One food, three scores: inside the Crosscheck Kitchen

The nutrition page is live, and so is the tool behind it. It used to be called the Histamine Kitchen. That name described about a third of what it now does, so it is the Crosscheck Kitchen — because crosschecking the scales against each other is the entire point. It is free, it runs in your browser, and nothing you type into it is sent anywhere.

The problem: three diets, three lists, one plate

If you have read about histamine intolerance, lectins and ketogenic eating, you have met three separate food lists written by three separate camps, each confident and each silent about the other two. Put them side by side and they contradict each other constantly. The usual fix is to blend them into a single “eat this / avoid this” verdict, which quietly destroys the only information that mattered: which scale objected, and why.

So this tool keeps them apart. Every one of its 440 foods carries three separate 0–3 scores that are never combined:

Where they disagree, and how badly

143 of the 440 foods score well on one of the first two scales and badly on the other. 45 are histamine-clear but lectin-heavy; 98 are histamine-flagged but carry no lectin objection at all. The tool has a single toggle that shows you only those 143.

The sharpest cluster is the grains. SIGHI rates wheat, bread, pasta, rye, barley and spelt as low-histamine — and they sit in the top lectin tier with no preparation escape, because wheat germ agglutinin is heat-stable and cooking does not rescue it. Run the other way and you find salami, sauerkraut, citrus zest and red wine: histamine-heavy, and carrying no lectin objection at all.

What the tool actually does

Check a food. Search all 440 entries, or paste an entire ingredient list and have it scanned line by line. Preparation words move the scores in both directions: canned, smoked, cured, aged, deli, leftover, broth and pre-ground raise the histamine score, while peeled, deseeded and pressure-cooked lower the lectin score — but only for the 43 foods where that preparation genuinely works. Filters cover a separate ceiling for each scale, plus category, keto-only, fixable-by-prep, and the conflicts toggle.

Build a menu. One, three or seven days drawn from 46 recipes, with independent histamine and lectin ceilings, a keto filter and free-text exclusions. Every dish is re-scored at generation time rather than carrying a stored rating. Recipes that depend on a lectin-reducing preparation are marked LECTIN PREP REQUIRED — in those, the peeling or the pressure-cooking is doing the work and is not optional. You get a consolidated shopping list and a print stylesheet at the end.

Where the evidence is strong, and where it is not

The three scales share a 0–3 shape because that makes them usable side by side. They do not share a meaning, and they do not rest on the same quality of evidence. Saying so is part of the tool, not a footnote to it.

• Histamine rests on the SIGHI Food Compatibility List, maintained and revised for years by a patient-and-clinician interest group and widely used in dietetic practice. It prints its own uncertainty, and so does this tool: 125 of the 440 entries are flagged uncertain because SIGHI marks them ambiguous or the sources disagree. Salmon, halibut, scallops, squid, bone broth and fish oil are all live disputes.
• Lectin is the weakest of the three and is labelled that way. The popular lists are not a clinical reference, so every entry was cross-checked against measured lectin-content literature.
• Net carbs is the only one that is simply arithmetic — and even there the tool holds back. 55 entries carry a “per 100 g” marker: cinnamon, ginger, bay leaf and the like, whose carb figures are correct per 100 g and meaningless per pinch. They still show their real number, but they are excluded from the 52, because reporting bay leaf as a food that breaks ketosis would be true arithmetic and useless advice.

Tracked separately from the scores themselves, because a food can be low in histamine and still provoke a release: 118 histamine liberators, 27 DAO blockers and 93 entries carrying other biogenic amines.

What it deliberately will not do

It will not give you a single number. It will not call any food “safe” — every entry gives a score and the mechanism behind it, so you can judge it yourself. It will not resolve a disagreement between sources by silently picking a winner; it flags the entry as uncertain and shows you the conflict. And it does not know anything about you. Histamine tolerance and lectin sensitivity are both highly individual, which is exactly why the tool hands you a structured starting point and your own food-and-symptom log remains the authority that overrides it.

The nutrition page is the long version: the method, the disagreements, the provenance of all three scales and the reasoning behind every threshold.