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How can I completely clear my smartphone of all information?

Are there companies that sell access to nutritional information databases that I could subscribe to that a smartphone app could make use of via scanning bar codes and performing certain custom calculations?

  • When someone makes an Android/iPhone app that scans a food product's bar code and returns nutrition information on that food from a database, who made that database? I can see Weight Watchers doing their own, but surely not everybody reinvents the wheel on this every time somebody makes an app that does something similar. Does anyone sell access to such a database? If so, who is that? I want to make an app for Android phones and iPhones that people would use to scan a food product's bar code and get back certain results based on the food's nutritional information. To do this, it would have to recognize the product by its bar code (nothing new there) and query some mammoth database of food products that included the same nutritional info you see listed on the back of each food package (current apps out there prove that one or more data sources like this already exist). I can't/won't create such a database myself. But if somebody else offers access to such a database that they maintain and keep current, I'd pay to subscribe to it so my app could access it and then perform its own calculations on that info for a specialized purpose. If by some miracle that database is public and free, well then awesome, but I won't hold my breath. Someone like Weight Watchers might be big enough to be able to afford to make and maintain their own database, but I'm sure that the smaller or individual makers of other apps that do similar or related things would not reinvent that wheel from scratch each time. Surely there is a third party that maintains a nutritional info database and offers access for a fee. Do you know who, if anyone, maintains that kind of database and sells access to it?

  • Answer:

    The USDA has a free database: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

Askr at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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When I worked for NIH, we had an ancient FoxPro (!) database of nutrition information that we'd gotten from the FDA at one point that we were tasked with keeping updated. I'd hope that they'd migrated it to something newer since then, but I'd poke around at the FDA as a starting point.

Oktober

Thanks, Rusty. That's a useful resource and looks awfully close to what I'm after. Maybe it would work on some level, assuming it's queryable via a different channel than the public web interface. But I'm thinking that's not quite it. I'm looking for something that is a specific product associated with a specific bar code. So it might be the Wheat Thins Original Flavor 10oz box, for example, whereas that USDA database might have an entry for "crackers, wheat, regular" and then you pick some amount or another and get the nutrition values for it. When I see the various apps brag about themselves, they say things like "the largest food database of any app and growing". So that sounds like they're doing their own database. I don't know how they get all the info on all the products in all the stores, but that seems like it would be an insane task and a huge operation that never ended. That's why I was hoping some company did that for a living and sold the results.

Askr

They often crowd-source it out to their users. If you scan something that isn't in their database, you enter the nutritional information on the label yourself and tell them what it is, and (modulo some sanity checking, one would hope) later users scan the same barcode and get the information you entered. Sucks to be an early adopter. Have you seen https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=3d6b1275164981aa709ba9e53e6fb3b1&tab=ivl&tabmode=list? It's four companies which responded to a USDA call for vendors to provide what you're asking about. Maybe one of them would be a good place to ask?

hades

Oh, hey. http://gladson.com/SERVICES/NutritionDatabase/tabid/89/Default.aspx:Gladson offers the industry standard for nutritional databases

hades

Oh awesome, Hades. This is excellent information. Gonna contact 'em. Thanks!

Askr

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