Jain and vegan tracking: a veg filter isn't enough
Almost every calorie app treats "vegetarian" as one switch. In India it is at least three, and the differences are not small — paneer is vegetarian and not vegan, potato is vegetarian and not Jain.
What each one excludes
Vegetarian
No meat, fish or eggs. Dairy is fine. This is the filter most apps have.
Vegan
Vegetarian, and also no dairy, honey or anything animal-derived. In an Indian catalogue that removes a very large share of the vegetarian dishes: paneer, dahi, ghee, malai, khoya, kheer, most sweets, and a great many curries finished with cream.
Jain
Vegetarian, and also no onion, no garlic, and no underground root vegetables — potato, carrot, radish, beetroot, sweet potato, yam, ginger and turmeric in root form. Dairy is generally accepted.
This is the one that trips up software, because onion and garlic are in the base of a very large number of Indian dishes without appearing in the name. A dish called "mixed vegetable curry" is usually not Jain.
Why the two filters are not nested
Vegan and Jain are not stricter and stricter versions of the same thing — they exclude different axes. A paneer butter masala is Jain-unfriendly (onion, garlic) and not vegan (dairy). An aloo sabzi without onion is vegan but not Jain. A plain dal with ghee is Jain but not vegan.
So an app needs two independent flags, not one slider. Fitlectic computes both per dish, from the name, the ingredient list and the aliases, and stores them separately.
The default that matters
When the ingredients are not clear enough to be sure, the honest answer is to leave the dish out, not to include it. Someone keeping a Jain diet would much rather miss a suggestion than be shown something with onion in it. Fitlectic treats an unknown as excluded for both vegan and Jain filtering, deliberately.
Tracking without checking each dish yourself
Set your pattern once — veg, egg, non-veg, vegan or Jain — and food suggestions respect it. 1,300+ Indian dishes, counted by the piece rather than by 100 g, and it all works offline.
Open Fitlectic