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Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

opennutrition.app

31–40 of 160 posts

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

#31

Very cool! Data needs some curation however. Search "Bacon" for example and you'll see raw bacon with 95kcal and 4g of protein while cooked bacon says 153kcal and 10g of protein.

Well, it's equating mass (28g) which is the right way to represent data here.

Equating calories is far less useful since you aren't choosing between eating 100cal of raw bacon vs 100cal of cooked bacon.

And the question you're trying to ask is "what nutrients/calories do my 4 strips of bacon have?"

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

#32

Very cool! Data needs some curation however. Search "Bacon" for example and you'll see raw bacon with 95kcal and 4g of protein while cooked bacon says 153kcal and 10g of protein.

What’s the point of providing nutritional data on raw bacon? Nobody eats raw bacon, do they?

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

#33

Very cool site, great implementation. Calorie burn is dependent on weight and body fat. Individuals who are x+25kg will burn way more calories than x. For users who come to this site to supplement their weight loss information might be misinformed in their journey, or worse,use it as a primary source and become discouraged because their idea of calorie loss is a little skewed due to the conservative numbers currently…

> or worse,use it as a primary source and become discouraged

I would hope these people download the free app so they can actually track their food, which has extensive tooling to track weight trends and expenditure changes over time :). But yes, you should be able to customize the assumptions, I just have about 100 more of these things to add and didn't want to wait longer to see feedback.

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

#34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: They are estimates from giving an LLM (generally o3 mini high due to cost, some o1 preview) a large corpus of grounding data to reason over and asking it to use its general world knowledge to return estimates it was confident in, which, when escalating to better LLMs like o1-pro and manual verification, proved to be good enough that I thought they warranted release. You can read about the background on how I d…

You need to add a disclaimer for this data. People could rely on them being accurate, and you simply can't prove they are.

There is a large disclaimer that states, among other things, "We strive to ensure accuracy and quality using authoritative sources and AI-based validation; however, we make no guarantees regarding completeness, accuracy, or timeliness. Always confirm nutritional data independently when accuracy is critical." on every page on the website where that kind of in-depth data is available.

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

#36
>> User-generated databases can be unreliable

>> Foods discovered via these searches are fed back into the database,

Aren’t LLMs also unreliable? How do you ensure the new content is from an authoritative, accurate source? How do you ensure the numbers that make it into the database are actually what the source provided?

According to the Methodology/About page

>> The LLM is tasked with creating complete nutritional values, explicitly explaining the rationale behind each value it generates. Outputs undergo rigorous validation steps,

Those rigorous validation steps were also created with LLMs, correct?

>> whose core innovations leveraged AI but didn’t explicitly market themselves as “AI products.”

Odd choice for an entirely AI based service. First thought I had after reading that was: must be because people don’t trust AI generated information. Seems disengenuous to minimize the AI aspect in marketing while this product only exists because of AI.

Great idea though, thanks for giving it a shot!

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

#37
post #16

Overall, very cool and seriously much needed! How does the micronutrient estimation work? Or is that part of the secret sauce? I was looking at this page: https://www.opennutrition.app/search/original-shells-cheese-... and saw the amino acid, vitamin, and mineral sections; there are many things listed which aren't covered by the official nutritional data. These entries also have very precise numbers but I'm not sure…

[deleted]

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

#38

Very cool! Data needs some curation however. Search "Bacon" for example and you'll see raw bacon with 95kcal and 4g of protein while cooked bacon says 153kcal and 10g of protein.

What’s the point of providing nutritional data on raw bacon? Nobody eats raw bacon, do they?

Because you want to be able to log the calories/nutrients of the food you're eating before it's cooked into a dish.

You don't want to have to cook your bacon and then measure its mass before you know how many calories it has when you can just log the raw form before you cook it.

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

#39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to add a disclaimer for this data. People could rely on them being accurate, and you simply can't prove they are.

There is a large disclaimer that states, among other things, "We strive to ensure accuracy and quality using authoritative sources and AI-based validation; however, we make no guarantees regarding completeness, accuracy, or timeliness. Always confirm nutritional data independently when accuracy is critical." on every page on the website where that kind of in-depth data is available.

[deleted]

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the point of providing nutritional data on raw bacon? Nobody eats raw bacon, do they?

Because you want to be able to log the calories/nutrients of the food you're eating before it's cooked into a dish. You don't want to have to cook your bacon and then measure its mass before you know how many calories it has when you can just log the raw form before you cook it.

You don't want to do that, but unless you are consuming all the rendered fat that's what you do to get an accurate value.
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