Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

This is neat. I've spent a lot of time thinking about implementing something similar for my company Eat This Much, but end up pushing it off in favor of focusing on our core meal planning features.

When something doesn't have a reference listed, and just says "sourced from a publicly available first-party datasource", what does that mean? Crawled from other sources and you'd prefer not to say? The wording does feel a little sketchy when contrasted with entries that do list sources.

When something does list references that don't seem super close to the actual food, what is the process like there for interpreting those values? Example, this Chicken Salad inheriting from Chicken Spread: https://www.opennutrition.app/search/chicken-salad-37mAX17YX...

The quality of the data might feel rough now, but I can see this being valuable for our users even if it's just an opt-in "show estimated micronutrients" or something. Would require labeling values as not being directly from a source of truth.

One thing that a lot of people are missing is that there is already a lot of inaccurate nutrition data out there. Even on information directly from the manufacturer, sometimes there are errors, or just old versions of the product that never get scrubbed from the internet (I imagine the latter case would be tricky for an LLM to deal with too). Just logging your dietary intake in any form will get you 80% of the benefit of tracking via some self awareness of your intake. Of course, it's an easy argument to point out that if you had the choice between verified data and fuzzy LLM data, you should go for the human verified data (for now).

Thank you for your questions and feedback.

> When something doesn't have a reference listed, and just says "sourced from a publicly available first-party datasource", what does that mean?

It depends, and the degree to which it depends is why the citation is ambiguous (although it is true, if imprecise). My goal is to individually cite the individual nutrients but it was simply too costly and time-consuming at the stage of the project at which I did this work.

> what is the process like there for interpreting those values?

Because the degree to which something in the database might be related to those values is so varied, it depends. The reasoning agent had access to those database entires, which is helpful because they tend to contain micronutrient data. It also had access to web data, as well as its own world knowledge, and considers sources in that order. Ultimately it was left up to the agent to decide what the most reasonable fit for each food was, thinking through what an average user likely meant by that entry (e.g. a typical user probably assumes a 'Tomato' is raw), and then to choose the best sources from there. For the chicken salad, it used approximate micronutrient values from the listed references to inform its answer, but adapted the end values for how the dish is described in the description.

> if you had the choice between verified data and fuzzy LLM data, you should go for the human verified data (for now)

Human verification isn't free, and that means it is not available to a lot of people who can't or don't want to pay for something. But if that's something that someone values, I would certainly not diss the human effort!