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Comment by jniedrauer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Shameless plug (from one of the developers) - you might want to give a try to our app/website - MyNetDiary https://www.mynetdiary.com .

1) We prioritize user experience and health over profits - there are no ads, no user data sharing, even account creation is optional, and all advice, all materials are carefully prepared and reviewed by RDs and CDEs.

2) Technology-wise it's as state-of-the-art as it gets - fully re-written in Swift 5, modern UX, ruthlessly optimized for minimum of taps, fully configurable (even the Dashboard), with awesome apps for Apple Watch and iMessage, with AR Grocery Check tool, etc.

3) Food database (805,000 items) is our crown jewel – if something is not correct or missing, users can send photos of food packages and nutrition facts from the app, we will verify and correct or add the food to the database. Thus, the database has no duplicates and as complete information as available. This is a free service for our users.

The Android app and web app are on par.

The easiest way to get a correct answer on the internet is to post an incorrect answer. You might have already solved this problem. I will definitely check this out, thanks.

But to be clear, it's not affiliated with openfoodfacts, right? So there is still room for a true open source solution that's based on OFF?

FYI during on boarding the “use metric” toggle does not covert the value imported from HealthKit.

> they all seem to be hell bent on keeping users actively engaged instead of actually helping them hit their goals

That's a fundamental tendency for any profit-driven business: The more they keep you using it, the more money they make.

To avoid that tendency, you'd need to make the app open-source and figure out alternative ways of funding its development (donations and/or grants).

For macronutrients and android there is waistline¹(available on fdroid and google app stores). It's pretty much what you asked for, open source and it uses OpenFoodFacts. It's more focused than myfitnesspal, but very usable and I think eating habits are too intimate to share with a company. Plus with myfitnesspal I feel like I'm working for the company when I add products to the database, not so with OpenFoodFacts.

[1] https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline

Great to see a lot of ideas and competition in this space. Another shameless plug for my team's app: https://www.joyapp.com.

High level benefits vs MFP and the other household names:

- Once you learn the ropes, it's an order of magnitude faster to add entries. It was designed to be opened for as little as possible each day.

- Very flexible with regards to dieting. Works just as well for people who want to gain or maintain weight. Low carb and intermittent fasting is also very easy to use with this app.

- Also, there are no community-entered foods. This is a feature in most cases. All the food is either from a professionally curated database (Nutritionix) or custom foods you enter.

- Tracking works all the way down to the micronutrient level, like potassium, vitamins. etc. If you're into that.

- No ads whatsoever. And we don't sell your data. Privacy is very important to us. You're not the product, we sell a product to you.

Another commenter mentioned corrections: this is built into Joy. Even FDA/Nutritionix items can be wrong/outdated. It's rare, but it happens. Or you want to track them differently. This is a single click away.

For the record: I did look at using Open Food Facts as the backing database a couple of years ago. And gave it a recent look again. But compared to the FDA database (for generic foods) and Nutritionix, it was way behind. I do want to explore ways to help the project.

Maybe not as comprehensive, but https://cronometer.com/ goes to lengths to break down foods by amino acids (super helpful for protein tracking and weightlifting) and micronutrients

One of the problems I have with MyFitnessPal (aside from the fact that I hate their UI) is that the nutrition information is not very robust beyond the basic calories, fat, etc. Unfortunately, they try to tell you more nutrition, like, say, potassium, but they don't tell you that the number is likely too low, because most of the food items don't record a value for potassium.

I recently wrote a free iOS app, Eight Brains Nutrition Diary [1] that queries the very comprehensive USDA database and displays nutrition values computed from the meals you input.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/eight-brains-nutrition-diary/i...

I agree here. Also myfitnesspal doesn't let you easily correct things for being wrong; case in point many products list only the calories for something, and not the macros/nutrients. I often search for something as a proxy for what I made myself, so don't have the stats, but do know it doesn't have 0g protein, 0g fat, and 0g carbs.

Basically it doesn't seem to want to help you flag things to make it better. A collaborative enterprise would.

It is possible to correct entries in MyFitnessPal, but not easily, as you say. I sometimes come across entries that are 100 times off, so someone (a user, or pulled from a database) has entered e.g. 600 kcal for 1 g when it should clearly be per 100 g.

That means I can either enter having eaten 0.4 of 1 gram, or try to correct the information. But when you try to correct it, you can't just say "multiply everything by 100" or add a new 100 g option. It's only possible to divide all entered macro and micro nutrients by 100 to get to the value per 1 g, which is tedious to do while cooking dinner for the family.

Yep, exactly this. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to let you suggest fixes, or flag things that are clearly incorrect, even if you don't fix them yourself - especially on something i pay for!

It's not open source but I'm working on an app to make nutrition tracking easier, it's called Bitesnap. I'd be open to open sourcing parts of the app and will open up an API for it soon.

I'd love to hear what ideas and features you have in mind.

The "killer feature" that I really really want, is the ability to create meals as ratios of foods, and then scale them up/down. For example, create a meal that's 100g of food A, 150g of food B, etc, with all of the nutrition information from each, and potentially a completely different final weight (more or less water from preparation, etc), say 400g/serving. Then let me log 500g of the meal on a given day, scaling the nutrition content of all of the components as needed.

The way I typically prepare food is by creating large batches of food with many ingredients, and then using different sized portions throughout the week. I think that's the way most people who actively plan their nutrition do it.

A nice-to-have would be the ability to randomly select past meals for a given day that match your goal nutrition profile. I usually eat the same stuff over and over in a given month, so planning what to eat for the week while maintaining variety is more of a chore than anything creative.

Nice, I've actually had a few people ask for that. Might have to add a way to turn a logged meal into a recipe/new item and let you adjust it the way you described.

Meal planning and suggestions is also on the roadmap.

Unless I misunderstand you, I solve this in MyFitnessPal by first creating a recipe with all ingredients, including water, then selecting the number of portions so that each portion is (close to) 100 grams. That way I can have 230 grams later and just enter 2.3 portions.

What I thought you meant when you talked about entering ratios of food that you can scale up and down is that at first I created "Spaghetti and sauce" recipes, with a set amount of spaghetti and sauce. But then I may just keep the left-over sauce in the fridge, and next time I'll have a different amount of pasta. Since the recipe is fixed, I can't easily change the ratios of the recipe as I add it, but would have to create a completely new recipe with a different amount of pasta.

I've now started creating recipes for only the sauce part, and will enter the pasta separately for each meal. That makes it more flexible, but annoying for recipes where I always have the same things toghether.

One thing that I miss from the recipe handling in MyFitnessPal is that when I'm in the diary day view and want to add a recipe to a meal, I can't see the list of ingredients or how much it is of each. I have to go to the recipe section first to be able to see that. For example, I have a protein shake I've added as a recipe that's 250 g of plant-based milk and 45 g of protein powder, but I always forget if it's 40, 45, or 60 grams of powder. I would prefer to be able to add the recipe to a meal and from the diary see the amounts of different ingredients in the recipe, like a click-to-expand-the-recipe feature.

try cronometer. i've been using them for several years, they are by far one of the best calorie tracking apps out there.

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