Open Food Facts – a food products database made by everyone, for everyone
world.openfoodfacts.org
world.openfoodfacts.org
In US, USDA provides a more curated dataset through FoodData Central (https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/) - smaller dataset but higher quality (nutrient coverage, number of samples tested, etc).
Nutritionix is very good for packaged foods, they got both an API and an app which can accept barcode scans.
I’ve also played around with plain google searches “calories <food> <x> g” works great for many simple items if all you care about is calories.
I'm not being harsh , or stating that openfoodfacts is not good or the info you get is not real / valid. they basically have what they gave them.
The industry (food and cosmetic) is in the paleolithic era , everything is being send and share on .csv or with proprietaries API (exam Nilsen), data aggregators using GS1 which is horrible, being parsed by some kind of ML algos that companies are writing , trying to uniform product data, trying to correct typos , clarify if the formulas are harmful for humans or not base on years of multiple studies and proprietary logic, that change more often than not. It Is a mess
There is a lot of good intentions, a lot of good people that they really care and want to change the market to create better products (starting from creating better ingredients) but honestly is not going to happen any time soon. Is just simply too big of an industry with years of legacy.
The only light I see is to start from 0, new small brands that may manufacture cosmetics and food and they can control what is being engineer inside , and they can store data in modern DBs and using Modern API design to expose the data and allow corrections. Is the only solution I see.
*edit typo
There are certain lines that the platforms can’t cross.
The information of open food facts, is pretty much useless(is open and known by anyone) when it gets interesting is when we analyze the formulations and effects of those. Same applies in cosmetics
If something has more or less sugar , more or less saturated fats is just a kids play. Nothing really interesting there, the brands and manufacturers , years ago were trying to prevent the exposure of the “is a bad product” message on those apps and platforms. Now they have learnt that is indeed nothing they have to be worried about. As the market of mindful consumers is literally tiny , it may look like gigantic from outside (data says the opposite)
So , An ingredient manufacturer , sells it to a Group , a group creates a formulation , goes to the market as safe (as of today) and becomes to be sold in your supermarket. Years later independent studies arise and show that ingredient N was harmful (cancer, breaks barrier of the skin, generates hormonal effects) and this platforms , aim to show that in their software. But this is proprietary to their platforms and like Yuka you may get sued
[0] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/terms-of-use
[1] https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1-0/
How reliable is their scoring system? I can't imagine a world where chocolate almond cashew milk with 14g of added sugar per 1 cup serving gets an A rating.
Be great if you could select preferred nutrition or macro nutrient profile and be presented with a calculated rating.
I'm also hoping in the future these apps have a local element, whereby the app knows what can easily be sourced in my location. So i can produce a top list of things to eat, that match my nutrition program, that I can find locally (not import, canned, processed).
It's still a bad system (the German Wikipedia article is a lot more detailed), but not the fault of the site
I found an open source application[1] for showing that stuff, and have been looking around to be able to add information for the North America region. [2]
The FDA database is good and this one is too, but they don't offer any seasonality about fruits or veg :/
[1] https://flunzmas.com/seasonal-foods-calendar/
[2] https://github.com/seasoncalendar/seasoncalendar/issues/115
Where would one find a simpler search facility that deals with raw ingredients rather than packaged products?
Where can I ask: "potatoes boiled" and get a rundown on nutrients, calories, etcetera?
Things built on top of NCCDB (http://www.ncc.umn.edu/food-and-nutrient-database/) like Cronometer tend to have the best info on basic ingredients. Or rather, I haven't found a better source.
Famnom is a nutrition tracking and meal planning service I built, after trying a few others that didn't fit my needs. The goal is to highlight macro and micro nutrient data for raw and unprocessed foods. Data is sourced from USDA.
Unfortunately, only a small fraction had that property filled in. Is there a better source for taxonomic names in foods? For instance, I don't see it in UM-NCC sample files.
https://f-droid.org/packages/openfoodfacts.github.scrachx.op...
> The package name on the Play Store is org.openfoodfacts.scanner. For historic reasons, it's openfoodfacts.github.scrachx.openfood in the code and on F-Droid.
(quoting from the app project's readme at https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-androidapp/)
Maybe will have to try Coke Zero next time I'm there, but I guess US Coke Zero will also try to match US Coca-Cola flavour.
The "Nutrient levels for 100 g" section seems a little whacky.
