External Nutrition Database

Overview

Why external database?

1. Provide robust search functionalities.
2. Does not require data collection personally.
3. All data should be wrangled properly.
4. Additional features provided.

Possible Implementation

1. Download nutrition dataset and build database personally.
2. Download nutrition dataset from one of the APIs below for research use, and use provided database service for search.
3. Use provided service entirely.

List of useful nutrition APIs

Edamam

includes a nutrition analysis api and database, and a recipe search. Usage Method: POST request

Pros and Cons

nutrition analysis and ingredient API

• Pros:
  • Accepts natural language input, such as a teaspoon of sugar, a large carrot etc.
  • Allows the input for food preparation (still in NL), and account for the variation in absoption.
  • Simple usage, input and output with JSON.
  • Offers health labels. This is particularly good for branding.
  • It also calculates glycemic level.
  • Pretty detailed information.
• Cons:
  • Request limit for the free tier.
  • Does not support the optimization we need. More of a trial and error type.

recipe searchAPI

Not really interested right now.

Final Comment

This API has several interesting features, including natural language input, food processing, health labels and glycemic index. However, the key thing it left is the ability of use the raw data to do what we need to do. All the rest are simply add-ons to the basic nutrition analysis.

nutritionix

Nutrition values of grocery items, restaurant items and common foods.It provides nutrition API and database licensing services.

Usage Method: POST request

Pros and Cons

nutrition API

• Pros:

  • Very large amount of data with constant update, including groceries, restaurants and usda common foods.
  • Offers two types of requests, the first is field search (like nosql) using request, and the second is natural language search (only for enterprise plan).
  • V2 offers exercise energy estimate.
  • Variety of query options.

• Cons:

  • Cost. Pro version is $299 per month, and enterprise pricing is still not known.
  • Does not support

USDA Food Composition Database

Food composition database by the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. Uses REST access for list of foods and the nutrient report.

Spoonacular Recipe-Food-Nutrition

The spoonacular Nutrition, Recipe, and Food API allows you to access over 365,000 recipes and 86,000 food products. >Our food ontology and semantic recipe search engine makes it possible to search for recipes using natural language >queries, such as "gluten free brownies without sugar" or "low fat vegan cupcakes." You can automatically calculate >the nutritional information for any recipe, analyze recipe costs, visualize ingredient lists, find recipes for what's >in your fridge, find recipes based on special diets, nutritional requirements, or favorite ingredients, classify >recipes into types and cuisines, convert ingredient amounts, or even compute an entire meal plan. With our powerful >API, you can create many kinds of food and especially nutrition apps. Special diets/dietary requirements currently >available include: vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, gluten free, grain free, dairy free, high protein, low sodium, low >carb, Paleo, Primal, ketogenic, FODMAP, and Whole 30. We will soon be adding Weight Watcher points, too.

ESHA Nutrition Database API

ESHA’s Nutrition Database API enables users to integrate their website and web applications with our database for live search results. Rather than developing and maintaining your own nutrient or exercise database, you can rely on ESHA for high quality source data.

fatsecret

The #1 food and nutrition database in the world, utilized by more than 10,000 developers, in more than 50 countries contributing in excess of 500 million API calls every month.