Nutritional Information per food item

[MarthinusBosman]

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Please provide a concise description of the problem that would be addressed by this feature.

Currently, nutritional info needs to be set per recipe. IMO it would make a lot more sense to have this info on a food item level and then just aggregate for each recipe.

Could then be combined with existing databases like fatsecret to get the nutritional information of common food items automatically during seeding.

Please provide a concise description of the feature that would resolve your issue.

Add nutritional info per food item

Please consider and list out some caveats or tradeoffs made in your design decision

Might break existing recipe nutritional info, but if it's implemented in a way that nutritional info can still be set manually per recipe to override default values (in cases where some food items are unavailable in list of food items for instance) then it should be fine.

Additional Information

• If this is accepted I'm willing to submit a PR to provide this feature
• If this is accepted I'm willing to help maintain this feature
• I'm willing to sponsor/pay a developer to do this work

[RealFoxie]

The main problem here is that a recipe has an amount and a specific unit for a certain food.
A recipe with "200g butter" or "200cups butter" will have different nutritional values.
You could do very straightforward aggregation (ignore amount and unit), but then it really isn't that useful, is it?

[RealFoxie]

Yes, but that's not trivial. I do this now in an external script to calculate cost of recipes, but as you can have any number of units and use them with any food, you need to add some constraints and such, which is currently not a thing.

[MarthinusBosman]

I see the backend repo is in python fastapi, I've got quite some experience with that. if I get some time I'll try and implement the whole solution.

[monksy]

Breaking out the unit, quanity and food seems like it needs some work. When I import recipes it looks like it's just copying the text there.

[Yuni1988]

I'd say that a solution where you add nutrition data per unit would still be very useful. E.g. nutrition data for 100g, nutrition data for 1 cup... And if nutrition data for specific food+unit is missing, do not include it in a calculation (just add some sort of visual indication when that happens). The user could have the ability to choose between using calculated nutrition data or overriding nutrition data for the whole meal (which would also make it backwards compatible with the current system).

If calculations between units are desired, user could enter conversion data instead of nutrition data for that unit. For example 1 cup of milk = 240g of milk. This way the nutrition data can be given per 100g, the rest can be derived from that.

Another possibility would be to make an importer for the USDA database which could seed the tables for food & nutrition data. I saw there are recent JSON files available for the database. But personally I wouldn't mind entering the data on my own, it's a one-time effort after all.

[RealFoxie]

Yes, some conversion logic is possible. Tandoor seems to have it in some way (but I have never used it before). Still a very hard problem to implement though, so won't happen if somebody who really wants it also has the experience and time to do so.

Basically all you need is conversions between units and specific conversions per food of needed (e.g. Grams to kilograms is done in units, but cl whip cream to grams whip cream will have to be a food specific conversion).
And then some graph logic that takes the path to create the conversions.

But that explanation skips over how to make this clear for the end user, a working editor view, decision when to show the conversion and when not etc.

[Eluinn]

Specifically came looking for thoughts along these lines and I would also love more in-depth nutritional data!

One idea: Nutritional data can be pulled from https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ there is an API that can be used as well. Might require naming ingredients more specifically ie instead of just 'flour', you may need to put 'Flour, wheat, all-purpose, enriched, unbleached' (nutritional info for this particular entry here> https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/789951/nutrients) or maybe a drop down, or search-based list population to choose from when importing a recipe. Such as:

Ingredient listed as Flour, please select which type: Flour, 00; Flour, almond; Flour, amaranth; Flour, pastry, unenriched, unbleached; Flour, wheat, all-purpose, enriched, unbleached; etc....

From what I've seen, the data is collected by using 100 gram samples, so this might only work if the ingredient itself is listed in grams/weight, unless an ingredient conversion is built in.

Using https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ would also enable more in depth nutritional data, such as vitamin and mineral composition as well, and it would regularly update as new ingredients are added or retested.

There are also legacy entries such as: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168936/nutrients that have even more details, such as amino acids and the like, but not sure how those fit in with the API.

EDIT:
For anyone who's interested, here are some google sheet templates I made with easy scaling, costing, and nutrition back when I was in culinary school. Back then I used https://Nutritiondata.self.com but their database (which pulled from https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/) is no longer available. I even set up auto generating charts for Caloric Ratio and an Amino Acid Profile.
I would love the ability to have similar use and available data within mealie!

The sheets are based entirely on weight and ratios (baker's %), but I built in some conversion tables into the documents as well.
Green sections are where you enter your info, red does calculations (try not to mess with these), and when you enter an ingredient in the template, it parses the database sheet for all the info.

Costing and Nutrition database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mr6b6tyhLIi48sHVy7gICHRgDab3vKsxC1cuOxmEM5Q/edit?usp=drive_link

Recipe Collection template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/173_fO3BrywULO2Th_M1MOACZ-MyjNyp9yDgL-PKHQXo/edit?usp=drive_link