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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

#61

Post by joshdickson »

XorNot wrote: post #57
rob wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really sure how the author thinks anybody who tracks their calories/macros seriously is going to trust a website that literally just makes up values for the vitamins, minerals, etc: > 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…

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 track my food intake.

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

#66

Post by joshdickson »

johnisgood wrote: post #58
joshdickson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is missing a milligram label, thank you for pointing that out. Fix uploading now.

That is what I thought. BTW when you hover over the ingredients, you just get back the name. Are you guys going to do something with it in the future? Right now there is a visual feedback (the cursor changes), but it is not useful yet. I am not entirely sure what I would have expected, perhaps a description of what it is, and upon clicking on it, it could have information gathered from various sources, like examine.c…

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-eeG7JQCQipwf

Frankly, I just couldn't justify the additional time and monetary expense in doing that if I released this initial version and nobody cared or found it useful. This dataset was also compiled before tools like Claude Citations came out which could make it easier. That is the nature of AI-driven data; I think this is useful now, it is also the worst it will ever be.

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

#67

Post by johnisgood »

joshdickson wrote: post #66
johnisgood wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what I thought. BTW when you hover over the ingredients, you just get back the name. Are you guys going to do something with it in the future? Right now there is a visual feedback (the cursor changes), but it is not useful yet. I am not entirely sure what I would have expected, perhaps a description of what it is, and upon clicking on it, it could have information gathered from various sources, like examine.c…

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.

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

#68

Post by tjpnz »

I've been tracking my daily calorie intake on a spreadsheet for the past three months and have had some success losing weight through it. If you do it right it will shine a light on the seemingly inconsequential food items which are setting you back. For me it was the Japanese milk teas which I was able to quickly eliminate.

The big thing I've realized through this exercise is just how much of a creature of habit I am. Inputting what I've eaten over the previous day is mostly copying and pasting rows from previous days sheets, and I suspect I could simplify input even further. Most people would be in a similar position and should be able to build their own lists by reading the nutritional information already available. When that's not available It doesn't necessarily I found r/caloriecount to be a useful resource. It need not be perfect either, just as long as you're doing it consistently.

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

#69

Post by yamihere »

joshdickson wrote: post #49
yamihere wrote: post #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 v…

> Those rigorous validation steps were also created with LLMs, correct? Not really. I do explain in the methodology post how good o1-pro is at the task, but there was a lot of manual effort involved in coming to that conclusion with my own effort to review the LLM's reasoning, and even still, o1-pro is not perfect.

Nice! Thanks for responding.

>> Outputs undergo rigorous validation steps, including cross-checking with advanced auditing models such as OpenAI’s o1-pro, which has proven especially proficient at performing high-quality random audits.

>> there was a lot of manual effort involved in coming to that conclusion with my own effort to review the LLM's reasoning

So, the randomly audited entries seemed reasonable to you – not even the data itself, just the reasoning about the generated data. Did the manual reviews stop once things started looking good enough? Are the audits ongoing, to fill out the rest of the dataset? Would those be manually double-checked as well?

>> I became interested in exploring how recent advances in generative AI could enable entirely new kinds of consumer products—ones whose core innovations leveraged AI but didn’t explicitly market themselves as “AI products.”

Once again: Why not market this as an AI product? This is LLMs all the way down.

People are already interested in using this dataset. I was. Now, LLM generated “usually close enough to not be actively harmful” data is being distributed as a source for any and all to use. I think your disclaimer is excellent. Does your license require an equivalent disclaimer be provided by those using this data?

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