daniel bigham.ca

Grocery shopping
July 21, 2009

Today was the first day I had been in a grocery store since spending some time working on some nutrition software.

To give some background, I have written a subroutine so that you can ask "recommend a food", and the software will consider what foods will maximize your nutrition graph for today -- that is, to minimize the amount of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients still required for the current day, given what you've already eaten.

I have noticed that this subroutine often recommends foods such as:

GoLean cereal

Raisin Bran cereal

milk

orange juice

cranberry juice

bananas

pears

yogourt

chicken breast

...

And so, as I walked along I had it in my head to pick up some GoLean, Raisin Bran, OJ, bananas, pears, etc.

In addition to picking these items up, I was more interested in comparing the nutrition labels on various kinds of bread, as well as orange juice. I chose the bread that minimized sodium while maximizing omega-3... and I picked the orange juice with 30% DV of calcium; I got the PC variety rather than the Tropicana variety since it was $2.99 VS $4.50.

I real breakthrough was finding Miss Vickies unsalted chips. They're just potatoes and sunflower oil, and they taste great! I can't believe it: A potato chip with 0 sodium!

I have also started entering costs into the system so that, while maximizing nutrition, it will also minimize cost. Fun stuff.

Nutrition graph
July 8, 2009

Here's my nutrition graph for July 8 2009:

This is the output of my Grace project.

Nutrition
June 30, 2009

I've been working on some enhancements to my Grace project that allows for queries such as "how many calories are in 1 Tbsp peanut butter?", or "how many calories are in {recipe}"? (And likewise for other nutrients such as fat, saturated fat, trans fat, carbs, fibre, sugar, protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, etc.) It also allows you to say "I had 3/4 cup raisin bran", etc., and then later on to ask "what have I eaten today?", or "how many calories have I eaten today?". (And likewise for the other nutrients)

As I've been collecting nutritional information for various foods, I'm reminded of how thankful I am for laws that have been passed to promote consistent labeling. (Thank you government!)

One complication is that I'd like the actual number of g/mg/ug for the various vitamins and minerals, but the nutrition labels give a "% Daily Value". I did a Google search for the Government of Canada web page, but I was unsure whether these percentage values were based on the recent RDA/AI (recommended dietary allowance /adequate intake) numbers.

I ended up sending an email to the link on the "Contact Us" page and within 7 minutes I got an email reply back with a bunch of helpful information and a link that answered my precise question. Wow! I'm impressed.

older >>