How per-ingredient charts reveal new food intolerances over time

Ask a parent whether their baby likes avocado and you'll get an answer based on the last time they served it. But "the last time" is the least reliable data point there is. The truth about a food — whether it's loved, refused, or quietly causing trouble — only shows up when you watch the same ingredient again and again, over time.

Why single meals mislead you

Any one meal is full of noise. A baby might turn down a food they normally love because they're tired, teething, or simply done eating. They might sleep badly for reasons that have nothing to do with dinner. Judge an ingredient on a single sitting and you'll get it wrong about as often as you get it right.

Average that same ingredient across ten or twenty meals, though, and the random noise starts to cancel out. What's left is the signal.

What "ingredient mood over time" actually means

Every time you log a meal in AllerLog, the ingredients in it inherit that meal's scores — how much your baby liked it, and how they slept and pooped afterward. Do that for a few weeks and each ingredient builds its own quiet track record. The app turns that history into a per-ingredient chart: one line of evidence per food, built entirely from your own logs.

How to read the trend

Once an ingredient has a chart, three shapes tell you almost everything:

• Steady and high — a safe favourite. Keep going.
• Consistently low — a food that keeps lining up with poor scores. Worth watching, and worth flagging.
• Drifting downward — the one to pay attention to. An ingredient that used to score well and is slipping can be the first hint of a new sensitivity building with repeated exposure.

That last pattern is the one a chart catches and memory never will.

New intolerances develop — a trend catches them

Allergies and intolerances aren't fixed at birth. Some build up over repeated exposures, so a food that was genuinely fine last month can start causing trouble this month. Without a record, that slow change is invisible; you just notice, eventually, that meals have somehow gotten harder. A trend line makes the shift visible while it's still early — and early is exactly when you want to catch it.

A food doesn't have to fail on day one to be a problem. Watch the trend, not the last meal.

Turning a chart into an answer

Charts show correlation, not proof — so use them to narrow the field, then confirm carefully:

• Filter to your least-favourite ingredients to put the likeliest suspects first
• Where you can, introduce one new ingredient at a time so the chart isn't muddied
• Use your fully editable history to double-check the meals behind a dip
• Take the clearest trends to your pediatrician — a chart built from weeks of real data beats "I think dairy might be an issue"

And once an ingredient looks suspect, mark it as an allergen to get a follow-up reminder the next time it appears. Charts are strongest alongside the other two signals: the sleep and poop scores that feed them, and the AI that reads every ingredient's trend at once.

AllerLog is a tracking and journaling tool to help you and your pediatrician spot patterns. It is not a medical device and does not provide a diagnosis. A chart can show that an ingredient lines up with lower scores, but only a qualified healthcare professional can confirm a food allergy or intolerance. Always consult one about your child's diet and health.