Red circle: 30.9 g Fat in high quantity
Red circle: 10.6 g Saturated fat in high quantity
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with consuming fat, especially saturated fats - they're completely different from carbohydrates and sugars, which you don't want to be consuming large quantities of.
Aside from the whacky qualitative assessment of nutritional value, the quantitative information seems to be very useful. Imagine being able to query their API and filter out foods with vegetable oils or high-fructose corn syrup...
Facts matter. Let's not mislabel or dismiss them just because they're not convenient for everyone.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
Around the same time as the link you cited: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/opinion/saturated-fat-is-...
This article delves into specific categories within “saturated fat” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/well/eat/is-the-saturated...
Two years later: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/well/good-fats-bad-fats.h...
A few years after that: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/well/eat/low-carb-diet-he...
Citing the NYT isn’t really helpful since you can find basically every diet fad/trend in their pages.
Personal experience tells me that sugar and refined carbs make it harder to maintain a healthy weight, and that’s enough for me. But that’s not a “facts matter” frame. An anti-fat/pro-carb person could list out a whole book worth of facts leading in exactly the wrong direction: https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Diet-Groundbreaking-Permanent...
Facts do matter, but in the case of nutrition, facts are a dime a dozen and we clearly have not as a society arrived at a final answer.
P.S. the sugar lobby explanation is uncompelling because all other industries also have lobbyists; I would think the beef and pork lobbyists would not be doing their job if they let you think that saturated fat is unhealthy.
I didn't cite the NYT as information about dietary facts. I cited a famous NYT article which unveiled the details of a massively concerted effort by bad actors to invent fake research and then force it onto an entire country as medical fact. The article doesn't make any claims about diets, but instead enumerates the actions of pro-sugar conspirators. So you've concocted this entire argument around something neither I nor the article said.
Your NYT links consist of a letter to the editor, an online Q&A column, one article which specifically discuss how unsaturated fats are good and saturated fats aren't actually bad in moderation, and one article which discusses the business optics of marketing fat/sugar usage from the perspective of an ice cream company. None of what you presented shows inconsistency, and it certainly doesn't qualify as evidence that NYT is bandwagoning or waffling.
> Personal experience tells me that sugar and refined carbs make it harder to maintain a healthy weight, and that’s enough for me. But that’s not a “facts matter” frame. An anti-fat/pro-carb person could list out a whole book worth of facts leading in exactly the wrong direction
Writing a book of personal interpretations and opinions is not the same thing as practicing scientific research. You're declaring that the very existence of detractors from corroborated research magically turns all of those widely-accepted conclusions into "dime a dozen" opinions. If that were how things worked, the very concept of factual information would cease to have any meaning.
I’ve read the book I linked, and every single claim is backed up by research, and many of the cited studies are high quality meta reviews. That doesn’t mean the conclusions are good, just that there is a very deep pool of contradictory findings to pull from.
I’m with you that some level of fat intake is healthy and that sugar/starch are suspect, but I just think it is dishonest or misleading to say it is “fact” or settled science given the uncertainty and ongoing changing nature of the scientific findings.
P.S. the NYT was years late to the party on the shocking sugar revelations; https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/sugar-indust...
The nature of science is that consensus adjusts to data. But unless something is a very new field of research, there typically aren't major shifts in consensus. The scientific process is more akin to incrementally washing away layers of misunderstanding. Within the context of cholesterol and heart disease, we've been washing for over 100 years[1], and the consensus on that connection has been unwavering since the 1950s.
Research in the late 1950s actually hinted at trans fats being the culprit, but then came the aforementioned period of anti-fat political manipulation, so it wasn't until the early 1990s when new studies built on the 1950s research and solidified scientific consensus. That consensus eventually led to federal policy changes and the banning of trans fats, which has since resulted[2] in an estimated ~4.5% reduction in heart disease mortality and an ~8.9% reduction in stroke mortality.
Since those studies in the 1990s, consensus hasn't changed and is quite simple[3] to understand. LDL greatly increases risk for heart disease and stroke. HDL absorbs LDL on its way to the liver, lowering LDL levels. Trans fats contain only LDL and are thereby inherently harmful and deadly. Saturated fats contain more LDL than HDL, but their ultimate effect on the total HDL ratio and mortality is negligible. Unsaturated fats contain only HDL, making them inherently healthy presuming an appropriate level of consumption.
Those are all facts. There is no current research refuting any of it, meaning we are at a stable point in scientific consensus on the subject.
