Show HN: Famnom – Nutrition tracker and meal planner for families
I&#x27;ve thought about making something like this in the past.<p>I&#x27;ve used the &quot;Nutrients&quot; iOS app for tracking nutrition, but not in the way it&#x27;s meant to be used. Maybe my usage patterns could help you writing your app.<p>I tend to use the app to get a pulse on the nutrient density of the foods I consume (or feed my daughter). I would make simple meals, and plug them in, and then try to get all the nutrient bars filled up. It was harder than I expected. It was a puzzle to figure out because foods have different levels of each nutrient. I want to avoid adding onto nutrients I&#x27;m already consuming enough of.<p>I tried to use the Nutrients app to search for foods dense in some nutrient I was lacking, but I often found Google searches to be better for this. The way the app ranked foods wasn&#x27;t useful to me. Was it measuring nutrients by weight? What if I wanted to rank by price, or by region? I don&#x27;t care that raw Moose Liver has lots of Riboflavin.<p>I preferred using the app to determine my grocery list because I don&#x27;t like recipes. I want to know how to cook things individually (pasta, rice, eggs, asparagus, etc) with salt + (butter or oil), and then figure out how to assemble meals on my own. With recipes, I would often have leftovers I didn&#x27;t know what to do with. I could look up more recipes, but I couldn&#x27;t see how this would make me a better cook since I didn&#x27;t know what I was doing or why. I was inspired by Samin Nosrat&#x27;s Salt Fat Acid Heat approach to cooking. This way I could get nutrition and flavor simultaneously.<p>This all got really complicated, and I eventually figured I wouldn&#x27;t reach the end of it. For example, rice grown in different regions has different levels of arsenic. I&#x27;m not concerned about arsenic specifically, but the finding got me more curiously interested in toxins, and soil differences around the world. I got into nutrition thinking I could be convinced of one specific diet over another, but I soon found myself looking into differences between soil in different regions.<p>After I used the app enough, I got a sense of some of my blind spots, and used that to adjust my diet intuitively.<p>Some changes that more-or-less stuck:
- More sun for Vitamin D
- More Avocados
- Omega-3 from fish oil
- Nutritional Yeast for B Vitamins
- More greens (especially for magnesium)
- Spinach in smoothies
- Less sugars, carbs, and bread
- Parmesan cheese for calcium
- More beans<p>I have decent intuition around green means chlorophyll molecule means there&#x27;s a magnesium atom in there, and some others. The minerals are easy enough for me to get enough of. I can usually get enough Vitamin C. I don&#x27;t have good intuition around Vitamin K, E, Niacin, Riboflavin, Folate. Beans have lots of Folate. This makes sense, but lots of other foods I regularly eat have it too.<p>I&#x27;m inspired to get back into this and start tracking again.<p>--<p>BACKGROUND:<p>After my daughter was born, I was suddenly extremely interested in nutrition. I worried what might happen if my daughter started missing important nutrients. However, it was hard to get trustworthy information on nutrition. Important debates weren&#x27;t settled. I wasn&#x27;t confident that I could trust things like the food pyramid. Like you, I felt more confident about using micro and macro nutrients as a way to decide what to eat, but also to compose meals that were nutritionally complete. This is something I didn&#x27;t see much focus on. People would tout some specific food as &quot;healthy&quot; without putting it in context.<p>From there, I still wanted to cover my bases for unknown unknowns. If I added more traditional foods, I&#x27;d be able to cover for it. As an outsider, I don&#x27;t know how likely it is that we&#x27;ve discovered all the nutrients we need. For example, I recently saw a research paper asking if Lithium is a micronutrient. Maybe there were foods that had nutrients that weren&#x27;t discovered, or maybe different people need different levels of the same nutrients. Maybe microplastics are a bigger problem than we imagine. It&#x27;s hard to account for everything. I wanted a baseline I could start from. I looked into traditional slavic foods. I found that potatoes were more recents, for example, so I wouldn&#x27;t use them to cover for unknown unknowns. However, cabbage and buckwheat are both nutritionally rich and slavic staples. Maybe I could use this finding to trust dishes that feature these ingredients.