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Show HN: Intuitive nutrition information
- MagnumOpus 11y agoFrustrating. I didn't even find a way to enter "1 pizza" (or "1 whole pizza" or "1 entire pizza" or "1 pizza pie", it keeps coming up with "1 serving of pizza" or "1 slice of pizza" - either of which are completely fluffy measurements that could mean anything from 1/12 to a whole pizza.
- imauld 11y ago12 slices pizza: 1649 Calories 64% carbs22% fat14% (58 g) protein 12 slices Pizzax
- michaelmachine 11y agoreally cool! Are you planning to turn this into an API or app for tracking nutrition?
- gusgordon 11y agoThanks! I do plan on expanding it, not sure how yet. Right now, you can create a list and each list will have a unique URL. If you want to save a list, you can save the URL.
- white-flame 11y agoWhat about the vitamin & mineral content? Having carbs/fat/protein/calories seems to be more focused on people avoiding getting too much of "bad" stuff, as opposed to ensuring they do get proper nutrition in terms of "good" stuff. However, the interface would seem to get pretty cluttered if it was a more complete nutritional profile.
- bmir-alum-007 11y agoA flyover details dialog via hover icon with a grid of micro thermobars colored accordingly would make sense, sorting would rock. Clicking the icon should pin the same info open into content to allow a quick comparison, but there proly should be a sep. comparison interface later on.
- gusgordon 11y agoYes, I want to include that. There are a couple problems — incomplete nutrition profiles for certain foods, and slightly different foods having very different micronutrients (vitamins and minerals). For example, while a homemade cheeseburger and a cheeseburger from McDonald's have very similar macronutrients, they may have completely different micronutrients. That said, general guidelines can still be given. It's important to remember that, in general, the amount of calories consumed matters the most. Other information is important too, though.
- brandonmenc 11y agoThis is very cool. I spend way too much time consulting nutrition tables to plan my meals - I would use this all the time. Great UI too. I see you have grams for protein but not the other two macros. Could you add them?
- rohanprabhu 11y agoNot that it matters if it is added, I can see the rationale behind this. Generally when people are following a program, depending on the program and the cycle (bulking or cutting), there is a set amount of proteins one should consume (1.5g/lb of body weight, 1g/lb of body weight etc.) and the remaining calories are to be attained from carbs/fats in some ratio (which in some cases might not even be defined, but left to preference).
- paulojreis 11y agoSo you assume everyone is "bulking" or "cutting", or following that kind of "program"?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- brandonmenc 11y agoTrue. But often I'm concerned with a specific macro, as in, "hey I need 20g more carbs today." The macro ratios of individual food items doesn't really help when calculating the total day ratios.
- gusgordon 11y agoThanks for the suggestion. I agree, I think I could improve how details are displayed more effectively anyways.
- g8938492 11y agocool. what source did you use... AUSNUT, USDA Nut DB?
- mark_l_watson 11y agoDoes this use the USDA Nutrition Database? It is a useful source of nutrient data that I have used for many years on my http://cookingspace.com http://cookingspace.com site (parden the plug). I really like the user interface on spe.lt - nicely done!
- pkaye 11y agoThis is really needed! I'm on a renal diet and I have to watch every number like protein, sodium, phosphorus, potassium, fat, etc. I struggle day by day cobbling things in google docs online because the tools online don't suffice.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoI originally wrote cookingspace because I need to track how much vitamin K is in my diet.
- pkaye 11y agoI've been also exploring to see if I can teach myself web development skills to create my own app based on my needs. I see some good ideas I can learn from yours...
- bildung 11y ago> my http://cookingspace.com http://cookingspace.com site Bug report: When I click on the "Tips" link in the header, the link just disappears.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoThanks for that!
- bmir-alum-007 11y agoThe natural language processing is awesome. Good work, guys.
- greybox 11y agoCompletely useless; mildly entertaining. . . De ja vu ?
- fpgaminer 11y agoWorked for a few items I tested, but failed for "soylent 1.5". That gave me "1.5 pouches Soylent", but what I wanted was "1 pouch Soylent v1.5". But otherwise, I enjoy the simplicity and interface. I currently use My Fitness Pal on my phone to track calories during bulking and cutting. For the most part, the app is great, especially its database, but it has several quirks that make using it more difficult than it has to be. Putting the Add Food button directly over the advertisements, for example... But more importantly, inputting certain food items can be tedious. For example, logging "204 grams of milk" is difficult, but spe.lt handled that gracefully. I feel like spe.lt combined with My Fitness Pal's database and a speech-to-text interface would be splendid.
