Food Prints Blog

Updated Nutrient Database to the Latest USDA Release 24

2011-12-31T09:46:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the year again to update our database. We are please to inform you that pizza is still in Fast Foods group and not in Vegetables. Some of the noticeable additions include:

Complete list of changes is available at SR23 to SR24. Please contact us if you have questions or need more information.

Nutrition Care Process and Chronic Kidney Disease

2011-06-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Fisetin: A Natural Fist against Cancer

2011-06-02T19:17:00.000-07:00

What can be better than fighting cancer by eating fruits you enjoy? Now, a new research shows that Fisetin, a dietary compound found in strawberries and kiwis, can have a beneficial effect in fighting cancer. This compound is not widely publicized as Resveratrol, however, there are already dietary supplements on the market that includes Fisetin. There is no need for prescription for dietary supplements and it's easier to get dietary supplements to the market compared to drugs. Also, there is no need for prescription for dietary supplements. It remains to be seen whether Fisetin can prevent or cure cancer in the long term.

Arbiser JL, & Fisher DE (2011). Fisetin: A Natural Fist against Melanoma? The Journal of investigative dermatology, 131 (6), 1187-9 PMID: 21566577
Khan N, Afaq F, Khusro FH, Adhami VM, Suh Y, & Mukhtar H (2011). Dual inhibition of PI3K/AKT and mTOR signaling in human non-small cell lung cancer cells by a dietary flavonoid fisetin. International journal of cancer. Journal international du cancer PMID: 21618507

Risks and Benefits of Vegetarianism vs Omnivore

2011-04-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reviews Chemistry behind Vegetarianism. There was a recent buzz around this article and most of the initial headlines were confusing and seemed to indicate that Vegans at Higher Risk for Cardiovascular Disease. It was hard to discern this from the abstract but, luckily, Google was able to find pdf of this article where you can find a table with relative benefits and risks of vegetarianism compared with omnivore. According to this table, omnivores have a significantly higher cluster of cardiovascular risk factors compared with vegetarians, including increased body mass index, waist to hip ratio, blood pressure, plasma total cholesterol, triacylglycerol and low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol levels. Compared with omnivores, vegetarians, especially vegans, on the other hand, have higher risk of blood platelet aggregation, iron deficiency anemia, vitamin B₁₂ deficiency and high levels of homocysteine. The article concludes suggesting that vegetarians, especially vegans, could benefit from increased dietary intake of vitamin B₁₂ and n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid. The list of foods high in vitamin B₁₂ includes ready-to-eat cereals, such as wheat flakes, bran flakes and oatmeals. The list of foods high in polyunsaturated fatty acids includes safflower, grapeseed, flaxseed, sunflowere oil and walnuts.

Li D (2011). Chemistry behind Vegetarianism. Journal of agricultural and food chemistry, 59 (3), 777-84 PMID: 21204526

Evaluating the Efficacy of Herbs and Supplements

2011-02-04T20:16:00.000-08:00

I highly recommend this video. Food Prints conveniently provides table of foods that are high in Vitamin E, Selenium (Se) or Folic Acid.

Updated Nutrient Database to Release 23

2010-10-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

We are please to announce updated release 23 of our Nutrient Database. Here are some of the products that have been added in this new release:

Cheese, dry white, queso seco	Restaurant, Latino, pupusas con frijoles (pupusas, bean)
Cheese, fresh, queso fresco	Restaurant, Latino, pupusas con queso (pupusas, cheese)
Cheese, white, queso blanco	Restaurant, Latino, pupusas del cerdo (pupusas, pork)
Millet flour	Restaurant, Latino, tamale, corn
Sorghum flour	Restaurant, Latino, tamale, pork
DIGIORNO Pizzas	Restaurant, Latino, black bean soup
Ground turkey	Restaurant, Latino, tripe soup
Bread, blue corn, somiviki (Hopi)	Restaurant, Latino, arepa (unleavened cornmeal bread)
Tea, herbal, brewed, Hohoysi (Hopi)	Restaurant, Latino, bunuelos (fried yeast bread)
Tortilla, blue corn, Sakwavikaviki (Hopi)	Restaurant, Chinese, beef and vegetables
Papaya, canned, heavy syrup, drained	Restaurant, Chinese, lemon chicken
Nance, canned, syrup, drained	Restaurant, Chinese, general tso's chicken
Nance, frozen, unsweetened	Restaurant, Chinese, kung pao chicken

A complete list of changes can be found in Composition of Foods Raw, Processed, Prepared USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 23.

