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Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

opennutrition.app

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Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#111

Post by sodality2 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #73
adamas wrote: post #35

What's the main difference between this and OpenFoodFacts really ?

The problem with OpenFoodFacts is that it just has nutrition label info for packaged goods. So, very little nutrient info beyond calories and protein. No info about micronutrients. No info about minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids. It's useless for nutrition tracking since if you're eating packaged food, then you already have that information yourself. It doesn't answer basic questions like "I ate 100g of ex…

> So, very little nutrient info beyond calories and protein. No info about micronutrients. No info about minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids.

Many items do have these things.

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/5060495116377/huel-b...

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#112

Post by joshdickson »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #8

Pretty slick website. I also love how you using AI to generate all the food icons. It's so, so much nicer than just visually comparing text. When I first found Cronometer and started using it daily, I did what every developer does and looked at what kind of data exists out there if I wanted to build my own app. The free data from the FDA was pretty bad/limited with massive holes and it would have taken a lot of effor…

Thank you for the feedback.

Have you asked one of the LLMs used to tell you about the choline content of a food, even ungrounded? They are surprisingly good at reasoning about what kinds of foods tend to contain large amounts of choline because their training datasets will include all kinds of similar data points, even if the single food you're looking for doesn't have it listed explicitly.

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#113

Post by teolemon »

NewJazz wrote: post #103
hombre_fatal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with OpenFoodFacts is that it just has nutrition label info for packaged goods. So, very little nutrient info beyond calories and protein. No info about micronutrients. No info about minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids. It's useless for nutrition tracking since if you're eating packaged food, then you already have that information yourself. It doesn't answer basic questions like "I ate 100g of ex…

You can add micro nutrients to those foods, they just don't always have them. Or so I thought.

Hi, Pierre, Open Food Facts NGO co-founder. We have an issue to propose approximation of micro-nutrients from reputable database. Feel free to join the project and contribute your time/coding skills to help us solve this: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/issues...

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#114

Post by joshdickson »

sodality2 wrote: post #108

I have to say, irrespective of any concerns about the LLM-generated content, the actual app alone (goal-setting, macro tracking, etc) is the best free iOS-based nutrition-tracking app I've ever used, at first use. It's actually shockingly hard to find good, free (or even one time payment!) ones that don't constantly nag you to upgrade and paywall. I would pay a lot (once) for a nutrition/weight tracking app as slick…

Thank you very much for your feedback. Building a great product that did not have variable usage costs that allowed for a generous free tier was my primary motivation for undertaking this project. While there is a need to monetize, I also believe there is a niche for an app with a more expansive free tier than exists in the space currently.

Only using the OFF database would be untenable to me as an end user. I think most people do not want to know or care about where the data is coming from, they just want it to be accurate and easy to use. I've listed the usability reasons here for why I can't offer that how I want with only OFF (and that's no dig to OFF, it is a fantastic project, and a primary motivator for this project and its license structure).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43570775

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#115

Post by teolemon »

joshdickson wrote: post #61
XorNot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ exists, and has an app with everything you'd need. And is just crowd sourcing nutrition labels and barcodes.

OpenFoodFacts is a huge inspiration to this project, obviously. However, as someone with a normal diet, OFF lacks: 1. Generic, non-branded foods 2. Simple prepared foods that ease food entry 3. Restaurant foods 4. Micronutrients beyond those reported by the brand. OFF is a fantastic project but OpenNutrition is really trying to fit a different niche. OFF does what it does very well; I would never be able to use it to…

Hi Josh: Pierre, Open Food Facts NGO co-founder. 1. Generic, non-branded foods & 2. Simple prepared foods that ease food entry: Those two could be solved in a deterministic way, and we'd be happy for a separate Open Food Facts hosted API endpoint (basically a small backend serving a combination of all national generic databases), or improvement to the core software 3. Restaurant foods - Open Prices (our effort to collect geo-located prices on products) could be an entry point to collect menus, and potentially estimate nutrition for food in restaurants, since we have support for products without barcode. 4. Micronutrients beyond those reported by the brand. - We have an issue to propose approximation of micro-nutrients from reputable database: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/issues...

We're happy to cover more use-cases, so feel free to join the project and contribute your time/coding skills to help us solve those issues. https://slack.openfoodfacts.org or https://forum.openfoodfacts.org or directly https://github.com/openfoodfacts

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#117

Post by hombre_fatal »

sodality2 wrote: post #111
hombre_fatal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with OpenFoodFacts is that it just has nutrition label info for packaged goods. So, very little nutrient info beyond calories and protein. No info about micronutrients. No info about minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids. It's useless for nutrition tracking since if you're eating packaged food, then you already have that information yourself. It doesn't answer basic questions like "I ate 100g of ex…

> So, very little nutrient info beyond calories and protein. No info about micronutrients. No info about minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids. Many items do have these things. https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/5060495116377/huel-b...

That is one exception, and it's only because Huel reports that info since it's a fortified meal replacement product. The same way a multivitamin would have that info on its label.

But consider that OpenFoodFacts can't give you that info on just about anything else, especially not basic foods like "apples" or "tofu" or "chicken breast".

I'm not dumping on the project. It's really useful to have a database of packaged food labels. It's just not trying to solve this problem.

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#118

Post by andy_ppp »

I think this is great and I was thinking about doing the same thing, you could use a few different LLMs to do a kind of adversarial check of calories for a thing and use a load of other techniques to improve the dataset over time. It's hardly as if the dataset in something like MyFitnessPal is completely perfect. You could probably figure out boundaries too so if we know 100g of a food does the protein/fat/carbs/sugar/fibre/water etc. content wildly exceed the boundaries/totals you could get it to review it's findings, ignore that LLM, fill in from a different food db etc. etc.

Incidentally o3-mini-high got the fried breakfast I added to a tracking app this morning within 50 calories!

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#119

Post by nqzero »

Zealotux wrote: post #3

Congrats on the launch! Looks slick and reactive. Now I wish there was an app to analyse my meals from pictures and estimate the calories/macros, I guess it exists somewhere but I doubt the accuracy, honestly the only thing I really want from so-called AIs.

any idea how the webapp is written ? eg, what libraries or framework is used

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#120

Post by sodality2 »

joshdickson wrote: post #114
sodality2 wrote: post #108

I have to say, irrespective of any concerns about the LLM-generated content, the actual app alone (goal-setting, macro tracking, etc) is the best free iOS-based nutrition-tracking app I've ever used, at first use. It's actually shockingly hard to find good, free (or even one time payment!) ones that don't constantly nag you to upgrade and paywall. I would pay a lot (once) for a nutrition/weight tracking app as slick…

Thank you very much for your feedback. Building a great product that did not have variable usage costs that allowed for a generous free tier was my primary motivation for undertaking this project. While there is a need to monetize, I also believe there is a niche for an app with a more expansive free tier than exists in the space currently. Only using the OFF database would be untenable to me as an end user. I think…

Some kind of fall-back mechanism would be nice, then, maybe? As someone who does indeed want it to be accurate, I would prefer to use OFF for any food which exists within their database, since it tends to be much more accurate (and maybe fall back to "AI search" if I want to look up "apple" or whatever).

I understand that most people probably consume more whole foods that might not have the cut-and-dry numbers on OFF. It just does feel like a big lacking feature to just categorically exclude OFF, if I wanted to use it.

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