Show HN: Famnom – Nutrition tracker and meal planner for families
famnom.com
famnom.com
I continue to use Cronometer as I have a few genetic mutations that lead to my body burning through certain vitamins and other substances more quickly than folks without the mutations. There's a very handy feature called "The Oracle" which will suggest to you a food or a recipe (you can then view the recipe's ingredients so you're not just told "Omelette with dark leafy greens" and left to wonder what the hell that contains). The Oracle's recommendation is made based on how many calories and various macros that you 'have left' for the day.
Cronometer only has branded US and Canadian foods (and a few EU foods) along with 'regular' foods like "egg, boiled" or "avocado, Hass" at the moment, but I'm hoping that they expand to have more branded EU and Asian foods in their database!
It's multi-user support is... entirely non-existent. And they seem rather uninterested in feedback. I'd happily pay them for a feature where I could easily make dinner, and split it between multiple users. But no, I have to save a "recipe" (which stays in the DB forever) and then add a portion of that recipe from the other user's account.
So a family-based offering is definitely an interesting idea!
While I appreciate the data privacy stance of Cronometer immensely there are a few 'collaborative use' features that I wish I could opt into on Cronometer like the shared recipe feature that you mention. Shared exercise info would be great too! Let's say we go on a bike ride together: I can kick over the Exercise activity to your Cronometer account too. Great for parents inputting their kids info too. Not a parent but if I wanted to log my kids' nutrient intake and make sure that they were getting X minutes of sustained bike-riding, swimming, whatever each week it would be great to do some fitness activities together and then kick the activity log over to the kids profile. So as not to cause eating disorders or whatnot I obviously wouldn't make kids log their food intake. My grandmother had me do that as a (mildly chubby) child and go to TOPS with her and it was ... weird.
I ended up just using a spreadsheet as all these apps seem oddly expensive for a food log.
I’m able to send email to chronometer@prepend.com without any problems. And nothing shows up in my spam folder.
You know how there's the checkbox to exclude "My recipes" from the Oracles suggestions? I was debating making a recipe to act as one catch-all for all the foods that I don't like or can't tolerate and then tell the Oracle "exclude nuts, shellfish [I have allergies to those] and My Recipes" and see what it suggests. I find it frustrating that there's no "globally forget" option for the Oracle, so the other day I thought of the "My Recipes" as a hack to exclude foods that I don't like from the Oracle (but I haven't yet had a chance to implement this / try this out).
I fully agree that the Oracle is the most rudimentary 'suggestion robot' out there. (I can't even bring myself to call it a recommender system.) I wish that I could overweight some ingredients moreso than others: if I'm short on Mg AND selenium and only have 200 cal left in my day make sure I get the selenium, Oracle! Or over- or underweight, say, protein over total calories or something. With a little bit of rudimentary ML the Cronometer folks could make the Oracle tremendously useful, but I am unsure as to why they don't do this? Lack of expertise in recsys? Cronometer folks, if you want assistance in this space I'd be happy to help; just tell me what email address to email you at and we can chat.
What is it?
Famnom is an easy-to-use macro and micro-nutrient tracker, and meal planner. Choose from a database of foods or add your own, create recipes and log meals. Set custom nutrition goals or use FDA RDIs for macros - calories, fats, proteins, carbs and micro-nutrients - Magnesium, Calcium, Zinc, Iron, etc. Use MealPlanner to generate daily meal plans based on nutrition goals, available items and taste preferences. Sample user journeys:
Signup/Login: https://github.com/umangsh/famnom/blob/master/journeys/signu...
Search/Setup Kitchen: https://github.com/umangsh/famnom/blob/master/journeys/searc...
Nutrition Goals: https://github.com/umangsh/famnom/blob/master/journeys/nutri...
Mealplanner: https://github.com/umangsh/famnom/blob/master/journeys/mealp...
Why?
My main goal was to eliminate nutritional supplements in my diet, and use fresh foods and recipes as much as possible. Famnom can help:
1. Track macro nutrients and micro nutrients, such as Vitamin D, Fiber, Magnesium, etc consumed per day. Connect with Apple Health for trends over longer periods of time.
2. Generate meal plans based on available foods and recipes in Kitchen, nutrition preferences and taste preferences.
3. Share kitchens with other family members.
Famnom has worked for me personally. I was able to eliminate almost all supplements from my diet. I hope it can help others with their health goals.
Tech Stack:
Application backend code built using Django + Postgres. Deployed on Heroku. iOS and Android apps built with Flutter.
Code: https://github.com/umangsh/famnom
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/famnom/id1583273562
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.famnom.fam...
