Nutrition tracking

[nandi95]

This is a very broad idea/query to see if this is at all planned. It would be nice if nutrients could be tracked, macros such as protein/fat/carbohydrates.

Additional context I try to you myfitnesspal and while it is nice, it is not great for planning ahead in my opinion

[julianpoy]

Hey there - thanks for the suggestion.

Automated nutrition planning isn't on the roadmap at the moment, simply because there isn't a great place/way to fetch nutrition information for a given ingredient. There are several databases out there (such as the one from the USDA) that contain nutrition information for branded foods, but don't really hit the mark in terms of matching nutritional information for individual ingredients (IE 4 russet potatoes).

Manual nutrition planning can be done pretty easily by using the notes field. If there's something missing in the workflow for manual nutrition planning, I'm happy to give that a closer look.

Overall, I have really wanted to explore some better solutions here. I just don't feel like the data is really available quite yet for automatic nutritional calculation, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

[targetdrone]

What do you think of simply storing the nutrition data for a recipe in a NutritionInformation object? Many recipes already include nutrition information (such as those I've already entered into PaprikaApp. :) ) While I certainly could enter them as part of the notes, I already have them isolated so it would be useful to import them in a schema appropriate format. That way the information could be presented in a consistent fashion, and it could be simply divided by scale and yield to give portion-sized information.

I realize that schema.org's recipe ingredients are only text strings, and their schema doesn't provide native object types for "ingredients" or "ShoppingListItems" that really should have their own nutrition data. And yes, those limitations would make true automated recipe calculation impractical today.

But those are features that can be added later. Nutrition lookup can be added if such data becomes easily available from a public source. And automated calculation can be added once the schema supports the data,

[werdnanoslen]

There are several databases out there (such as the one from the USDA) that contain nutrition information for branded foods, but don't really hit the mark in terms of matching nutritional information for individual ingredients (IE 4 russet potatoes).

I dunno, I think the USDA api works pretty well for that with their new Foundation dataset. I hacked together a little proof of concept here (source). I set it to just use grams, but I could have also fetched their measures (e.g. 1 "each" navel orange, which is a little more standard and thus countable/"each"-able than potatoes). A challenge then is what to do about ingredients that vary significantly in size/weight and don't have that "each" measure, like russet potatoes. In that case, you might just go with the default USDA-provided portion size (often 100g) to ballpark it with a warning/disclaimer on the UI.

[julianpoy]

The main issue I ran up against trying to leverage the USDA food database is - what do you do for the non-US userbase? A large portion of the userbase for RecipeSage is not in the US.