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?

2010-05-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

Excellent talk about cancer-fighting foods. See also Food Prints notes for Tomatoes and Spinach.

Food and Addiction

2010-05-06T20:51:00.000-07:00

This week NPR had also an interesting story - Soda In America: Taxes And A Debate Over Health. Check out also this funny cartoon that I saw in Google Reader.

Web Services

2010-05-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

There has been multiple requests to add web services to Food Prints, that's why I created RESTful Web Services to allow developers access to nutrition data stored in Google App Engine. The URL for this is http://food-prints.appspot.com/ws. You'll need to add query string (q) to this to get the results. For instance http://food-prints.appspot.com/ws?q=cheese returns this JSON result:

{
   "Cheese, brie":334.0,
   "Cheese, camembert":300.0,
   "Cheese, brick":371.0,
   "Cheese, cheddar":403.0,
   "Cheese, blue":353.0,
   "Cheese, colby":394.0,
   "Cheese, cottage, creamed, large or small curd":98.0,
   "Cheese, caraway":376.0,
   "Cheese, cheshire":387.0,
   "Cheese, cottage, creamed, with fruit":97.0
}

The strings here are first 10 food names found in the database, and values are calories per 100g of serving. You can get the next 10 results, if any, by passing offset parameter. For instance, http://food-prints.appspot.com/ws?q=cheese&offset=10 returns next 10 results. You can also get serving size for a given food in grams by sending w (for weight) parameter with the exact name of a food. For instance, http://food-prints.appspot.com/ws?w=Cheese, brie returns:

{
   "cubic inch":17.0,
   "cup: sliced":144.0,
   "cup: melted":240.0,
   "oz":28.35,
   "package (4.5 oz)":128.0
}

If you are calling this from javascript, you can also pass callback parameter that will be called when you get the data. I had to use JSONP for cross-site Callbacks to avoid same origin problem with XMLHttpRequest.
This is how I did this in server-side Python code:

def generate(self, object=None):
    callback = self.request.get('callback')
    if callback:
        self.response.out.write(callback + "("+ simplejson.dumps(object)+");")
    else:
        self.response.out.write(simplejson.dumps(object))

The following example shows a complete code that you can copy/paste inside html body tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
function handler(jsonData) { 
 var tableStr = "<table><thead><tr><th>Name</th><th>Quantity</th></tr></thead>";
 for (var food in jsonData) {
  tableStr +="<tr><td><a href='http://food-prints.appspot.com/facts/"+food+"'>"+food+"</a></td><td>"+jsonData[food]+"</td></tr>"; 
 }
 tableStr += "</table>";
 document.getElementById("result").innerHTML = tableStr;
}
var wsURL="http://food-prints.appspot.com/ws?callback=handler&q=";
var script = document.createElement("script");        
script.setAttribute("src",wsURL+"cheese");
document.body.appendChild(script);
function find(){
 document.getElementById("result").innerHTML = "Searching...";
 var script = document.createElement("script");        
 script.setAttribute("src",wsURL+escape(document.getElementById('query').value));
 document.body.appendChild(script);
}
</script>
<input type="text" id="query" value="cheese"/>
<input type="button" onclick="find()" value="Search" />
<div id="result"></div>

Here is how it renders

If you use this in your own app, please consider adding a link back to http://food-prints.appspot.com to acknowledge the source. Here is a sample image you can use:

Updated Nutrient Database to Release 22

2010-03-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

I've updated Nutrient Database to Release 22. Restaurant Foods is added as a new group under Browse menu. Around 225 new foods were added to the database and 104 removed (no longer in the market). Here is a list of some of the new foods:

As part of the American Indian/Alaska Native database, data for 7 food items (ringed seal liver, stinging nettles, caribou, wocas (yellow pond lily) dried seeds and tubers, beaked hazelnuts, and piki bread) were added.

As part of an ongoing effort to expand the number of Latino food items in the database, profiles for tostada shells, sweet breads, cakes, cookies, muffins, horchata, fried green and fried yellow plantains, and dulce de leche have been added.

See SR22 documentation for a detailed list of changes. I've also changed the default weight unit in Nutrition Facts from gram (g) to whatever unit comes first in the database. For instance, the default unit for the goat milk is now 1 cup instead of 100g. All comments and suggestions are welcome.