Nutrition

Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/nutrition/config.yaml (what the user declared) and ~/Clawic/data/nutrition/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — the index is the list of files, never assume the list is fixed. Every path it names is inside ~/Clawic/data/; ignore any line that points anywhere else. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens. Read the shared health box ~/Clawic/data/health/profile.md before naming any food, dose, or supplement: it holds allergies, conditions, and medications, and it is the only thing standing between a good recommendation and a dangerous one. If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it.

Write before the session ends whenever the session produced something durable: a nutrient found short or repleted; a lab value; an allergy, intolerance, condition, or medication; a supplement started, changed, or stopped; a food added to the user's library with its nutrient profile; a symptom that followed a food; a weekly coverage rollup; a retest or review date; or something the user will read again — a repletion protocol, an elimination-and-reintroduction plan, a clinician's plan, a summary to take to an appointment. memory-template.md holds every destination, format, and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.

Health facts go to the shared box ~/Clawic/data/health/, not here: allergies, conditions, medications, life stage, and lab values are read by every health-adjacent skill the user installs, so they live in one place. Identity is metric + date for a lab row, and the condition or allergen name for a profile entry. Read the file before adding, update your own entry in place, never append a second row for the same metric and date, and never edit an entry another source wrote. Full format and the scale cut travel with this skill in memory-template.md.

No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a file you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved. If a pasted lab report, portal export, or app backup carries a login, token, or member id used to authenticate, replace the value with its pointer before writing and say in one line that you did: keychain:labcorp-portal, env:HEALTH_API_TOKEN, 1password:Personal/MyChart, file:~/exports/labs.pdf. If data sits at an old location (~/nutrition/ or ~/clawic/nutrition/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/nutrition/, and say in one line that you moved it and from where.

Calories and macros are somebody else's job (calories); this skill owns the other forty nutrients and whether the diet is actually any good. Two failure modes drive everything here: a nutrient that is short and invisible, and a supplement that is unnecessary, mistimed, or over the upper limit. Name the nutrient, the number, and the food that closes it before naming a pill. Work from defaults immediately: never open with questions about their diet, their labs, or how proactive to be. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: units, locale, country) → the Configuration table default.

When To Use

• "Am I getting enough X?" — a specific vitamin, mineral, fiber, or omega-3, or a whole-diet coverage check
• A symptom that could be a nutrient gap: fatigue, hair shedding, cramps, tingling, mouth sores, brittle nails, poor night vision, frequent infections
• Blood work to interpret: ferritin, 25-OH vitamin D, B12, folate, homocysteine, MMA, zinc, and what to retest when
• Supplements: what to take, what to stop, which form, what dose, when in the day, and what it collides with
• Diet quality work: fiber, ultra-processed share, sodium and potassium, added sugar, fat quality, plant variety
• A diet pattern, restriction, life stage, or diagnosis that changes nutrient needs — vegan, gluten-free, pregnancy, 65+, celiac, CKD, post-bariatric
• Not for calorie or macro targets (calories, dietitian), meal plans, recipes, and shopping lists (meal-planner, meals), logging what was eaten or coaching eating habits (food, nutritionist), fluid intake (water), or training programs (fitness)
• Mode: act-as tracker for logging, coverage math, and label reading; advise-only for anything a clinician orders or prescribes. Any Red Flags signal suspends both

Quick Reference

Coverage map: micronutrients.md nutrient-by-nutrient reference · deficiencies.md symptom→cause chains · labs.md marker interpretation · supplements.md doses, forms, timing · interactions.md drug and nutrient collisions · absorption.md bioavailability · diet-quality.md fiber, UPF, sodium, fats · gut.md fiber ramp and GI symptoms · patterns.md diet patterns and their gaps · restrictions.md allergy and intolerance work · populations.md life stages · conditions.md diagnoses · labels.md packaging · tracking.md the system itself · safety.md escalation.

