A recent study found that over 80% of the public felt the need to improve their nutrition. This is not surprising considering the amount of news time devoted to the 'obesity crisis' and the concerns over spiraling health care costs arising out of chronic diseases such as diabetes. The study went on to say that most people did not have a clear understanding of what to do to improve their nutrition. NutritionInteracive.com has recently launched a dynamic website as a response to this need.
The NutritionInteractive 'food finder' is a food search engine that uses advanced internet technology to make it easy and fast to find foods that meet desired nutrition criteria. The website uses the 'AJAX' web technologies popularized by Google to supply amazing speed for the various steps required in building a new nutrition plan.
NutritionInteractive.com uses the USDA's food nutrient database as the basis for our nutrition information. As well, we have added popular foods that are not in the USDA database such as 'Splenda'. The key to the success of the NutritionInteractive nutrition system is the speed and ease of use. We have carefully arranged the foods in a logical hierarchy. The use of a hierarchy helps us present lists of foods in the way people generally look for things. A simple example would be if you wanted to serve fish for dinner but couldn't decide what kind of fish. We give you the option to look for general categories eg. 'fish' or more specific searches eg 'salmon'. In this way we make it easy and fast to find foods and combine them into meals and nutrition plans.
For NutritionInteractive the challenge of achieving better nutrition is viewed as a challenge of information and time. Our users need to be able to get the necessary information to make sound nutrition choices in a very short time. We felt a large component of the nutrition challenge was one of convenience. We wanted a time challenged homemaker to be able to arrive at our site and within five minutes have a delicious and nutritious one week nutrition plan. This was, however, a considerable goal. The average meal has eight ingredients. If you are planning twenty-one meals (3/day for a week) you need to find and combine more than one hundred and fifty foods.
To achieve the necessary speed and convenience we built a food 'search engine' with the design goal of being able to find any food in just five keystrokes. This makes building recipes and meals very fast. We also added a revolutionary feature called 'versioning'. With versioning you can make personal copies of any recipe or nutrition plan and make it the basis for your own version. Once you have your version, you are free to make any changes. The original remains unchanged. We keep track of the versions and so you can see the changes that other users make to 'improve' the base recipe.
The real power of the NutritionInteractive nutrition improvement system comes when you start building nutrition plans. A nutrition plan is one week of meal ideas. The theory behind a meal plan is that to effectively improve our nutrition we need to find a way to reorganize our eating habits. The nutrition plan does just that. Using the incredible speed of the 'AJAX' powered interface, you can build a nutrition plan with one full week of meals for an entire household in just a few minutes. Once you have built a nutrition plan, NutritionInteracive.com will automatically produce a shopping list so you can be sure to be able to purchase all the necessary food items in one shopping trip. You can also start with one of already built nutrition plans and modify to fit your nutrition profile.
NutritionInteractive.com adds revolutionary new capabilities to the potential of the Internet to improve our nutrition.

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About The Author

Pat Capozzi has had a diverse background in food and nutrition. After opening several resturants he became involved as the director of development of one the leading food dot.coms.
This led to the formation of the next generation of nutrition site using the 'Ajax' Technologies.
pjc@nutritioninteractive.com