- seivan 11y agoNot sure Siri (Wolfram) has Soylent, but you can ask her about "calories in a slice of pizza" or "calories in a cheeseburger" :) Does anyone know if there is a js-lib where you can subtract units and <subject> from written text like this does? I have my own database of values I want to try this on.
- usaphp 11y ago> Putting the Add Food button directly over the advertisements I think they have a premium subscription for 9$/month which does not have any advertisements
- InclinedPlane 11y agoFYI: http://news.yahoo.com/sow-files-notice-legal-action-against-soylent-super-200000801.html http://news.yahoo.com/sow-files-notice-legal-action-against-...
- wolframhempel 11y agoSearching "Red Wine" -> "1 serving Vinegar"... how dare you, Sir
- teekert 11y agoNice, I even found a dutch entry (Boterham ham en kaa (trailing s is missing?)), which makes me wonder, where do you get the info? Is it reliable?
- gusgordon 11y agoThanks, the trailing s is missing because it's trying to singularize "kaas" :) The information is from USDA, and scraped from a bunch of other various sources. The info should be vastly correct, "correctness" is also a heuristic taken into account when returning results.
- flebron 11y ago"1 bowl of rice" gets interpreted as 1 cup of Sake?
- sniW 11y agoIt picks up on specific types of rice - e.g. "white rice", "jasmine rice", and "brown rice" all work.
- SturgeonsLaw 11y agoWell throw in some yeast and give it enough time...
- gusgordon 11y agoShould be fixed now, thanks
- cogg 11y agoSpecifying raw or cooked rice gets you the right answer. Given that it gives you the info to correct instantly, this isn't too bad. NLP is hard. We had a similar idea, but for automatic handling of whole recipes that you can adjust to your dietary needs (http://www.tweakeats.com http://www.tweakeats.com). I have to say I prefer the feedback for individual ingredients that spelt has though, given the ambiguity of a lot of ingredients (raw vs cooked, chopped ingredients measured before or after chopping, red peppers, etc.). Seeing quickly how is was interpreted is helpful.
- pacoverdi 11y agoGood job! What about showing sugar / carbs ratio and saturated fat / fat ratio? Minor annoyance: the floating "Terms - Contact" overlaps with content on small screens (eg. my Galaxy S4 mini).
- brador 11y agoSo close to being amazing! Please make the length of the bar relative to the calories, right now they're all the same width. And maybe allow comparison between x and y. Say, 2 eggs vs 1 chicken breast.
- adhambadr 11y agoawesome! -sugar would be a great info to know -what API database are u using ? is this information public or you generated it yourself ?
- shostack 11y agoWow--I really clicked with this immediately--super intuitive. Also, holy crap is it fast--instant results. Some initial reactions/suggestions: - I want to be able to edit entries in a list in-line. When I looked at it on my Android phone, each word's link was separated which made me think I could click each element individually to change it in place vs. having to re-enter it on the right panel. Think of it like Google or Pinterest's search interface where you modify individual words in place vs. doing it somewhere separate. For modifying integers, you could even use a dropdown or scroll menu on mobile since numbers would likely be relatively low. - When I have the input field selected, pause the animation. In fact, maybe make it stop looping once I've entered one or a couple things. It is distracting and I've shown I understand how to use the box. Instead, consider putting static text examples somewhere below--an input key if you will. - You have an engaging hook--let me take the next step of engagement. Add user accounts and the ability to save lists as recipe's or shopping lists, share them, and list the most popular ones based on shares. Instant boost to k-factor. - In the list below the bar graph, I'd love to see line-item nutritional stats (perhaps marked by corresponding graph series color) for contribution of total calories of that type. For example, I have a smoothie recipe with 1C almond milk in it. Without clicking on it, I should be able to see displayed both the absolute values as well as the percentage of total recipe calories, carbs, fat and protein the line item is adding. - Let me make lists of lists, list of lists of lists, etc.--ie. menu planning. A list is a recipe, a list of lists is the menu, a list of lists of lists is a weekly meal plan that would be awesome to plug into Amazon Fresh or something of the sort (if it had an API). Let me buy n-deep lists with a click. - Consider showing the source of the data for users to verify or investigate further. If I am substituting something for one of your entries though that you don't have, I should be able to enter my own custom items as well as their nutritional information. This obviously is easier to implement for individual users and their shared recipes vs. incorporating in to your master lookup data. - The mobile interface is slick, but I'd love a native app down the line as well. - Let me upload a photo(s)--particularly on mobile where I might have made something, want to snap a photo, toss together the recipe quickly, and share it out. Think Instagram for recipes. Would love to know more details about the project. 1. What did you use for building the front/back ends? 2. How did you make it so blazing fast? 3. What's your data source? 4. What made you decide to launch this? Consider adding an "About" page. Awesome stuff.
