Thursday, July 09, 2009

Idea for a nutrition website

The website has a database of foods and which nutrients they contain (not just on the vitamin and mineral level, but also proteins, enzymes, glyconutrients, etc. etc.), and knows in what proportions the body needs all these nutrients

Then the user can put in things they definitely want to eat, and how much of them, and
the website can fill in for them what the rest of their diet needs to consist of to get the full gamut of nutrients. Then from those suggested foods they can also exclude certain things and/or choose between options and maybe specify how much of what they want to eat, which it then reacts to with further suggestions, and so on.

A wide variety of foods is really needed for good health, and hopefully the website's flow of suggestions would reflect that fact.

The person should probably be able to, or maybe have to, put in certain parameters regarding their body, such as weight, height, gender, age, fat index, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.

Perhaps they can also put in specific areas they want to improve, such as "hair, skin and nails"

Allegedly nutrition isn't as simple as just ingesting this or that nutrient, in that certain nutrients and together and one might not be effective without the other. The site should also be aware of these interdependencies.

The user should be able to specify whether they want only natural foods, only vegetarian, only vegan, no red meat, only live foods, etc.

They might also should be able to include allergies to specific substances, lactose intolerance, etc., although maybe the same effect would be just as easily or easilier achieved through the exclusion of specific suggested foods.

It would be nice if this website didn't just have a database of staple foods, but also a vast database of specific products. And that should also come with the ability to exclude certain substances like polyunsaturated fats, aspartame, partially hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, sucralose, etc. — although the website could also exclude all such things, or least the really bad ones like what I just mentioned, by nature.

Though the specific products idea carries the problem of certain products only being available in certain areas and certain grocery store chains.

Another consideration is that, while certain substances (like sodium) are listed in terms of specific quantities, most of the ingredients, even though they're listed in order of quantity, don't specify their actual amounts. So to really effectively be able do the products idea, the website's owners would have to "rock the boat", in a sense, and get manufacturers to release specific ingredient amounts, by making the deal with them that, in exchange for releasing that data, their products can be suggested within, and thus promoted by, the world's most useful dietary website.

1 comment:

inhahe said... <- a site my friend found that does something similar to this, although at first glance its model seems to be a bit more simplistic. i can't really tell, though, because it won't work anyway; it keeps crashing.