Show HN: Intuitive nutrition information

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I see you have grams for protein but not the other two macros. Could you add them?

I really like the user interface on spe.lt - nicely done!

(Do you consider to open source it?)

  WebSocket connection to 'ws://spe.lt:8080/' failed: Error in connection establishment: net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

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).

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.

See https://diy.soylent.com.

what source did you use... AUSNUT, USDA Nut DB?