Another thing is the USDA nutrition info for raw ingredients might be actually a bit out of date, with a lot of the measurements taken long time ago. The actual micronutrient content of raw food can vary greatly depending on what kind of soil it was planted in, how unripe it was before harvesting and many other factors, which isn't shown in this kind of stuff unfortunately. And the quality of soil 30 or 40 years ago is probably radically different than it is now.
Anyway I see you have the Famnom code on GH but apparently not with an OSS license. Are you planning to seek contributions with a friendly license in the future? If so I’d be interested.
My thinking is that logging food is annoying (weighing and tracking food you ate). I want to make a more fluid way of just selecting recipes or food and encourage a more scalable/intuitive way of eating.
Looks like a cool project you’ve built there.
Do you use linear programming / some other optimization algorithm to hit targets, or is it more like a deficit tracker where you tell it what you ate and it tells you that you need 8 more mcg of zink or whatever?
Either have a demo account with ephemeral in-browser storage so people can experiment, or allow people to experiment anonymously first.
Again, I am super interested and will make an account anyway but I have to tell you, your landing page is bad. You can improve it.
Help me expand my perspective.
After doing this for a while I started developing stomach problems (unrelated to my change in diet), and I needed to ensure that I was meeting my minimum requirements for fibre too. All of a sudden you end up with quite a tricky multi-dimensional optimisation problem, and it was actually quite a fun intellectual exercise trying to meet all the constraints, obviously without hating what I ate.
There are all sorts of reasons that you might want to minimise or maximise some micro- or macro-nutrient. Any athlete will want some sort of control of what they eat. Perhaps you want more magnesium for better sleep, and you'd like to get it from actual food rather than supplements. Calorie restriction while keeping protein high is a common one for losing weight. Almost no-one eating a western diet gets anywhere near enough fibre, and any one of various health scares might make you aware of that. Tracking what you eat permanently is a serious commitment that is probably unnecessary for most people, but I think it's a good thing to try, at least for a while. I tend to go back to tracking periodically when I want to get some aspect of my diet under control, but I don't do it all the time.
Too much sodium / low potassium are common in most diets. Low magnesium (sleep issues), low zinc, low fiber etc are a few others - a common remedy being nutrition supplements. Better tracking allowed me to eliminate additional supplements from my diet (except Vit D, which is hard to find in natural sources).
Famnom suggests FDA RDI defaults, but users are free to choose what they would like to track.
Besides produce/meat, the database also provides nutrition info for 300,000+ branded packaged foods (search by name or barcode).
In addition, you can create new foods and add them to your kitchen.
Pass.
I've used the "Nutrients" iOS app for tracking nutrition, but not in the way it's meant to be used. Maybe my usage patterns could help you writing your app.
I tend to use the app to get a pulse on the nutrient density of the foods I consume (or feed my daughter). I would make simple meals, and plug them in, and then try to get all the nutrient bars filled up. It was harder than I expected. It was a puzzle to figure out because foods have different levels of each nutrient. I want to avoid adding onto nutrients I'm already consuming enough of.
I tried to use the Nutrients app to search for foods dense in some nutrient I was lacking, but I often found Google searches to be better for this. The way the app ranked foods wasn't useful to me. Was it measuring nutrients by weight? What if I wanted to rank by price, or by region? I don't care that raw Moose Liver has lots of Riboflavin.
I preferred using the app to determine my grocery list because I don't like recipes. I want to know how to cook things individually (pasta, rice, eggs, asparagus, etc) with salt + (butter or oil), and then figure out how to assemble meals on my own. With recipes, I would often have leftovers I didn't know what to do with. I could look up more recipes, but I couldn't see how this would make me a better cook since I didn't know what I was doing or why. I was inspired by Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat approach to cooking. This way I could get nutrition and flavor simultaneously.
This all got really complicated, and I eventually figured I wouldn't reach the end of it. For example, rice grown in different regions has different levels of arsenic. I'm not concerned about arsenic specifically, but the finding got me more curiously interested in toxins, and soil differences around the world. I got into nutrition thinking I could be convinced of one specific diet over another, but I soon found myself looking into differences between soil in different regions.
After I used the app enough, I got a sense of some of my blind spots, and used that to adjust my diet intuitively.
Some changes that more-or-less stuck: - More sun for Vitamin D - More Avocados - Omega-3 from fish oil - Nutritional Yeast for B Vitamins - More greens (especially for magnesium) - Spinach in smoothies - Less sugars, carbs, and bread - Parmesan cheese for calcium - More beans
I have decent intuition around green means chlorophyll molecule means there's a magnesium atom in there, and some others. The minerals are easy enough for me to get enough of. I can usually get enough Vitamin C. I don't have good intuition around Vitamin K, E, Niacin, Riboflavin, Folate. Beans have lots of Folate. This makes sense, but lots of other foods I regularly eat have it too.
I'm inspired to get back into this and start tracking again.
