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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

#141

Post by papa_bear »

This is neat. I've spent a lot of time thinking about implementing something similar for my company Eat This Much, but end up pushing it off in favor of focusing on our core meal planning features.

When something doesn't have a reference listed, and just says "sourced from a publicly available first-party datasource", what does that mean? Crawled from other sources and you'd prefer not to say? The wording does feel a little sketchy when contrasted with entries that do list sources.

When something does list references that don't seem super close to the actual food, what is the process like there for interpreting those values? Example, this Chicken Salad inheriting from Chicken Spread: https://www.opennutrition.app/search/chicken-salad-37mAX17YX...

The quality of the data might feel rough now, but I can see this being valuable for our users even if it's just an opt-in "show estimated micronutrients" or something. Would require labeling values as not being directly from a source of truth.

One thing that a lot of people are missing is that there is already a lot of inaccurate nutrition data out there. Even on information directly from the manufacturer, sometimes there are errors, or just old versions of the product that never get scrubbed from the internet (I imagine the latter case would be tricky for an LLM to deal with too). Just logging your dietary intake in any form will get you 80% of the benefit of tracking via some self awareness of your intake. Of course, it's an easy argument to point out that if you had the choice between verified data and fuzzy LLM data, you should go for the human verified data (for now).

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

#142

Post by joshdickson »

papa_bear wrote: post #141

This is neat. I've spent a lot of time thinking about implementing something similar for my company Eat This Much, but end up pushing it off in favor of focusing on our core meal planning features. When something doesn't have a reference listed, and just says "sourced from a publicly available first-party datasource", what does that mean? Crawled from other sources and you'd prefer not to say? The wording does feel a…

Thank you for your questions and feedback.

> When something doesn't have a reference listed, and just says "sourced from a publicly available first-party datasource", what does that mean?

It depends, and the degree to which it depends is why the citation is ambiguous (although it is true, if imprecise). My goal is to individually cite the individual nutrients but it was simply too costly and time-consuming at the stage of the project at which I did this work.

> what is the process like there for interpreting those values?

Because the degree to which something in the database might be related to those values is so varied, it depends. The reasoning agent had access to those database entires, which is helpful because they tend to contain micronutrient data. It also had access to web data, as well as its own world knowledge, and considers sources in that order. Ultimately it was left up to the agent to decide what the most reasonable fit for each food was, thinking through what an average user likely meant by that entry (e.g. a typical user probably assumes a 'Tomato' is raw), and then to choose the best sources from there. For the chicken salad, it used approximate micronutrient values from the listed references to inform its answer, but adapted the end values for how the dish is described in the description.

> if you had the choice between verified data and fuzzy LLM data, you should go for the human verified data (for now)

Human verification isn't free, and that means it is not available to a lot of people who can't or don't want to pay for something. But if that's something that someone values, I would certainly not diss the human effort!

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

#143

Post by joshdickson »

criddell wrote: post #32
dudeabidez wrote: post #13

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?

Almost every protein that I consume is weighed raw for ease in logging. One reason is if you are cooking a dish with e.g. bacon as an ingredient, you may not be able or want to separate it out at the end. Likewise, if I sauté chicken breasts in a pan and then finish the dish with other ingredients, I probably want to just eat the food and not deal with weighing them after water loss. Providing both just provides greater ease in logging your meals and is exact-enough for most people :)

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

#144

Post by joshdickson »

ehaveman wrote: post #56

when i track nutrition i always get stuck on things like "are the values for a chicken thigh with the bone in or out? do i weigh the meat pre-cooked or after i cook it? do i weigh the bones after i'm done eating and subtract that from the initial weight?" im probably overthinking it. love the look and i'll keep playing with it but right off the bat i ran into a couple issues: when i start typing on the search box on…

Thank you for your kind words and feedback. The search should be better now, and is much better in-app with additional local caching.

I can assure you that you are not overthinking it in terms of figuring that information out. The search experience tries to make it as clear and helpful as possible. If you encounter any situations where it could be more clear, I would love to see them. My contact info is in my bio, or there is a feedback prompt on the site/in-app. Thanks again for checking the project out and your feedback.

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

#145

Post by joshdickson »

johnisgood wrote: post #67
joshdickson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal, without question, is 100% full coverage on citations for every piece of data that's in the database, even if the citation is an LLM's general reasoning (which for o1-pro is both quite good and often includes study citations). Right now you'll see that aggregated on some items like this where the reported data is an ensemble of all of the linked resources: https://www.opennutrition.app/search/eggs-eeG7JQCQip…

I am not complaining by the way, it was more of a feature request, for example when you hover over an ingredient (e.g. "Choline", "Tryptophan", etc.), it may display a somewhat concise description of that ingredient (e.g. "Tryptophan is ..."). It is fine as it is either way, all things considered.

Ah that's a good idea, should add that. Also I appreciate your phrasing of "you guys" when, as a solo developer, if someone thinks your efforts are the product of a larger team, it's always appreciated :)

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

#146

Post by papa_bear »

joshdickson wrote: post #142
papa_bear wrote: post #141

This is neat. I've spent a lot of time thinking about implementing something similar for my company Eat This Much, but end up pushing it off in favor of focusing on our core meal planning features. When something doesn't have a reference listed, and just says "sourced from a publicly available first-party datasource", what does that mean? Crawled from other sources and you'd prefer not to say? The wording does feel a…

Thank you for your questions and feedback. > When something doesn't have a reference listed, and just says "sourced from a publicly available first-party datasource", what does that mean? It depends, and the degree to which it depends is why the citation is ambiguous (although it is true, if imprecise). My goal is to individually cite the individual nutrients but it was simply too costly and time-consuming at the sta…

Very cool, thanks for elaborating on the process. Good luck, I'll be keeping an eye on your progress!

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

#147

Post by blooalien »

csdvrx wrote: post #122
joshdickson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I envisioned many lines of inquiry from HN but the idea that a compressed TSV of nutritional data is not a "dataset" (definition: a collection of related sets of information that is composed of separate elements but can be manipulated as a unit by a computer) was unexpected.

There are many HN users who are opposed to LLM. Some of them are fundamentalists, and no amount of reason will reach them (read the comments on the Ghibli-style images to get a sample), others are opposed for very self-interested reasons: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it" Yesterday, I vibe coded a DNS server in python from scratch in half a day…

> Like vibe coding, it works very well if you know what you are doing (emphasis mine)

This is true of so very many things involving computers (and tools in general, really) and LLMs are no exception. Just like any tool, "knowing what you are doing" is the really important part, but so many folks are convinced that these "AI" things can do the thinking part for them, and it's just not the case (yet). You gotta know what you're doing and how to properly use the tool to avoid a lotta the "foot-guns" and get the most benefit outta these things.

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

#148

Post by alexsexotic »

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…

The icons looks neat! What did you use to generate the icons so fast? I could use it in my plant app.

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

#149

Post by rendaw »

joshdickson wrote: post #139
justsid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this actually very upsetting. My wife does calorie counting and all of the apps for it are horrible, especially the market leaders. But those have one thing going for them: Databases of nutritional information, which can be used for easy meal calorie counting. Just enter the ingredients (usually you can scan a barcode) and how much you ate of the total and it tells you where you are standing on caloric and nut…

[flagged]

By 100+ comment discussion I assume you mean this HN post in its whole? People here aren't checking the facts, so the fact that only one person found an issue doesn't mean much.
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