Glykos
Know the number before you eat it.
And know what to eat instead.
Coming soon
The number that matters
A rice cake has a glycemic index of 82 — high. But one cake carries only about 7 g of net carbs, so its glycemic load is roughly 6 — low. That gap is why load, not index, is the number worth tracking, and why doing it by hand is tedious enough that nobody keeps it up.
Features
What to Eat Instead
Every food you open shows the alternatives that carry less glycemic load at a comparable serving, ranked by how much load the swap saves. Foods you already keep are marked — a swap is only taken if it is available.
Comparable Servings, Not Smaller Ones
A candidate has to carry between half and twice the original’s net carbohydrate to qualify, save at least 15% of the load and 2.0 outright, and have a measured index rather than a category estimate. It reports the gap between two numbers — it does not tell anyone what to eat.
Two Taps to Log
The add sheet opens with your most-used and most-recent foods already listed, before you type anything. Edit servings or delete an entry in one tap; swipe to remove.
The Shape of the Day
Load by part of the day — morning, midday, afternoon, evening, late — so three moderate meals read differently from the same number carried in one. Each entry takes its part of the day from the clock, so writing the day up at bedtime does not stack it all into the evening.
Daily Goal Gauge
A gauge shows total glycemic load against your own daily goal, graded green, orange, or red. It is a progress bar, not a dial: the goal line stays visible when the day runs past it, so 10 over and 100 over do not look the same.
Any Day, Not Just Today
A week strip and a date picker let you back-fill days you missed. Day totals cover net carbs, total carbs, fiber, saturated fat, and calories, with a callout for the biggest contributor.
One Searchable Library
Single foods and multi-ingredient meals live in the same list — no guessing where you saved something. The app starts empty and fills up with what you actually eat. Filter by food or meal and by category; sort by name, index, load, or recency.
USDA Database Built In
Around 7,400 foods with their nutrition already filled in, searchable offline. Find the food, pick the serving, done — no typing numbers off a packet, and no network.
One Search Box
It covers your own foods and the built-in USDA database at once, so you never have to guess which list a food is in. Search never dead-ends: a “Create” row sits above every result, with the glycemic index already resolved from whatever you typed.
Scan the Label
Point the camera at a Nutrition Facts panel and it fills in serving size, calories, total carbs, fiber, and saturated fat. The raw recognized text always stays visible so you can copy anything it got wrong. All on-device.
Index Filled In For You
Glycemic index comes from a built-in table of 166 foods with aliases, plus a category estimate when nothing matches. Every value is overridable, and the app always tells you where the number came from. Net carbs and load update live while you type.
Meals That Roll Up
Build a meal from foods and say how many servings it makes. Per-serving totals update live, with the glycemic index weighted by net carbs — the way the arithmetic actually works.
Weekly & Monthly Reports
Total and daily-average load, a bar chart with your goal line, per-week summaries, best and highest day, and the share of days within goal. Days you did not log are drawn as gaps, not zeros.
Browse the Reference Table
The whole glycemic index table is searchable from Settings, category estimates included. Help explains index, load, and net carbs in plain language, and why they differ.
Backup & Restore
A complete JSON backup of every food, meal, and journal entry — export it, restore it, move it between devices. Your records are yours to take anywhere.
Your Settings, Your Sync
Light, dark, or automatic theme. Metric or US serving units. A daily goal with the standard ranges explained. Optional iCloud sync runs through your own private account — off by default.
Why Glykos?
It answers the question a tracker leaves you with
Every food log tells you what you ate. Glykos tells you what you could have eaten instead, and what the difference comes to. That is arithmetic no calorie counter can do, because calories are additive and a glycemic index is not.
It does the part people give up on
Looking up a glycemic index and multiplying it by net carbs is exactly the friction that kills a tracking habit by day three. Two taps, and it is done.
Load, not just index
Index charts rank foods; carb counters count grams. Only load ties the two to the portion you actually ate.
Honest about estimates
Every glycemic index shows its source — a reference match, a category estimate, or your own value — so a guess never masquerades as a measurement.
Current data, not recycled charts
The reference values come from the 2021 international tables, the peer-reviewed systematic review of studies run to the ISO standard. Watermelon, the food every GI article calls high, was revised down from 76 to 50 in that review — charts still circulating online have the old number.
Honest about gaps
Un-journaled days are drawn as gaps, not zeros. A blank day is a hole in the record, not a perfect score. The reports do not flatter you.
Genuinely private
No account, no ads, no analytics SDK, no network calls. Health-adjacent data never leaves the device, and the privacy manifest declares zero data collected.
Works offline, always
Airplane mode, a basement grocery aisle, a plane — it does not care. The glycemic index lookup, the USDA database, and label scanning all run on your device.
No account. No ads. No tracking.
Your food log stays on your device. Glycemic index lookup and label scanning are entirely on-device, and iCloud sync — if you turn it on — runs through your own private account that we can never see.
Estimates, not medical advice. Published glycemic index values are averages with real measurement error, and they shift with variety, ripeness, processing, and cooking. Glykos does not diagnose, treat, or dose anything. Talk to a qualified healthcare professional about decisions concerning your health.