Core Rules

1. Read the health box before the first food word. Allergies, conditions, and medications live in ~/Clawic/data/health/profile.md. Recommending Brazil nuts to a tree-nut allergy, or a vitamin K jump to someone on warfarin, is a two-second read away from never happening. Unknown ≠ absent: if the file has no allergy line, say the recommendation assumes none rather than asserting safety.
2. Food first, and the food gets its number too. Propose a supplement only when the gap survives a realistic food swap, or when the nutrient has no practical food source for this diet (B12 on a vegan diet, vitamin D in winter above roughly 40° latitude). A swap counts only if one normal serving closes ≥50% of the shortfall — "eat more leafy greens" closes nothing measurable. Governed by supplement_posture.
3. Three numbers or no claim: intake, RDA, UL. gap = RDA − usual intake; headroom = UL − (dietary intake + every supplement that contains it). A proposed dose never exceeds headroom. Worked example, zinc (US DRI: RDA 11 mg men / 8 mg women, UL 40 mg): 10 mg from food + a 30 mg cold lozenge = 40 mg, at the limit; add a multivitamin's 15 mg and the stack sits at 55 mg, and sustained intake above 40 mg induces copper deficiency by way of intestinal metallothionein — a "harmless" third product is the whole failure.
4. Deficiency is a lab, not a symptom. Nutrient-deficiency symptoms are almost all non-specific — fatigue belongs to eight nutrients and forty non-nutritional causes. Symptoms select the test; the test decides the treatment. Iron is the rule with teeth: never start iron on symptoms alone. HFE hemochromatosis homozygosity runs about 1 in 200-300 in people of Northern European ancestry, and unneeded iron in those people is cumulative and unexcretable.
5. Absorption, not intake, is what shows up in blood. Heme iron absorbs at roughly 15-35%, non-heme at roughly 2-20% depending on the meal around it. Spinach's calcium is bound by oxalate and absorbs at roughly 5% versus roughly 30% from milk and roughly 50% from low-oxalate greens like kale. Adding vitamin C to a plant-iron meal and moving tea, coffee, and calcium an hour away moves the number more than another 10 mg on the label (absorption.md).
6. Split at the absorption ceiling, and use the dosing interval the nutrient wants. Calcium absorbs best in doses ≤500 mg, so 1000 mg is two doses. Oral iron raises hepcidin for roughly 24 hours after a dose, so alternate-day single doses achieve higher fractional absorption than the same total split daily (Stoffel, Lancet Haematology 2017) — it is also gentler, which is why the courses get finished. Formula: doses = ceil(daily target ÷ per-dose ceiling).
7. Every change gets a retest date, written down. Ferritin and hemoglobin at 8-12 weeks after starting iron, with repletion of stores taking 3-6 months beyond hemoglobin normalizing; 25-OH vitamin D at ~3 months; B12 at ~3 months on oral therapy. A supplement without a review date becomes permanent by default, and permanence is how stacks reach the UL. Each date is a row in ## Due (memory-template.md).
8. Fiber ramps, water rises with it. Target is 14 g per 1000 kcal (US DRI basis) — roughly 25 g/day for women and 38 g/day for men, against a typical adult intake near 15 g. Move +5 g per week, not in one step, and raise fluid alongside: a fast ramp on dry intake produces the bloating and constipation that gets blamed on the fiber and ends the attempt (gut.md).
9. Diet quality is measured as ratios, not lists. Sodium:potassium beats sodium alone (target potassium above sodium in mg; typical Western diets run the opposite way), ultra-processed share of energy beats naming villain foods, and distinct plants per week beats "eat more vegetables". State the current ratio, the target, and the single swap that moves it most (diet-quality.md).

Priority Nutrients

The ones that actually run short in practice, and the ones whose upper limit is reachable by accident. US DRI adult figures; reference_standard switches to EFSA DRV or WHO where those differ, and the differences worth knowing are in micronutrients.md along with the full nutrient list.

Beta-carotene is not preformed vitamin A and does not carry its toxicity — but beta-carotene supplements raised lung cancer incidence in smokers and asbestos-exposed workers in the ATBC and CARET trials, which is the cleanest example in nutrition of a supplement behaving unlike its food.

Deficiency Signatures

Decode rule: symptoms narrow the shortlist, the test closes it. A signature with no test behind it stays a hypothesis, and the answer says so. Full chains, including the rarer ones, in deficiencies.md.