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BACKGROUND:
After my daughter was born, I was suddenly extremely interested in nutrition. I worried what might happen if my daughter started missing important nutrients. However, it was hard to get trustworthy information on nutrition. Important debates weren't settled. I wasn't confident that I could trust things like the food pyramid. Like you, I felt more confident about using micro and macro nutrients as a way to decide what to eat, but also to compose meals that were nutritionally complete. This is something I didn't see much focus on. People would tout some specific food as "healthy" without putting it in context.
From there, I still wanted to cover my bases for unknown unknowns. If I added more traditional foods, I'd be able to cover for it. As an outsider, I don't know how likely it is that we've discovered all the nutrients we need. For example, I recently saw a research paper asking if Lithium is a micronutrient. Maybe there were foods that had nutrients that weren't discovered, or maybe different people need different levels of the same nutrients. Maybe microplastics are a bigger problem than we imagine. It's hard to account for everything. I wanted a baseline I could start from. I looked into traditional slavic foods. I found that potatoes were more recents, for example, so I wouldn't use them to cover for unknown unknowns. However, cabbage and buckwheat are both nutritionally rich and slavic staples. Maybe I could use this finding to trust dishes that feature these ingredients.
+1 for blind spots. Choline (eggs), Iodine (Iodized salt, seaweed), Zinc (pumpkin seeds, etc) are a few others in my experience. Intuition builds up steadily after tracking a while. Good luck!
I would also suggest avoiding leafy vegetables in general, since there are a lot of defensive chemicals in them that are not very good for you, especially concentrated blended versions of them. You tend to want to eat plants in states that they want to be eaten in, such as fruit flesh. Plants don't want their leaves and seeds to be eaten, thus the large amount of protective chemicals in them to discourage that from happening. The ideal situation for plants is you eat a fruit when it's ripe, swallow the seed whole, and pass the seed in your stool somewhere else in a stool fertilizer bed on the ground somewhere. This means low sugar fruits that we call vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes are also ok.
Also fish and liquid oils tend to go rancid fairly fast. Solid oils tend to stay fresh longer. If you want more fish in your diet, eating actual fresh wild fish vs a fish oil significantly healthier.
I'm aware that plants have defensive chemicals though I haven't researched it in too much depth. I can probably be convinced to drop spinach and nuts.
I don't eat enough organ meats. Chicken liver seems cheap for the nutrition you get out of it. I never bothered getting into cooking it, but it seems like a good idea.
Good point on the fish oil. My daughter is totally fine consuming the gross-tasting fish oil (even without the lemon flavoring) out of a spoon. My guess is she's really craving the nutrients in there. I keep the oil in the fridge, but there might be no real way to compete with fresh fish.
I agree an info or onboarding section on famnom itself would be nice to have, thanks for the feedback.
Edit: I just looked at the journeys and I found it hard to figure out what was going on. The gifs moved fast, and do people plan their meals around amounts of raw ingredients? I would have expected recipes to be the central focus, but none of the journeys touch on recipes AFAICT.
I'd love a good tool for tracking nutrition, comparing recipes, etc. so I'm enthusiastic about this.
There are definitely variations between different authorities (NHS, FDA, etc). FDA RDIs provide a sane default, and users can update nutrition preferences based on their health goals.
For example if you have a diet high in oxalates, which are present in many leafy green vegetables, then your nutritional requirements for things like calcium and magnesium are increased, because the oxalates bind to the calcium and magnesium and cause you to not absorb it. Thus to compensate for that effect, you need to eat more of that nutrient. If you have a diet free of oxalates, then the amount you need is less than the RDI, etc.
Also a lot of nutrition labels do not modify themselves on the bioavailability of their specific nutrients. Plant protein is less bioavailable and has a less balanced amino acid profile than meat protein, so you need to eat more plant protein typically to get the same total equivalent amount to be absorbed by your body. Magnesium oxide is cheaper than magnesium citrate and is not absorbed enough, so you need more magnesium oxide in weight to have the amount absorbed by your body be the same as a lesser amount of magnesium citrate. But on nutrition labels, they're just going to put milligrams of magnesium, no matter what kind there is.
Outsiders of the field have slowly started to figure out where nutrition went wrong, but since entities like the FDA have spread missinformation for decades, there is a lot of inertia to overcome, which will sadly take another couple decades apparently. Best examples i can remember ad hoc are probably Gary Taubes and Robert Lustig.
It's pretty clear by now that the obsession with eating carbs is actively harmful and likely the cause for the diabetes and obesity epidemic. The obsession with polyunsaturated plant fats is next, they oxidize rapidly, even inside our bodies, and cause great damage.
The issue for nutritionists is one of credibility, how does a scientific field collectively turn on a dime and proclaim literally the opposite of what they have claimed in the decades prior?