WolframAlpha for Nutrition Professionals

July 11, 2009 by Colby
Filed under: Fitness 2.0, Nutrition 2.0, Search Engine 

WolframAlpha, a powerful search engine that was just launched in May this year, has a few useful tricks that deal with nutrition data.

For example, you can type in any food, and the amount, and WA will give you the nutrition data in a label form along with more information than you’ll probably ever need.  It also will recognize brands, so for example, entering “2 mcdonalds double cheeseburgers” yields the calculated information: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+mcdonalds+double+cheeseburger

WA can also add the data from multiple food items, so if you have an interesting meal of corn flakes, orange juice, a peach, and a beer, the resulting nutrition facts are like so: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+1+bowl+of+corn+flakes+%2B+a+glass+of+OJ+%2B+1+peach+%2B+1+beer

You can see that WA gives options to choose from specific brands (or alternate sizes) if they are not specified, and you can also separate the facts of each item.

Specific nutrients can be easily calculated, for example if I wanted to know the vitamin C content of 5 oranges, I enter “vitamin C in 5 oranges” and it gives the answer: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=vitamin+C+in+5+oranges

Other specific examples are listed here: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/examples/FoodAndNutrition.html

Other relevant data examples for body composition, exercise, and more (lots of relevant possibilities for MNT) can be found here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/HealthAndMedicine.html

Please comment if you find other uses.

Sources of the data are listed at the bottom.

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