FoodCalc is a simple program to
calculate intake of nutrients when given a list with amounts of different foods consumed
and another list with contents of nutrients for the different foods (a food
table).
The calculations done by FoodCalc are rather simple, however it does have some flexibility
especially in how to do reductions of nutrients when foods are cooked by
boiling, frying,
etc.
FoodCalc is very efficient, making it possibly quite quickly to compute intakes for tens
or even hundreds of thousands of people with each hundreds or thousands of foods
consumed.
The time taken for FoodCalc to do the calculations will largely depend on the computer
used. At the time of writing FoodCalc is available for Windows 95/98/NT and for
HP-UX.
Also the source code is available, and can be easily compiled on most systems that has an
ANSI C compiler.
The FoodCalc program was written by Jesper Lauritsen. The writing of the initial
version and some of the later changes was largely funded by the Diet, Cancer and Health project at
the Danish Cancer Society.
The program is in the public domain. You may use it and change it in any way you
like. However,
you should always give due credit to Jesper Lauritsen. Also, neither Jesper Lauritsen nor
the Danish Cancer Society can in no way be responsibly for any damages done by this
program. Also, neither Jesper Lauritsen nor the Danish Cancer Society gives any guaranties
what so ever regarding the functionality or correctness of this program. Basically you can
use it if you want, but if it does not follow your expectations, you have no one to blame
but your self. If you have any questions, comments, bug reports, bug fixes, or
enhancements, please send e-mail to Jesper
Lauritsen. |
| Why you should not
use FoodCalc: |
|
If you want to calculate nutrient intakes just for your self
and a few friends. FoodCalc is not at all useful for this! |
|
If you do not have a food table. FoodCalc does not
include a food table. However it can be used with the large USDA food table which is
freely available, and a subset of the Danish national food table is available for download
here. |
|
If you do not have any experience with command based
statistical tools like SAS or SPSS or you do not have the help of a programmer. FoodCalc
has no Windows, forms or buttons - you have to write small specialized programs! |
|
If you do not have a statistical and/or graphical
package.
FoodCalc can not produce any (non-trivial) statistics nor any graphs. |
|
If you do not have knowledge about how food calculations are
done. FoodCalc has lots of different ways of doing the calculations - you need to be able
to choose and specify those you need. |
| Why you should
use FoodCalc: |
|
If you have data for thousands, or tens of
thousands, or
hundred of thousands of persons. FoodCalc is very fast. |
|
If you have a food table. FoodCalc can be used with almost
any food table. |
|
If you have your data in a database system, an interview
support system or some other system or in text files. It is usually quite easy to export
the data to a form readable by FoodCalc. |
|
If you want full control on how the food calculations are
done. FoodCalc can do a lot of different specialized calculations. |
|
If you want to analyze the resulting data in your favorite
statistical and graphical package. The results of FoodCalc calculations can usually very
easily be read into most packages. |
|
If you want to do food calculations as a part of a larger
system. FoodCalc can effectively be integrated in many environments and it is highly
portable. |
|