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foodcounts
was developed and is owned by
Dr Nick Allott and
Mike
Allott
foodcounts is an individual food management system that
relies on measuring and analysing what we eat in order to encourage
healthy eating and to promote general well-being
foodcounts
was conceived in 1999
years ago by a small group of contract system designers and
outlined in a report in 2001.
The internet domain was purchased in February 2000. The trademark
and software specification was registered with the UK Patent Office
in November 2000.
foodcounts, as a food management system, was first presented
as a
funding proposal
to the DTI in 2003, under the Smart
Feasibility award and inspired by the Foresight Directive
Fundamental foods
Food
Diary (current)
Recommended daily
allowances
Other pages:
Favourite foods
Food Diary by Mobile phone
Nutrition monitoring
Macronutrients
Calorie-comparisons
Commons Select
Submission
Traffic lights proposal
National-nutrient-database
Infopods-food information
food-counts/new_images
Pages summary
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What does foodcounts®
mean?
The
foodcounts® slogan has two meanings. First, it means
food is necessary to, and determines the quality of our existence.
Second, it means food has mathematical values - both in terms of
nutritional benefits and in terms of environmental cost.
Taken together,
foodcounts®
means an information-logic designed to promote
nutrition monitoring using a food diary system to add-up our daily intake of:
In essence,
foodcounts®
is a system for selecting and measuring what we eat , following
EU guidelines on daily intake levels,
and within an optimal diet-economy.
Diet, and nutrition optimality
The
foodcounts®
food diary system will provide an important tool to gather
information on our daily diet and to analyse its
composition. It does not offer guidance on food selection or
food choice, other than to rely on the advice and
recommendations of public health
authorities and to rely on the golden rule of "five-a-day".
We define optimal nutrition as a diet that follows the
guidelines set by by these recognised public health bodies
and in the main we adopt those
guidelines set by the
European Union (although we also offer comparisons with
those guidelines set by UK and US authorities where there
are significant differences).
Optimal nutrition relies on a scientific
mainstream consensus and seeks to avoid the
information-anarchy of nutrition exceptionalists and cranks
Essential to optimal nutrition is
palatability: a diet that is not pleasing to an individual's
taste is unlikely to be sustained.
We only monitor the intake of
those nutrients that are recognised as essential to human
health and for which composition tables (analysed-food-items) are maintained under the separate
authorities of the UK and US governments. These nutrients
are the Calorie (energy-giving)
macronutrients of Protein,
the 5 types of Fats, the 6 types of Carbohydrates, the non-energy nutrients of fibre
and salt, plus the 12 named vitamins and the 15 named
minerals which make up the
micronutrients for which recommended daily intake levels are
published.
In all we are monitoring 41
macronutrients and micronutrients contained within a preferred personal diet, and
targeting optimal nutrition as the goal
(either in the real sense or in a theoretical sense).
Broader efficiencies
of pursuing Nutrition Optimality will flow
from an added inventory-system to allow
cost-benefit-analysis
comparisons between fresh, frozen, canned or dried variations
of the same foodstuffs. The inventory-system also allows for
nutritional degradation-values, and wastage-values to be counted.
Why
use foodcounts®
?
Instinct and appetite will do much to
determine our physical and mental wellbeing. When our instinct or
appetite causes us to deviate from a healthy balance, either because
of our CBA gene, or because of an excessive taste for those things
we all know to be unhealthy, then some form of intervention is
desirable. If so, there has to a system for corrective
action, otherwise our basic instincts will always prevail.
Foodcounts is such a system. It turns food-selection and
nutrition-monitoring into a disciplined daily ritual.
Why ritualise a food diary system of nutrition monitoring?
People
who are healthy and instinctively eat a balanced diet do not
need to monitor their daily food intake.
However, adopting a systemic approach (if only for given periods) will
enable us to gain a better understanding of individualised food-therapeutics, and will be of particular benefit to
those with specific health conditions associated with
unbalanced eating. More specifically it offers a snapshot of
optimal nutritional balance based on personal
taste, rather than an imposed dietary regime. Most important, its
demands acquiring a nutritional and environmental knowledge of our preferred
foods which overtime becomes second nature: foodcounting
can become as natural as ABC.
Key
definition: Fundamental Foods
To
enable us to simplify the process of nutrition monitoring we
have coined the term
fundamental foods
to describe a foodstuff that is a readily available whole-food and
one that has also been analysed for its nutrient composition by
either, or both, of the 2 national organisations responsible for
the maintenance of nutrient data (the American USDA nutrient
database and the British McCance and Widdowson composition of
foods database). We have isolated around 200 such fundamental foods
(named foods) which essentially constitute the ingredients of
the English speaking
first-world diet. In reality, for most individuals and
families the number of fundamental foods in a monthly shopping
basket will be less than 100. These foodstuffs are coded to form the
core-identities of our system. Using a proprietary wizard
these fundamental foods map initially to all other
analysed food items (8,000), and ultimately to all
seller-food-items (25,000 +)
An on line food-diary system to encourage a diet of fundamental
foods
The
accuracy of nutrition monitoring is dependent on the proportion
of measurable fundamental foods contained within the daily diet.
