Nutrition information in fun picture form
Published by Kyso Kisaen May 21st, 2006 in Health, We EatThis is why I love the internets. Two health and fitness nuts who happen to know how to make databases and websites made this freakishly spectacular tool to help people appropriately analyize their food. I’ve been playing with it for about an hour so far and I haven’t even scratched the surface of its usefullness.
The site takes alot of the pain in the ass out of comparing similar foods. Now, I don’t have to spend four hours in the grocery store today with a pen and a piece of paper comparing my cheese and bread options. I can do the basic comparing at home and save the showing-up-in-person-with-a-notebook work for later, when I have a basic diet picked out.
You can pick a bunch of foods to compare which presents different qualities of the food in graph form and follows that with a quick summary about the pros and cons of the food. You can put in your age, sex, height, weight and level of activity to get an estimate of your daily caloric needs. You can click on a vitamin or mineral and get a page of the top foods that contain that substance. There’s even a page summarizing the purposes of different chemical food additives.
Make no mistake, paying this much attention to the food you eat is still a serious time-killer. However, this site makes the process quite a bit easier and more reasonable. I can spend a nice Sunday afternoon finding the nutritional densities of my most commonly eaten meals, adjust today’s grocery shopping accordingly, and barring computer catastrophe return to tweak the information next Sunday.
Be very careful with that energy needs estimator thingy. I just calculated mine and it told me to eat about three times what I eat in order to maintain my weight at its current level. I re-calculated it using the ’sedentary’ option with no extra exercise at all, and it still was about twice my daily calorie intake. My metabolism is messed up from many years of VERY low-calorie diets, though, so your mileage may vary.
I cruised through the rest of the site, though, and it looks pretty comprehensive. It — like most other similar applications/databases, etc. that I’ve seen — gets tricky to use if you cook your own recipes. But for prepared food, fast food, and simple recipes (i.e. one- or two-ingredient items), it seems like a pretty good resource. And way fun for the compulsive data-collectors among us (you know who you are).
Yeah, it’s not the be-all end-all look-what-replaced-your-physician of nutrition databases, but it is infinitly better than nothing. It would also be better if you could save your own recipes once you entered them, and save the whole thing in a format the site could read if you switched computers.
What I liked about them was that the separated the fitness and diet stuff from the raw data, and that they offer you better choices for weight loss, weight gain, and something called optimal health. Also their section on diets discouraged fad diets and encouraged being sensible about foods and portions, which of course is great advice.
I’ve tried a lot of them over the years, and I have access to the databases used by research nutritionists. I have yet to find one that is truly easy to use for someone who actually cooks.
When I get really compulsive about it, I set up spreadsheets to calculate everything for myself: I enter all relevant specs for all the ingredients and then weigh the total and divide into servings, etc. But it got to the point where I’d only cook things I’d made before, and then to the point where I’d only get things pre-made in boxes on account of I’m lousy at following precise recipes and cooking stopped being any fun at all. I’m all about making shit up as I go along, so the numbers for each recipe were only good for that particular batch of it. Because the next time I might use sweet potatoes instead of squash, or turkey instead of pork, or spinach instead of kale. Or whatever. You get the idea.
And let me tell you what, there are few things less charming than dining out with someone who takes a digital scale out of her purse to weigh the food before she eats it. Been there, done that.
I’m thinking about writing a book about how to double your weight using popular weight-loss/dieting advice. It worked for me! You can do it too!
Having said all that, though, I’ve been trying to develop a more flexible database with a simpler interface - partly to learn some new programming stuff, and partly to, um, feed my dieting obsession (if you’ll pardon that lame joke). Would you be interested in beta-testing it if I can ever get it to work?
If you get it to work, I would certianly give it a try and even post a link here if you want.