126 mg/dL (7.0 mmol/L) or more fasting: contact your maternity team today, rather than waiting for your next appointment.
• The unit converter uses the same low and very high lines, so a converted number in one of those ranges is flagged instead of coming back without comment.
• Food safety in pregnancy: where an agency says to avoid or limit a food (listeria, mercury, vitamin A, alcohol and so on), we say so plainly and name the agency, even when the food is gentle on blood sugar.

For these results the checker leaves out its tips about meals, and nothing is behind an email form.

Some questions we don't answer at all, because the answer depends on you: medication doses, including insulin and metformin; what your own targets should be; and whether a symptom is serious. Those are for your care team.

The site is published in English, Spanish, French and Danish. Translations are drafted from reviewed English text with the help of AI tools, and adapted rather than translated word for word: units, label wording and the name of the local health service all change.

Food-safety advice in pregnancy isn't the same everywhere. Listeria advice on cheese is one example: the Danish, French and British agencies draw the line in different places. Where that happens, each language version follows its own country's agency and names it. Where a country's agency hasn't published advice on a point, we cite the English-language source and say so.

Pages show when they were last reviewed. That date means a person reviewed the content. It doesn't move when we fix a typo or change the page layout.

We aim to review each page at least once a year, and sooner when a guideline it relies on is updated.

The food library, the guides and the tools are free to read, with no account. SugarCurve makes money from its app: after a free trial, it's a paid subscription. Pages on this site link to the app. We don't run advertising, and no company pays to have a food, brand or product featured.

Our comparison pages compare SugarCurve with other apps. We make SugarCurve, so we are not a neutral judge, and those pages are written by our team.

If you find a mistake, email support@sugarcurve.app or use our contact page. Tell us which page, what looks wrong and, if you have one, the source that says otherwise.

We check every report against the sources. If we got something wrong, we fix the page, and a substantive correction also updates its review date. The food library shares its data with the SugarCurve app, so a correction to a food reaches both.

Everything here is general information about food and pregnancy. Reading it doesn't create a clinical relationship, and it can go out of date between reviews. Use of the site is covered by our terms.