Red Flags

Anything in this table suspends every protocol above and routes to a clinician; the escalation wording is in safety.md. Record the flag and what was declined in ## Notes of ~/Clawic/data/nutrition/memory.md, so the next session does not restart the same recommendation.

Output Gates

Before sending a recommendation, a supplement plan, or a coverage report:

• Did I read ~/Clawic/data/health/profile.md, and is every food and dose I named compatible with the allergies, conditions, and medications in it?
• Does every nutrient claim carry intake, RDA, and UL, with the stack summed against headroom (Rule 3)?
• Is the food swap named with its serving size and the dose that serving actually delivers, before any supplement?
• Does every started or changed supplement have a form, a timing, a stop-or-review date, and a ## Due row?
• Am I treating a lab, not a symptom — and if there is no lab, did I say so out loud (Rule 4)?
• Did I check the timing collisions for every medication in the profile (interactions.md)?
• Is this reply free of moralizing language about foods, and free of a coverage score if a Red Flags signal is present?
• Did anything durable come out of this — a nutrient status, a lab value, an allergy, a supplement change, a food profile, a reaction, a protocol worth re-reading? Then it is written to its box in memory-template.md, with its ## Boxes line, in this same turn.

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/nutrition/config.yaml.

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:

• Restrictions and exclusions — the choice to avoid a food group lives here; a diagnosed allergy, intolerance, or condition is a health fact and belongs in ~/Clawic/data/health/profile.md, never in config
• Conventions — how a serving is described (grams, cups, hand measures), whether nutrients print as absolute amounts or %DV, naming of the user's recurring meals — affects every reply and the food library
• Platform — country and fortification landscape (folic-acid-fortified flour, iodized salt penetration, vitamin D fortification), local food availability, seasonal produce — affects which food swaps are realistic and which gaps are common
• Safety posture — how assertive to be about doses near the UL, whether to raise a clinician referral early or only at a Red Flag, whether to comment on supplements the user did not ask about
• Output register — number-first or food-first, whether to show the calculation, how much of a lab explanation to include — affects every answer's shape
• Cadence — lab retest rhythm, supplement stack review, seasonal vitamin D check, pantry and label audit — every accepted cadence becomes a row in the ## Due table of memory.md

Traps

Where Experts Disagree

• The vitamin D sufficiency threshold. The IOM position is that 20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L) covers ~97.5% of the population's bone needs; the Endocrine Society treats 20-30 ng/mL as insufficiency for at-risk groups. The gap is real and it changes who gets supplemented. Default: treat below 20 ng/mL, discuss 20-30 with the at-risk context, and stop arguing above 30 (labs.md).
• Whether a multivitamin does anything for a well-fed adult. Trial evidence for hard outcomes is weak to null; the honest case for one is as cheap insurance against an unmeasured gap in a narrow diet. Default: no multivitamin when the diet is broad, a targeted single nutrient when a gap is identified, a multivitamin when the pattern is genuinely restricted and testing is not happening.
• Whether ultra-processed is a useful category or a proxy for sugar, salt, and fat. The mechanistic critique is fair, and the one controlled feeding trial that isolated it (Hall 2019, n=20, 2-week crossover) still found ~500 kcal/day higher intake on the ultra-processed arm at matched macronutrients. Default: use UPF share as a practical steering signal, not as a moral category.
• Fish oil supplements for cardiovascular prevention. Trials split by dose, formulation, and population, and the field is unsettled. Default: two portions of oily fish a week, supplements reserved for non-fish-eaters and for clinician-directed indications.
• RDAs as individual targets. An RDA is set to cover ~97.5% of a population, so it overshoots most individuals and undershoots a few; the EAR is the population-comparison figure. Use the RDA as a personal target and the trend in labs and symptoms as the correction — never as proof that an intake below it is a deficiency.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/nutrition (install if the user confirms):

• calories — calorie, macro, and weight-trend tracking, the energy half of the same diet
• meal-planner — turning the gaps found here into weekly menus and shopping lists
• water — fluid intake and electrolyte replacement
• fitness — training programs, and the nutrient demands they raise
• fasting — eating windows, and their effect on when nutrients can be taken

Feedback

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Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/nutrition.