Nutrition news and software, nutrition books

Energy requirements, RDIs

Actual food intake

Body size

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Energy requirement, RDI calculators

Basal metabolism calculator

Java applet that calculates your BMR based on height, weight, age, gender and activity level. Requires Java-capable browser.

Fast food content calculator: Cyberdiet

Returns information on food alternatives within specified types of food within the major fast food chains, within constraints that you enter regarding desired energy and macronutrient percentage content.

Energy and BMI calculators: Healthcalc

Commercial web site offers simple calculation of energy requirements based on gender and activity level, particular as applied to working out on treadmill.

Energy requirement calculator: Hohenheim University

Allows more finely detailed input of exertion levels (in hours) than most on-line calculators of this kind.

HomeArts calculators

HomeArts is the home page for Hearst publications (like Good Housekeeping.). This site has a range of simple but amusing calculators.

Calorie Calculator: Stevens Creek Software

Calculates daily kcal requirement (including resting rate) based on weight and sports activity (restricted range of choices but allows distances run,swum etc). No allowance for gender.

BMR and BMI Calculator: Techware Corporation

Calculates your "resting and active metabolic rates, which can estimate your ideal calorie intake per day. This will also calculate your healthy weight range according to the U.S. Surgeon General." In practice the only inputs are weight and height (Imperial units) and activity level in the simplest of terms.

You Are What You Eat: A Guide to Good Nutrition

This is something special. Put together by students from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (in Virginia, USA), an enormous amount of work, ingenuity and programming flare has gone into producing a site offering resources to encourage healthy eating.

The site offers a profusion of tools on nutrient content, dietary analysis, food label information. It has basic nutrient information. It has calculators that allow you to work out your own nutrition profile and so doing calculates your individual RDVs. Uses Metric and Imperial units and activity level.

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Actual food intake calculators

Pick of the crop   Nutritiondata Generates nutrition labels for large data base of nearly 7,000 foods, including many fast foods. Also food additive identifier. Interactive Healthy Eating Index A neat little package from the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion which assesses diet quality based on your input of what foods you eat.

Dietary Screeners: Berkeley Nutrition Services

Two on-line questionnaire dietary assessment tools from Berkeley Nutrition Services, a company offering commercial nutrition assessment . One quiz assesses your frequency of fibre, fruit and vegetable consumption', whilst the other looks at fat intake, both basd on a few simple frequency questions. They also offer a complete take-home dietary assessment as a commercial service.

Calorie Counter: Bowman Gray School Medicine

Chose serving portions from a limited range of foods for each main meal, snacks and drinks. Returns macronutrient composition expressed as % daily requirements.

 

Drive Through Diet: Wake Forest/Bowman Gray University

"Look up the nutritional information of the seven largest fast food chains in America." Well done site which allows you to enter serving portions of foods from main fast food chains in the US and get a Java script calculator work out the calorie and macronutrient intake represented. Also can answer questions on which of that chain's foods are the highest in fat, calories etc. Very useful contribution. The hospital's Center for Research on Human Nutrition and Chronic Disease Prevention has anothjer web site with a variety of calculators, such as calorie counter, eating disorders quiz, fitness calculator etc.

Hohenheim University calculators

A most interesting set of calculators (although entirely in German):

• Food frequency based: provides nutient analysis, based on checking the number of serves of a range of foods, which you can do either daily, weekly or monthly and by meal. Results are also compared with RDI from simple input of age, gender, activity level.
• Nutrient analysis calculator: based on dietary record.
• Diet prescription calculator: returns recommended foods based on input of desired intake of specified nutrients.

How's Your Diet: Bowman Gray School Medicine

"..walks you through the 1995 Dietary Guidelines for Americans so you can see how well your own eating habits measure up to the national standards. Then, the Medficts test developed for NIH research, will tell you in more detail if the fat content of your diet is within the 1995 dietary guidelines. It will examine the fat content of your diet and will teach you about high and low-fat food choices." In fact the first part is just a simplistic collation of whether your inputted serves of each food group matches the recommended number. Then this primitive food frequency approach is elaborated into more detailed food groups (including low and high fat) in which you enter frequency and serving size (small, medium and large) and the calculator returns the macronutrient intake with some simple comments, all within a java script box.

