Nutritional analysis (Nutrimeter®)

Recipes are composed of ingredients, which allow them to be selected during searches, and to be filtered according to profiles (see the section on ingredients)

For each ingredient included in a recipe, the “What Foods” team added foods whose nutritional makeup are provided by two public databases :

  • • Ciqual (Observatory of the nutritional composition of foods, affiliated to the French Ministry of Health), which contains over 1400 generic foods consumed in France
  • • Fcen (Ministry of Health of Canada), with over 5804 generic foods

For basic ingredients, these databases allow you to choose several foods according to their state that determines their nutritional values, as shown in the example of cauliflower :

It is thanks to these databases and to the description of the composition of recipes, that it is possible to make nutritional analysis of your diet, as shown in the following diagram :

Physiological and nutritional profile

The information necessary to determine the values of Recommended Dietary Intake (RDI) of the thirty nutrients for a person are:

  • Sex
  • Age
  • Weight
  • For a woman, if she is pregnant or if she is breastfeeding
  • • The level of physical activity, which is a coefficient between 1.2 (low mobility) and 2.0 (work strength sports)

The RDI are thus customized for each individual, based on the recommendations listed in the reference book by the CNERNA-CNRS "Recommended dietary intake for the French population" coordinated by Ambroise Martin. Fact sheets that explain the values and safe limits of toxicity are available on the site What-Foods.com, and are available when consulting the results of the calculation of the RDI by the Nutrimeter ®..

It is possible, at the request of a nutritionist or dietician, to modify the standard RDI for each nutrient so that the Nutritimeter ® becomes a useful monitoring tool for professionals.

The nutritional analysis of one’s food intake can be made for a day, or the period during food consumption was logged. The result is a graph (histogram) which gives, for each of the thirty nutrients analyzed by the Nutrimeter ®, a ratio relative to the RDI value set for the physiological profile.

The 100% value for a nutrient on the histogram corresponds to match between what is consumed and what is recommended (RDI). This is what is called a balanced diet.
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