does everyone run their food intake past these tools or do some of you trust your own instincts.?

I am capable of getting obsessive and I really don't even want to go there. But reading some of your posts makes me a bit wary that I might not be getting every thing that i need.

also do you have to weigh everything before you can feed into the computer - sounds really tedious.

thanks

hey FP. curiosity killed the cat for me. with lots of folks talking about nutritiondata and fitday, i decided to check it out for myself. not because i was worried about a deficiency or anything, since overall i feel great, lots of energy, etc. all apparent signs of good health. i guess i just want to be like the cool kids.

so i kept track of my intake for a day and entered them into both fitday and nutritiondata to see which one i liked better. you don't have to measure your food as you can enter quantity of individual foods or measurements (ex. 1 apple, or 1 cup apples). here's what i found out:

1) it took longer intially to enter my daily food into nutritiondata since you have to set up a personal "pantry" first, that is foods you generally eat are stored as part of your account, whereas with fitday you search on each food. fitday was faster to get started with, but then once i had my pantry set up, nutritiondata was faster. there is also the option with nutritiondata to store "recipes" - groups of foods in certain quantities you can save as a certain recipe name and choose the whole thing. that way you can analyze the nutrition of just the recipe, or just select the recipe as part of your daily intake (faster if you eat a lot of the same combos, or variations on a theme...).

2) nutritiondata had a lot more information and nutrient "reports" - graphical displays that made it easy to "see" exactly what was going on.

3) fitday was better at tracking/looking at your energy inputs and outputs, in terms of exercise. it has a lot of features that I would think would be good to use to track weight loss -- in addition to your weight you can enter all your measurements, etc. and monitor your progress. nutritiondata has only a "calories burned calculator" that seems almost an aside - it doesn't store any of your personal settings and you have to enter your height, weight, sex, etc. in each time, and the calories it calculates cannot be saved with your daily intake, etc.

i guess the name says it all. nutritiondata has more, well, nutrition data, and fitday is better at tracking/monitoring fitness and weight loss progression. i liked nutritiondata better for MY goals/style, since i am primarily interested in checking my diet for deficiencies, and am only planning on doing this for a short time or to do occasional spot-checks on my intake. i have learned alot of interesting and useful information so far - for instance, my sodium intake is way too high. and there are certain things like selenium, zinc, folic acid, etc. that i am not getting enough of. so i will be cutting way back on the nama shoyu and sea salt, and i ordered some brazil nuts online (as it turns out, selenium is virtually nonexistent in my diet. did you know one brazil nut a day offers more than the recommended daily allowance for selenium? it sounds like way more fun to eat a brazil nut every day than to take a supplement.) so i have found this a useful and interesting experiment so far.

good luck!

flipperjan Wrote:
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> does everyone run their food intake past these
> tools or do some of you trust your own
> instincts.?

No. I occasionally look up a particular nutrient to see if I am getting enough, and I have done the odd day or two of putting everything I eat in.

If you are worried though, you only need to do it everyday for a week or two. If that all checks out then you are probably ok.

Rob

--
Rob Hull - Funky Raw
My blog: [www.rawrob.com]

fipperjan,

I think when you're brand new to an idea, especially one as important as this, it's wise to research the resources available to you and pick a few to use, even if only for a time. Nutrition is important and just eating raw doesn't guarantee you a healthy, disease-free life. Many raw foodists suffer from deficiencies and this is almost always due to lack of research. This is your life. Your health. It's worth the time to use.

I'm new to this lifestyle myself and I intend to use nutritiondata.com myself, but I'm sure both are great! It just depends on which one works best with you. Keep us up on how you're progressing!

When you get really into weird and tropical raw food, it starts getting harder and harder to find nutritional information period. Fitday gives me a great idea of what I'm eating, but god only knows the real wealth packed in a raw mangosteen? What's really in my sprouts? How mineral-rich the soil that grew my food is?

thanks very much for your answers - great detail Butterfly.
I think I might give nutriondata.com a whirl.

phantom How mineral-rich the soil that grew my food is?[/quote]

This is a very good question. The research I've been reading for years has said that our soil is basically depleted of nutrients because it's been overworked. The ones we put back in aren't natural and isn't good enough. This is why I want to have my own place where I can grow much of my own food.

We've gotten away from God's original plan for eating and working the soil.
Exodus 23:10-11 says, “Plant and harvest your crops for six years, but let the land be renewed and lie uncultivated during the seventh year. Then let the poor among you harvest whatever grows on its own. Leave the rest for wild animals to eat. The same applies to your vineyards and olive groves."

By letting the land rest for a year, it gives the soil a chance to replenish itself. (It was also a way of trusting God for their needs.)

