๐Ÿ‘คlelf๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ145๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ47

(Replying to PARENT post)

I was once at a Coffee place, reading a book. There was a 50-ish guy at the adjacent table, explaining cryptography to a bunch of young 20-30 odds (perhaps first-time entrepreneurs). I could not help myself overhear them for 30+ minutes. When they ended their meeting, I asked the guy if I can take some more of his extra time to talk "interesting tech." He was elated, and we spent an additional hour or so just talking. I let him talk most of the time, interrupting him with "my usual dumb questions."

He was part of a Startup sometime back that did some optical etching on medicines. With this, a standard Smartphone app can point to the medicine (tablets, etc.) and be able to track all the info on it. Any attempt to alter the data will result in, of course, corrupted/frauded data.

So, I asked him if the machine do it for food. He was confident that it could be done but will likely be too costly for food items.

I walked out happy, being able to talk to an interesting person. I'm not sure of any information or links, though. If this is something that interesting, it presents a lot of possibilities -- etch an "invisible barcode" on our food, that I can fish out my phone and track every detail about the food.

๐Ÿ‘คBrajeshwar๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I'd love to see this data glued to an open source nutrition tracking app of some kind. Most nutrition tracking apps are designed for weight loss, use a limited proprietary database, and make questionable quality/design decisions.

MyFitnessPal is probably the most complete platform in this space, but their backend code seems to be declining in quality recently, and their app does annoying comical things like shaming you for eating the exactly the amount you specified in your goal macros. Actively tracking your calories without developing an eating disorder is challenging enough, but they all seem to be hell bent on keeping users actively engaged instead of actually helping them hit their goals.

I've halfway started on the project I want to exist, but it's one of those side projects I might touch every month or two, and I'm a long way from having any kind of viable product.

๐Ÿ‘คjniedrauer๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

What would really solve the problem of food tracking and diet apps is a QR code containing all nutritional values on the package of every food product. I really can't believe this is not implemented yet. It's law to put all nutritional values on the package (in Europe at least), so why not go a step further and make it machine readable?
๐Ÿ‘คTomJansen๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I always get a little irritated, perhaps irrationally so, when I find another "open" project that uses a new or obscure content licensing scheme. In this case, they are using ones from the "Open Database" family, of which I am not familiar.

Can someone clarify what, if any, advantages for consumers/users this has over one of the Creative Commons content licenses? If there is a code aspect to it, then please similarly explain the advantage it has over one of the BSD, MIT, Apache, or A/GPL-compatible licenses.

License proliferation has been a real pain of late (past few years) and has muddied the waters significantly whereas many of these above-mentioned ones have largely stood the test of time and already serve a huge swath of the content world.

๐Ÿ‘คbasilgohar๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Founder of a food related robotics company here. There are a number of databases out there covering this sort of thing already, eg. USDA's NNDB. Some of the issues: not global in coverage, static entries where product formulae change, raw entries where products are typically cooked, variable cooking times, variable ingredients, new brand names/mergers, unknown products. Frankly if you want to know what is in your food precisely, the best way is to grow it in an environment that you control, and eat it directly instead of packaging, storing, preserving or transporting.
๐Ÿ‘คcontingencies๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

My son has a handful of food allergies (peanuts, Cashews, pistachios and unfortunately milk). When you say "traces" is that like the equivalent of "Made in a facility with X"?

IMO, this could be very useful for people ordering phone online, but the packaging and definitions should probably be pulled directly from the manufacturer.

For example, "Made in a facility with X, but we clean our machines every day to ensure no cross contamination" is a lot better than "Made on a shared machine with products that contain X".

๐Ÿ‘คwtvanhest๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Used by many product checking apps. In France, Yuka seems to be the leader app ( https://yuka.io/en/ ). Yuka uses the open food facts database to fill its own datatabase. This kind of app is used a lot here to verify the chemicals in a product. It already started to force food companies to change their recipes and to remove bad chemicals they usually put into their products.
๐Ÿ‘คvansteen๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Personally, I like my food data normalized to a given calorie quantity so i can easily make comparisons and rank foods/recipes easily. I like to search for foods based on their nutritional content: micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. i couldn't find anything like that on the web. anyways, so i created: https://kale.world/c. (shameless plug, i know)
๐Ÿ‘คpascalxus๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Out of nostalgia for German foods I grew up with I clicked on two: a packaged whole grain bread and some Liverwurst, I would love to eat those two together. First gets an "A", second gets an "F". I guess I average out - awesome.
๐Ÿ‘คzwieback๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

My personal interest in such a thing would be health related, a la "Let your food be your medicine." Talking about medicinal uses of food tends to be highly controversial, and never mind the endless studies into health effects of various foods and the constant interest in diet and health.

I don't readily see what kinds of "facts" about food they specifically desire or will accept. They may want to address that before someone comes along and starts adding facts that other people would object to for various reasons.

๐Ÿ‘คDoreenMichele๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I work for a diabetes prevention startup, and we found that https://myfitnesspal.com and https://www.wikicalories.com have most of the foods facts at least for the UK. However we also found that such crowdsourced info is often not reliable.
๐Ÿ‘คx02525๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

The USDA also maintains a big database of nutrition information. The older version had better features but unfortunately they rewrote everything and lost some of those features. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
๐Ÿ‘คpkaye๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Looks fantastic! But why no price information? I'd suspect maybe for legal reasons, but there are other websites tracking prices in supermarkets...
๐Ÿ‘คowenversteeg๐Ÿ•‘5y๐Ÿ”ผ0๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ0