Eating Well on Independence Day
Josh Tauberer
http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/07/04/eating-well-on-independence-day/)
Happy 4th of July. I thought I’d share an interesting website that has
nothing to do with government transparency but is about good use of
government data. The USDA maintains a big database of nutrition facts
about foods
(http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=12354500). You can
download the database and build applications based on it, like a menu
planner. This is something I’ve been thinking about in the back of my
head for a while since after getting into the whole Michael Pollan
(http://www.michaelpollan.com/) food mind-set I’ve wondered whether one
can make a healthy diet just by balancing various food groups (as I try
to do with limited success), or whether (contra Pollan’s overall
message, though maybe not in the details) it would be useful to start
adding up the numbers of various nutrients to see how my meals match up
with recommended values. How should I know, for instance, if I’ve
managed to exclude an important vitamin in my particular selection of
foods that I eat week after week, right?
The database is great itself, but the cooler website is MyPyramid Menu
Planner (mypyramidtracker.gov) (also out of the USDA). You can enter a
typical daily roster of what you eat (with a nice sound effect) and it
will tell you how it stacks up for a recommended diet for your age (or
for me, how to gain weight to a recommended amount for my age). It feels
a little over-simplified, but the simplicity keeps me on the site. I
find, not surprisingly, that I probably eat about half of the
recommended calories and clearly not enough grain or fruit. Well, I knew
this in the abstract, but quantifying it helps direct me to fixing the
problem.
I’m sure there are other websites that do similar things, but it’s nice
to find a case where the government has both published a comprehensive
(well structured, well documented) database and has also built a really
nice interface for the data. And on a topic that is really very
important to daily life, too.
And with that, I think I will take the rest of the weekend off from civics!
--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)