Show HN: Famnom – Nutrition tracker and meal planner for families

I actually think everyone should track what they eat, at least for a while. It's a really interesting experience. I started because I wanted to lose weight but was exercising a lot, so I was restricting my calories while trying to keep protein high. It didn't take long to realise that I had previously had little to no idea of what I was putting in my mouth, and tracking for a while (probably ~3 months minimum) gives you a much better intuition.

After doing this for a while I started developing stomach problems (unrelated to my change in diet), and I needed to ensure that I was meeting my minimum requirements for fibre too. All of a sudden you end up with quite a tricky multi-dimensional optimisation problem, and it was actually quite a fun intellectual exercise trying to meet all the constraints, obviously without hating what I ate.

There are all sorts of reasons that you might want to minimise or maximise some micro- or macro-nutrient. Any athlete will want some sort of control of what they eat. Perhaps you want more magnesium for better sleep, and you'd like to get it from actual food rather than supplements. Calorie restriction while keeping protein high is a common one for losing weight. Almost no-one eating a western diet gets anywhere near enough fibre, and any one of various health scares might make you aware of that. Tracking what you eat permanently is a serious commitment that is probably unnecessary for most people, but I think it's a good thing to try, at least for a while. I tend to go back to tracking periodically when I want to get some aspect of my diet under control, but I don't do it all the time.

They're not linked from your website so they're basically unfindable (for the record your reply in this post is now somewhere in the middle).

Edit: I just looked at the journeys and I found it hard to figure out what was going on. The gifs moved fast, and do people plan their meals around amounts of raw ingredients? I would have expected recipes to be the central focus, but none of the journeys touch on recipes AFAICT.

I'd love a good tool for tracking nutrition, comparing recipes, etc. so I'm enthusiastic about this.

Show HW starts with a sign-on page?

Pass.

The entire "scientific" field of nutrition has gone down a wrong path a couple decades ago, and the FDA specifically with their recommendations to eat a lot of carbs has done the public a great disservice.

Outsiders of the field have slowly started to figure out where nutrition went wrong, but since entities like the FDA have spread missinformation for decades, there is a lot of inertia to overcome, which will sadly take another couple decades apparently. Best examples i can remember ad hoc are probably Gary Taubes and Robert Lustig.

It's pretty clear by now that the obsession with eating carbs is actively harmful and likely the cause for the diabetes and obesity epidemic. The obsession with polyunsaturated plant fats is next, they oxidize rapidly, even inside our bodies, and cause great damage.

The issue for nutritionists is one of credibility, how does a scientific field collectively turn on a dime and proclaim literally the opposite of what they have claimed in the decades prior?

I've found it to be pretty unimaginative, yes! :) It often suggests organ meats to me or omelettes with dark leafy greens.

You know how there's the checkbox to exclude "My recipes" from the Oracles suggestions? I was debating making a recipe to act as one catch-all for all the foods that I don't like or can't tolerate and then tell the Oracle "exclude nuts, shellfish [I have allergies to those] and My Recipes" and see what it suggests. I find it frustrating that there's no "globally forget" option for the Oracle, so the other day I thought of the "My Recipes" as a hack to exclude foods that I don't like from the Oracle (but I haven't yet had a chance to implement this / try this out).

I fully agree that the Oracle is the most rudimentary 'suggestion robot' out there. (I can't even bring myself to call it a recommender system.) I wish that I could overweight some ingredients moreso than others: if I'm short on Mg AND selenium and only have 200 cal left in my day make sure I get the selenium, Oracle! Or over- or underweight, say, protein over total calories or something. With a little bit of rudimentary ML the Cronometer folks could make the Oracle tremendously useful, but I am unsure as to why they don't do this? Lack of expertise in recsys? Cronometer folks, if you want assistance in this space I'd be happy to help; just tell me what email address to email you at and we can chat.