> I’m with you that some level of fat intake is healthy and that sugar/starch are suspect, but I just think it is dishonest or misleading to say it is “fact” or settled science given the uncertainty and ongoing changing nature of the scientific findings.
Again, you're eliminating the possibility for the concept of factual information to exist. Science is always ongoing, but that doesn't mean we don't have any established consensus.
A very long time ago, the extent of our chemistry knowledge was that water made things wet and we must consume it in order to continue living. These days we understand thousands of concepts related to physics and chemistry, nearly all of which have scientific consensus. But if someone today started adamantly claiming that pure water is acidic, that wouldn't make our current understanding uncertain or any less factual. All it would mean is that someone ignored the established consensus and expressed a personal opinion. It doesn't qualify as science and doesn't have any legitimate bearing on practice or policy.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108295/
[2] https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/31898/MWP_2014_1...
[3] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
> There's nothing intrinsically wrong with consuming fat, especially saturated fats - they're completely different from carbohydrates and sugars, which you don't want to be consuming large quantities of.
The implication, when you say you shouldn’t eat large quantities of sugar+carbs, and that that is totally different from saturated fat, is that you should eat large quantities of saturated fat.
That is an opinion. I don’t contest the existence of facts, what I contest is the selective usage of facts to dress up your opinion as a fact. It is your opinion that high quantities of saturated fat are desirable, but most research I’ve seen says that the emphasis should be on Whole Foods and unsaturated fats, with some saturated fat tolerated to achieve that. This is actually supported by the research you cited later on.
The underlying science of cholesterol doesn’t seem to be seriously under question, but using that to say high quantities of saturated fat is healthy is fact skips many important steps and cheapens the meaning of “fact”.
Nobody ever said that saturated fats should be consumed excessively. That would both fly in the face of logic and isn't true for any nutrient. So you're not actually arguing a point here.
> You claim
You just quoted a different HN user and claimed it was something I said, then concocted another argument around it. That's beyond ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself.
> The implication, when you say you shouldn’t eat large quantities of sugar+carbs, and that that is totally different from saturated fat, is that you should eat large quantities of saturated fat.
Even though I wasn't the one you quoted and you're arguing with nobody, you're still wrong about this. What you're saying is completely illogical. Saying that you shouldn't do one thing doesn't inherently imply that you should do another.
In reality, the original commenter was stating that you shouldn't eat large quantities of sugar and carbohydrates, and that it's not nearly as harmful to consume large quantities of saturated fat. They never stated that you should consume large quantities of saturated fat.
> It is your opinion that high quantities of saturated fat are desirable
Stop lying. I never said or implied anything about saturated fats being desirable. It's disgusting that you feel so comfortable lying about other people.
> but most research I’ve seen says that the emphasis should be on Whole Foods and unsaturated fats, with some saturated fat tolerated to achieve that.
That is the entire point of my last comment, so I can only presume you didn't actually read it at all. I literally said "Saturated fats contain more LDL than HDL, but their ultimate effect on the total HDL ratio and mortality is negligible. Unsaturated fats contain only HDL, making them inherently healthy presuming an appropriate level of consumption."
I linked the research and then described it to you. Now you're claiming that I said the opposite, and that your research (which you haven't provided) is somehow more correct. Do you not realize that we're on a forum where all of the previous commentary is public? It's clearly visible that I've said absolutely none of the things you just claimed.
Most of what you’re writing about is sort of a silly basis for an argument though, by definition excess consumption of anything is bad. The issue is what counts as excess.
I don’t disagree on the findings. I repeated points of agreement not because I didn’t read your comment, but to highlight the shared understanding. I agree with your opinions on nutrition as shared, I just don’t think it’s right to claim that the specific underlying research is enough to support the overall nutrition guidance opinion as settled science or fact-based. I think there are plenty of ways to read the underlying research and still support a claim that individual specific components of a diet should be chosen to moderate saturated fat intake.
Yes, all of the ways. It's the only interpretation. It is literally what both the research and my comments state. You're still arguing against things that nobody said, while also redefining science and nutrition. I'm unsure of what you're trying to accomplish, but you're strictly making bad-faith arguments which don't reflect reality, and it's obnoxious.
If you're looking at the ingredients: canola/soy/corn/"vegetable" oil, or (high fructose) corn syrup, or sugar that doesn't explicitly say cane sugar.
If the pineapple is purple, the GMO ingredient should be obvious.