- cimi_ 11y agoSeems down to me, I'm seeing: WebSocket connection to 'ws://spe.lt:8080/' failed: Error in connection establishment: net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED
- Fourkeys 11y ago100g white rice - 8% protein (2g). I assume the reason for this is because its cooked and its taking into account water content but it feels unintuitive. Also it then doesnt tell me specifically how much carbs/fat there is, just a percentage. If people are going to use this for quick checks for specific diets it won't be all that useful. In fact it's probably worth just using the percentages for the colour bars and only having pure values in grams shown as numbers. You could add a toggle to show percentages so that people planning a days worth of food could have a percentage split for their macros. Aside from this I love this idea and the way its presented and would definitely use it if it had enough information.
- gusgordon 11y agoThe percentage bar is % energy content. Maybe there is a way to make that more clear. Displaying things in terms of weight percentages is misleading because the body burns a set amount of calories, not a set amount of food.
- tiemand 11y agoNo weight information? Just search for Mango and it just said 135 kcal without any indication of what the weight or size of the mango was.
- leni536 11y agoOk, I wasn't sure if it should say calories or kilocalories so I tried to look up which is the right one. Then for my surprise this is widely misused and now it's generally accepted to use Calories (with capital C) when you actually mean kilocalories. In Hungary every nutrition listing is in "kcal" (AFAIK) so this is the first time I encountered with this.
- robinhoodexe 11y agoBut... The correct one IS kcal. Or kilojoule, if you want to be even more universal.
- leni536 11y agoYeah, that's my point.
- Dorian-Marie 11y agoThanks, perfect for making DIY Soylent recipes. See https://diy.soylent.com https://diy.soylent.com.
- yashwant123 11y agodcfghdf
- Erwin 11y agoSI unit prefix are supported; I amused myself by asking for "3 yottatons of bacon". Not numbers though -- I wasn't able to add a million quadrillion eggs to complete the recipe that would feed the entire Milky Way.
- ljk 11y agovery cool, excited to use it when it has myfitnesspal.com features
- aznpwnzor 11y agoAmazing! The important thing to have a breakdown for is dietary carbs though. Most vegetables work for keto diets due to the carbs being mostly dietary. From this that isn't completely clear however.
- bossx 11y agogetting: Uncaught InvalidStateError: Failed to execute 'send' on 'WebSocket': Still in CONNECTING state.(anonymous function) @ main.js:23
- ciaoben 11y agoCongrats. I love when someone build a clean, simple product that it works fast, and do its job!! Maybe a lot of web developer should learn from such simples, right to the point, products! (Do you consider to open source it?)
- mobiuscog 11y agoReally simple and quick to use. As many others have stated, it needs the weight for carbohydrate as many of us are ensuring a daily limit rather than worrying too much about ratios.
- lips 11y agoThis could be the seed of something fantastic, IMHO. I'm trying to gain some bulk, and was using the "leading" product (MFP), but stopped because their data is: absolutely filthy via redundant user-submitted info, oriented towards companies rather than simple fresh home-cooking, poor handling of units (should be agnostic with internal conversion), and has friction at every layer of the experience. Even with basically no features, this is probably easier to adapt into something that I might use. Part of the problem with calorie/nutrition tracking is that use-cases conflict. I guess this could either become more opinionated, have multiple opinionated structures built on top of it, or just stay lean. Interested in seeing where this goes, would follow a dev blog.
- gusgordon 11y agoThanks! I am pondering how I want to take this, but I want it to stay pretty lean because I like it more and it's faster to develop. I'll consider a dev blog, probably just in the form of a more comprehensive about page.
- lips 11y agoWell, anything with an RSS feed would be great. I don't know about others, but it's my preferred way to keep up to date on software that I use/am interested in. I do have recurring "check on [url] tasks" but eh.
- ashworth 11y agoFeedback from my diabetic neighbor: this is useless to him without gram values for all the macronutrients, because he needs to calculate his insulin dosages. Percentages aren't enough.
- hadeharian 11y agoI would be nice if this worked at all on earlier versions of Firefox.