The Diet Problem: calculator

"The goal of the diet problem is to find the cheapest combination of foods that will satisfy all the daily nutritional requirements of a person." At present this feature is not working due to technical problems, but they say on the site that they are intending to fix that.

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Body size calculators

Pick of the crop BMI calculator: Cyberdiet Apart from calculating the BMI (imperial units), after asking a few very simple questions, it produces a nice graph showing your BMI and with simple explanation of what your BMI value means in health terms, as well as a suggested diet plan.

Shape Up America

"Shape Up America!" is an initiative to help maintain healthy body weight, and this web site has a Body Fat lab section, which includes an explanation of BMI plus a cross-table of height vs weight showing BMI.

Biofitness body fat calculator.

Based on free tape measurement and weight (they don't state which units this is supppoed to be in). you have to give them your email address to get the result.

Energy and BMI calculators: Healthcalc

Commercial web site offers simple calculation of energy requirements based on gender and activity level, particular as applied to working out on treadmill.

Healthy Body Calculator (Ask the Dietitian)

One of the better weight and dietary lifestyle calculators, with good use of colour and graphics to analyse and display "body weight range, body mass index (BMI), body frame size, waist to hip ratio and personalized nutrition facts for calories and fat grams." It does however require some technical inputs like elbow diameter and wieght:hip ratio that might be beyond some lay visitors.

Body Fat Calculator: "The Zone"

Java applet to calculate your body fat. Part of a project related to the best-seller on weight controlling diet called The Zone.

Are You Overweight?: P.Lutus

Simple java scripting gives you a BMI figure in response to input of height and weight, which can be in either metric or imperial units. A curious addition is that it tells you how much you would weigh on the various planets of the solar system!

Roche weight loss tools

BMI and energy requirement calculators (metric and imperial units). BMI calculator gives short commentary on significance of the BMI returned

BMR and BMI Calculator: Techware Corporation

Calculates your "resting and active metabolic rates, which can estimate your ideal calorie intake per day. This will also calculate your healthy weight range according to the U.S. Surgeon General." In practice the only inputs are weight and height (Imperial units) and activity level in the simplest of terms.

Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute: BMI calculator

Simple Imperial units only calculator, with elementary explanation of meaning of result.

NHLBI BMI calculator

Cute graphic but otherwise very tame calculator in Imperial units.

 

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Other calculators, quizes

Heart risk calculators

List of several calculators, mostly based on Framingham study equations. A number of others on the Internet include:

• National Cholesterol Education Program
• UK Public Health Knowledge web site
• Blackheath Medical Centre

 

Center for Science in the Public Interest: Rate Your Diet Quiz

Lots of questions on food and food group consumption leads to a point score response, but not specific to each answer. Comes from a public health oriented site.

Cholesterol calculator

Cholesterol calculator and dietary advice.

Fit Or Not Quiz: Bowman Gray School Medicine

"This Quiz will determine if your weight is reasonable for your height and will help you to design a program of diet and physical activity so that you can achieve a reasonable weight. Information for this module comes from the following sources: United States Department of Agriculture, Department of Heath and Human Services, American Heart Association, Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, American Journal Of Preventive Cardiology, Journal of Medicine Science and Sports Exercise."

Fast food content calculator: Cyberdiet

Returns information on food alternatives within specified types of food within the major fast food chains, within constraints that you enter regarding desired energy and macronutrient percentage content.

Foodlines

Site set up by private individuals from Canada, with some on-line calculators and unit converters, lay information on diet and health, recipes and also sells diet analysis software.

You First Health risk assessment

Interesting page to while away 15 minutes by filling in a health questionnaire and getting a detailed response based on common sense approach to prevention and healthy lifestyle. Simple nutrition assessment based on weight, exercise, fat and food group consumption is part of it.

Wake Forest University calculators

Actually part the medical centre, this Centre's web site is a great resource, with various interactive tools, such as calorie counter, eating disorders quiz, fitness calculator etc.

Women's Health Interactive

Interactive nutrition quiz focussed on a healthy diet for preventing heart disease. The quiz provides an automated scored response and educational material relevant to the topic.

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