Nutrition Explorer

Nutrition Explorer allows you to create a meal planner consisting of food items you select from a pick list of over 8750 food items. You can also find foods by keyword search and using logical content filters (based on nutritional potency values). Optionally, you can add some basic user profile information providing gender (pregnancy state for females), and age to get specific dietary requirement for each member of your family. A Help button has been added to provide a simple Tab by Tab walk through of the application functionality.

When age and gender parameter values are added to your profile it provides more precise calculations of the recommended daily allowances (RDA) and Upper Limits (UL) for the 38 vitamins, minerals, and macro-nutrients available in the application data. For example, the dietary needs of male children under age 5 are very different from adults. And specifically, there are differences in the dietary requirements for females who are pregnant (i.e. check the Iron pie chart).

It also provides Body Mass Index (BMI-for-age), and Macro-Nutrient analysis (Calories from Protein, Carbohydrates, Sugars, and Fats, etc.), and both RDA and Nutritional Facts stacked bar charts and data table results for all foods in your diet. Each item in the food list can be shown in detail from the standard Nutrition Facts information (including their percent Daily Values %DV for each vitamin and mineral). It also provides some basic pie charts of each vitamin and mineral with their breakdown of all the foods in your diet. The serving size of each food item in the diet can be set to provide more accurate calculations.

At this point in the development of the application all food items in the diet come from foods identified by the USDA National Nutrient Database (~8750 items).

USDA National Nutrient Database references:

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. 2016. USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release . Nutrient Data Laboratory Home Page, http://www.ars.usda.gov/nutrientdata

FDC SR Database Resources

https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-bhnrc/beltsville-human-nutrition-research-center/methods-and-application-of-food-composition-laboratory/mafcl-site-pages/database-resources/

Remedies and Supplement Data references by WebMD

(with in-app links to their query results) The data in the app is loosely sourced from WebMD.

https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/index

Standard Disclaimer:

Nutrition Explorer is a basic guide for nutritional requirements. Always use your doctor and/or check with you health care providers regarding dietary changes that may impact any existing medical conditions or your current state of health.

Privacy:

None of your personal profile data or diets are transmitted or shared. Only a few items of the profile are optionally required (age/gender/pregnancy status) to get accurate RDA estimations. If no profile data is provided the RDA is calculated on a generic 2000 calorie daily requirement.