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Nutrition Information on the Web

My younger son has developed a sudden interest in the nutritional content of foods. "Mommy, how much Vitamin C is in my apple?" he asked me yesterday. So we've been spending quite a bit of time at nutrition-related web sites. Unfortunately, the ones with enough detail to answer my son's questions aren't the friendliest ones on the Internet. My kingdom for a query interface. That is, I searched in vain for a page where I could select the food and the vitamin I was interested in, formatted just like my son's question, "What percent of the RDA for (choose nutrient) is in (choose food). Sounds like a great web site opportunity for some enterprising developer out there!

But the information is there if you're willing to read through some dense tables. There are really two questions: (1) how much of a given nutrient is in a certain food, and (2) how much of a given nutrient do I need every day. For Question 1, you can search for the food you're interested in on this page:

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

The second question, regarding recommended daily intake, is addressed on this page:
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/etext/000105.html#q2

The Dietary Intake Reference table links give you detailed requirements based on gender and age. They include minimum and maximum amounts recommended for good health, as well as the recommended daily allowances.

 

   

 

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