Analyze your diet

October 28, 2006 9:39 AM

NATS is an online personal nutritional analysis tool. It has a database of common foods, and an interface for entering nutritional data about foods that aren't listed. You can also calculate how much energy you burn in a day, and search for foods by nutrient. Registration is required to if you want to save your diet information.
posted by owhydididoit (15 comments total)

Nice one, thanks.
posted by Smedleyman at 9:48 AM on October 28, 2006

I always meant to get around to writing something like this for myself, but I should probably check this thing out sometime.
posted by delmoi at 10:18 AM on October 28, 2006

I see they've decided to eschew the 'web 2.0' aesthetic.
posted by delmoi at 10:19 AM on October 28, 2006

I built a simpler database like this once. For a nutritionist fitness web site. Didn't really pan out. No one wanted to look at my NADS.
posted by hal9k at 10:29 AM on October 28, 2006

This thing is pretty cool, but apparently with 8 hours of sleep and 16 hours of "inactivity" per day, I should still be eating 2900 calories. That's insane.

However, it's good to know that I am kicking the shit out of my daily values for Phosphorus, Thiamin, and protein.

Also, orange juice totally crushes all other juices in nutritional content! Holy crap. I will probably be using this tool extensively in the future. Thanks a lot.
posted by synaesthetichaze at 10:57 AM on October 28, 2006

Turns out that if you actually use the Daily Energy Calculator tool, it doesn't give you the cookie-cutter 2900 kcal value; on the nutritional analysis page, though, it will spit out whatever the default value is for your age group & gender as the recommended amount.
posted by synaesthetichaze at 11:12 AM on October 28, 2006

Huh, I had no idea my fast-paced, 15 mile cycling trips every couple days burned over 1000 calories each time. I was also surprised that to burn the same amount having even crazy monkey sex would take many hours.
posted by mathowie at 11:37 AM on October 28, 2006

There's also Fitday and Dr. Walford's Diet Planner. I found them to be slightly more convenient than this thing.
posted by surlycat at 11:43 AM on October 28, 2006

This is really a fine piece of webapp. It would be even better if one could download the whole thing and use it offline. But I think that I'll use NATS extensively. After all I gained some valuable insights (I get way too little VitA).
Thank you very much for this recommendation.
posted by pu9iad at 12:52 PM on October 28, 2006

I was also surprised that to burn the same amount having even crazy monkey sex would take many hours.

Not with me it won't. I'd really make you work for it, Matt.
posted by dobbs at 1:20 PM on October 28, 2006

I was also surprised that to burn the same amount having even crazy monkey sex would take many hours.

That depends on how you do it. ;p But it's true, if you can bike every day for an hour you can eat a lot.

Great find. Thanks, owdidi.
posted by mrgrimm at 1:47 PM on October 28, 2006

Most of the food composition data they used comes from USDA Agricultural Handbook n°8, that dates from 1992. I don't understand why they don't use the current and up to date USDA reference (Standard Reference 19), which is in public domain and fully searchable. SR19 is also more comprehensive nutrient-wise, and gives additional statistics such as the number of samples used to create a food composition profile.
posted by elgilito at 1:49 PM on October 28, 2006

pu9iad - if you want an offline version check out www.fitday.com its what i use to monitor my cal intake.

[and the second time ive mentioned it on meta today!]
posted by moochoo at 3:26 AM on October 30, 2006

Nice tool. I'd recommend checking out NutritionData as well, they have some very nice custom visual representations and you can put together a "pantry" to analyze recipes and the like.
posted by nTeleKy at 10:32 AM on October 30, 2006

Use this all the time. Especially good if you want to restrict calories
posted by harlanpepper at 12:47 PM on October 30, 2006