For the sake of money, we've moved away from this. Some people rotate their crops and some let a portion of their land rest for a season, but it's not enough anymore. The fact can't be ignored that our food is not nearly as nutrient-rich as it once was.

Thanks, maui_butterfly for sharing that. It sounds like most of the features of NutritionData that you missed in FitDay are present in the FitDay PC version, but that has it's limitations too and does have a one-time cost involved. When I first found FitDay, NutritionData didn't have a any of the diet management tools, just first class nutrition data. If you found a food there that wasn't in FitDay they had a tool to import the information directly into your FitDay account for you. I still prefer the Nutrition Search tool in FitDay PC to the one in NutritionData, but maybe they'll improve that one. (My notes on the features of FitDay PC which I value most are here: [flickr.com] )

Its great to go on fitday at lunch and only need about 13% more of RDA of zinc and a little sunlight, exceeding all other requirements.

I think this is a great thread because I highly doubt the people on here who eat a couple types of fruit a day are meeting nutritional requirements....and they are being encouraged, too, which is strange.....

[utopiankitchen.wordpress.com]

I totally agree with ya Utopian Life...that is why I try to eat as much variety as I can on any given day. I use FitDay to watch my zinc and selenium intakes as those are the ones I am usually low on... sometimes magnesium also (I supplement B12 and D).



My website: The Coconut Chronicles

Nutrition Data doesn't track zinc and selenium? These sites fascinate me and I'm looking forward to experimenting with them both. I don't care about the fitness tracking. Just a place to help with "nutrition data" so I can eventually have "fit day!"

Yes, nutritiondata.com does track zinc and selenium.

For those who have concerns, it might take some initial effort for the first week or so, but then it becomes old hat and you will know without having to calculate--most of it will be in your head. Green leaves tend to be good sources of most minerals and protein, which is why many of us eat a lot of them. Brazil nuts are good for selenium and methionine, flax is good for omega3, spinach for vitamin E, red bell pepper for vitamin C, a head of romaine has a little over 100 calories, a piece of fruit typically about 75 calories, each lb of f+v gives you about 10 g of fiber on average, etc.

I prefer cron-o-meter and nutritiondata to fitday because the first two provide individual fatty acid and amino acids. Also nutritiondata has a lot of neat search tools (which food in a certain category is highest in a particular nutrient, which food will best complement my existing amino acid intake, that sort of thing).

As a soon-to-be-ex-cooked-food-slug, who knew there was this whole other world going on around us? Not a spark of fascination has worn off on me about this whole experience yet. Just extraordinary. (Take into account my screen name. I really do live simply and it doesn't take much to amuse me! Ooh... shiny object... play, play, play...)

I got into the food nitty gritty about 20 years ago when I went veg. At the time I was using the food tables in the back of the cookbook "Laurel's Kitchen." I studied those tables and highlighted certain foods and values and I memorized most of it.

The online calculators make it so much easier.

Yeah, it's bizarre that most people have no idea what they are actually eating in terms of basic components. If they did, I am almost certain they'd choose differently at least most of the time.

In my opinion, for the beginning raw foodist, using the nutritional calculators is a worthwhile exercise. Do be aware that some of the nutrients listed, like protein, zinc, B12, etc (i.e. nutrients that come from meat), are politically influenced by the meat and dairy industries.

For most new raw foodists, the nutrient to watch is fat. It is very easy on a transitional raw diet to get fat intakes in excess of 60% of the caloric intake. A more reasonable fat intake for raw foodists is 20% of calories.

Once you play around with a few daily menus, and start to get an idea of what foods have what nutrients, you will no longer need the nutritional calculators.

I signed-up for Nutrition Data, but it's a lot to work with. (Remember, I live simply!) I'm trying to fill my pantry but I'm getting hung up on some terminology. Can anyone explain what these mean?

- Includes USDA Commodity Food.
- NLEA Serving

Also, I love tomatoes. I've always said that if I have tomatoes, lemon and garlic, I have groceries! Can you overdose on tomatoes, being a raw foodist? Do you use plain sundried tomatoes or the ones in oil?

There is another beautiful program which I prefer personally, called CRON-o-Meter because it is so easy. It is a very useful tool if you want to enter data frequently. You can download it for free, just google it and you will find it. You will like it!

Greenpower

Visit my website and my blog!

[www.natureshealingsecrets.com] (closed on Sundays)

NLEA = Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, this is the basis for current food labeling standards

a summary is here
[thomas.loc.gov];

USDA commodity = United States Department of Agriculture commodity food item, meens this food fits the description of a particular classification in their program. They buy particular food items in particular quantities for disbursement in federal programs.