[HN Gopher] Show HN: Intuitive nutrition information
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Show HN: Intuitive nutrition information
Hey everyone, I've been building this nutrition tracker and calorie
counter recently, after being frustrated by existing products for
ages. I built a similar app 8 years ago [1], but came back to this
problem again since there are still no good solutions here. Lmk
your thoughts and improvement ideas :) [1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077618
Author : gusgordon
Score : 21 points
Date : 2023-12-29 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spe.lt)
(TXT) w3m dump (spe.lt)
| CrypticShift wrote:
| While you certainly succeeded in simplifying the UX, I'm not for
| simplifying the data on food. Is there any database of
| "concentrations of vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients" you
| could integrate?
|
| I know this would defeat the purpose of a "simple" tracker, but I
| believe that we need to support the message that food is
| "complex" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.bionutrient.org/bionutrientmeter
| gusgordon wrote:
| Totally - right now it's using the USDA food nutrient database
| [1] which has all nutrients, so all the nutrients on the back-
| end are there. Calories is the most important thing to the
| majority of people (in my experience), so there's a balance
| between showing too much information vs. keeping things simple.
| Probably should just add a setting to show everything, though.
|
| [1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/download-datasets.html
| ivan_ah wrote:
| That's cool, but it seems to be limited to macros and working
| under the assumption that a calorie is a calorie.
|
| It would be much more interesting to me to have an easy way to
| access the information about "how processed" a food is, for
| example using the NOVA classification[1,2,3] system or something
| like that. I'm not sure if you can access that as a DB download
| or an API of some sort, but worth looking into.
|
| If you can't get data on this, then I'm pretty sure you can
| approximate the nova score by based on the "added sugars" and
| fibre contents... although it would be difficult to tell apart
| "undisturbed fibre" vs. fibre added later on as additive.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification [2]
| https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf [3]
| https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova
| XorNot wrote:
| Why the hell would a person need an app to tell "how processed"
| a food is? This is the one bit of information that is
| contextually obvious.
| stabbles wrote:
| It's just a nuance to the rule of thumb, that doesn't warrant
| such a strong reaction?
|
| If a 1st order rule of thumb is keeping caloric contents in
| check, a 2nd order rule doing that for nutrients
| individually, I wonder if someone knows a good but easy third
| order rule of thumb that takes into account processing.
|
| Something like "when two foods have roughly identical
| nutrients, prefer the one that has ingredients you could buy
| or make at home" might either not help cause there are no two
| such options to choose from, or it's too obvious (fresh pizza
| at the supermarket is worse than a handmade pizza)
|
| Is there a good rule of thumb that helps you pick relatively
| healthy foods in a world where many foods are ultra-processed
| already, and can't really be avoided?
| beefman wrote:
| Nice! Howabout adding a way to link to a meal?
| hackyhacky wrote:
| I entered "Cheerios" and was told one box of Cheerios cereal is
| 61 calories; and that one box of _blueberry_ Cheerios is 611
| calories. So I think that we need better quantification of units
| than just "box," since presumably these measurements are dealing
| with boxes of different sizes.
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