Most seller-food-items (i.e. foods purchased in
food-stores and which are identifiable by a barcode) will have
been combined and processed from fundamental foods, and the
nutrition values of these composite foods will always be subject
to a margin of error. And, because nutrient analysis is by
sampling and never absolute,
margins of error vary
from 10% -100%. Moreover, the labelling of these composite
foods does not normally provide any detailed analysis of
micronutrients
(vitamins and minerals). Until all food manufacturers provide
full composition data in an accessible form, a daily diet that avoids
processed and convenience foods will always be easier to count
and will offer a more reliable and detailed nutrition analysis.
Healthy Eating: measured portions
The success of a food monitoring
system is very much dependent on the accuracy of weight
measurement and the ability to translate 100g composition tables
into recommended portions, or in estimating the size of any
given portion. A scale-measurement system coupled with the
imaging comparisons (as recommended by the
World Cancer Research Fund) will in due course stimulate
second-sensing in portion measurement sufficient to satisfy
meaningful nutrition monitoring.
The vocabulary of food:
resolving ambiguity
Those who consume food and those
who analyse food speak a different language, to an extent that
often-simple propositions concerning nutrition monitoring become
confusing. At worst, these ambiguities present a serious barrier
to a proper understanding on perhaps the most important consumer
subject that directly affect us all.
It would not be productive for us to present a word-list of all
food and nutrition related definitions (such glossaries are
widely available elsewhere). However in order to simplify this
presentation we now set down our definitions concerning those
core-meanings upon which our food diary system is configured.
So, here is the main semantic base of our food-diary-system
proposition:
-
Food: any nutritious substance that
people or animals eat or drink in order to maintain life and
growth
-
Foodstuff: a substance suitable for
consumption as food and forming a basic component of the
human diet
-
Food-value: the nutritional value of a
foodstuff
-
Whole food: a foodstuff that has been
minimally processed and is generally free from additives
-
Fundamental food: a whole food
that has been officially analysed to determine its
composition and that is a named-food within the the
British and American nutrient databases
-
Food-item: any foodstuff that
has been uniquely coded and can be identified (by and large)
from its code
-
Analysed-food-item: any foodstuff that
is itemised within either of the British or American
nutrient databases
-
Seller-food-item: any foodstuff that
has been itemised as part of the Universal Product Code
system and that can be identified by a unique barcode
-
Common food: a named whole food that is known
by most consumers and is available from most (EU)
food-sellers
A system to simplify food categories (food-id
™)
Food
is categorised in 2 ways. First, all food-sellers use
shopping-aisle systems (driven by consumer taste and
preference). Second, food analysts classify by nutritional type,
essentially using a taxonomy based on shared chemical features.
The foodcounts®
system of food categories (food-id
™) is based on the principles of
core-identity to create a
list of
fundamental foods
(and ingredient foods) so that the main consumer and scientific
information-sources can be harmonised, and thereby improve
consumer understanding and accessibility.
A diary is a system for
planning the future as well as recording the past
Most food diaries are essentially a
daily log of food already consumed and food diaries are now
recognised as an essential and well proven system if weight-loss
or weight gain is the prime objective. However the emphasis of
the foodcounts®
diary system is in forward planning, using a dairy in its more
general sense as a time management tool. Using precise
nutrition monitoring it offers a systematic road-map to an
optimal nutrient balance that satisfies the official EU guidelines on healthy eating (if this is our goal).
Nutrition monitoring: an
access-for-all ethos
We
give particular attention to the innovation recommendations
of the
Foresight FCCI Panel
in developing a system-design that allows for new, more
realistic standards of food categorisation and labelling; we
also allow for the provision of considerably increased
information on fundamental foods and food ingredients. In
particular all aspects of our data bank interface will
incorporate a free “access-for-all” ethos. Furthermore, by
profiling individual customer needs on health status and
general lifestyle choices, a range of freely available
enquiry applications are made possible, offering new options
on food selection.
The
existence of the Internet, with the add-on use of mobile
phone applications (apps), will provide the main on-line
food diary mechanism for nutrition monitoring. However, a
manual system based on flash cards, look-up tables and daily
entry sheets will form the educational core and offer a
universal first-level access . The licensed UK nutrient
database and the open-source nutrient database maintained in
the US will be consolidated to form the the prime nutrient
information source (available on line or in look-up tables).
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