The magazine Self has a website, nutritiondata.self.com, with some pretty cool tools. My teaching partner and I found it while rewriting our course's syllabus. The lesson was on obesity and weight control, and we wanted to find an interesting and engaging activity to do with our kids in class rather than just sit there and lecture at them. But I digress (is that phrase a complete cliche now?).
Compared to some other online diet analysis programs I've seen, such as mypyramidtracker.gov (the USDA's free one), I'd rate it as one of the better. It's got one of the highest levels of detail, and its user interface is decent enough, though I think the mypyramidtracker's one was a bit more intuitive to start with. Also, this one doesn't save your progress as you go--you can only analyze one thing at a time and then you have to start a new query. Another drawback is when you search for foods (and their search function is really cool), it mostly returns individual ingredients, and very few meals, though I think that's common to all dietary software. Use of the software/site is free, but you have to register a username and password, as with all things.
If you want to learn more, I'll write up a walk-through of some of the features after the jump
To start with, hover over the TOOLS tab, and then click on Daily Needs Calculator. After entering in the basic info, it'll pop up with its recommendations of your daily minimums for macronutrients, and about a dozen each of vitamins and minerals.
Also under TOOLS is Nutrient Search. Here you can put in 3 criteria to perform a search: what is highest in (so based on my Monday post, we'll put dietary fibre), lowest in (I chose saturated fat), and then serving size (I just left it in grams). It returns a screen with category filters at the top, and the full list at the bottom. I chose "meals, entrees, and side orders," and was returned Spaghettios at 1g fibre and 0g saturated fat, or vegetarian chili with beans at 4g fibre and 0g saturated fat. Seems a little limited. So, this may not be the most useful tool on the website, but there are more specific functions I can use that are much more useful and cool.
Alright, now taking a look under the MY ND tab at My Foods. Search field near the top right allows you to find almost anything, in a plethora of permutations. For some, this may be the most insane and frustrating part as they give you MORE CHOICES THAN SHOULD EXIST. For sanity's sake, I'm just going to do something simple. I'll start with apples. From the list, find the permutation you want to use, then click the orange circle with the plus sign in it, which I'm going to refer to as O+ from now on (which is my blood type, in case anyone cares). It pops up a few little orange cells, and I'm clicking "add to compare." It automatically takes you to the compare list, so just put the next thing into the search field. Now I'll use apple juice to see the difference between eating and drinking it.
From the compare list, click the compare button, and scroll down on the next screen. It puts the items side by side (which item is which is vertical to the right of the graphs) and gives you more info than you thought you needed, but which can be really helpful (this was the part the other teacher and I were really impressed by). Macronutrient breakdown, how complete it is in amino acids, a weird graph of fullness factor vs overall score, then star ratings on its usefulness to weight loss, overall health, and weight gain. And if you click the "view complete analysis" hyperlink below all this, it will truly give you a COMPLETE analysis of this food. It's pretty awesome. Also, raw apples kicked the crap out of apple juice. I hope that didn't come as a shock to anybody (though I was shocked at how many amino acids apples had, as they are a low protein source).
Ok, next function: under MY ND, click My Tracking. You'll again use the search field and the O+ to add foods here, and this is going to create meals (it looks like you can select pre-defined meals by using their recipes, but I'm not bothering with that for now). So lets do an apple, baked beans, multigrain toast, and orange juice as a meal (these were left over from playing with it at school). I click Save & Analyze, and it gives me the same info found in compare founds, but aggregated for the whole meal.
Pretty cool, huh? It's great for finding out all about what you're eating. The main drawback to this as compared to the mypyramidtracker, is that this one doesn't actually track your diet. The My Tracking function doesn't actually save meals and let you look across time at what you've eaten, while mypyramidtracker allows you to save each meal you actually eat, and you can look at your diet from the whole time since you registered with that site.
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