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 :)<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077618">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077618</a>
Have to comment since I've been listening to Dr. Lustig lately (<a href="https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?si=6mS-3SKI7R4zOdYT" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?si=6mS-3SKI7R4zOdYT</a>).<p>The site shows that 1 can of Coca-Cola has fewer calories and less carbs than a medium apple: 90 vs 122 calories, 25 vs 30 gram of carbs. There is no other information, e.g no fiber content or added sugars section. Would this lead someone to believe, against common sense, that Coke is equivalent or even a healthier choice?<p>Edit: For those interested, here is a link to a similar system that contains more information (albeit not as polished): <a href="https://perfact.co:8443/Nova/" rel="nofollow">https://perfact.co:8443/Nova/</a>
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?<p>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].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bionutrient.org/bionutrientmeter" rel="nofollow">https://www.bionutrient.org/bionutrientmeter</a>
I entered "Cheerios" and was told one box of Cheerios cereal is 61 calories; and that one box of <i>blueberry</i> 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.
Seems cool! Congrats!<p>I agree that most products - I stumbled upon and tested - in this space are frustrating.<p>Would be nice to have a good UX to split food by meals (and have subtotals). But maybe that is too complex and you were not aiming for that!<p>Additional feedback: I think knowing if the food is weighted raw or cooked is pretty important. Sorry if I missed something but I couldn't tell if the "whole wheat pasta" were cooked or not. Uncooked was available for rice, though.
That's cool, but it seems to be limited to macros and working under the assumption that a calorie is a calorie.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf</a>
[3] <a href="https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova" rel="nofollow">https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova</a>
I’m a big fan of MacroFactor. It’s one of my few subscriptions. It’s the only tracker that works for me. The developers make understanding nutrition as simple as possible without pretending it can be oversimplified.