Foods from local African, Asian, and Afro-Caribbean regions.
Software is to analyse the nutrients in their 3 day or 5 day food diaries.
You may need to work with the companies that develop software by providing them hard data (results from actual analyses) for those exotic foods. Many of the current nutritional analyses software use the data from the existing nutritional composition databases (e.g. USDA nutrient database (Handbook 8), other national food composition databases; historic data sources). Complete nutritional composition of many exotic foods around the world are not readily available.
Thank you for this, I am trying to work with the developers but I am not sure if the nutritionist in Africa have something they are using already to calculate nutrient content of foods from the dietary intake food diaries.
One of my students is working in Tanzania and we have to estimate some of the nutrients using published data and USDA data. Love to see of you have located anyone there with existing software. Good luck with your search.
Thank you Amarat, its interesting to know that they are using USDA data but there are some food products which are not in that database, how do they estimate their nutrient content and is that a true representation of their nutritional status? I have gotten in contact with one of the software developers and now trying to work out what do they have in their "global database" will let you know as soon as I establish what it means and if it can be useful in the Afro- Carribean diets.
Isabella, the USDA Nutrient Database was created as one of the tools to help U.S. people eat better and make better food choices. This online database is based on the food compositional data from the USDA Agricultural Hand Book 8 (Food Compositions). The USDA Hand Book 8 (Food Composition Handbook) was first published in the 1950s (I think) and being updated as new data are available.
The hand book 8 used to be in paper format and in the last 20 years or so, the USDA put it into a searchable online database. This database is now connected to the Food Frequency Questionnaires which is administered by the food assistant programs (SNAPEd and EFFNEP) to determine changes in food consumption pattern for selected groups of US populations.
Needless to say this is why the foods in the USDA Nutrient Data Base is based on typical foods which are available in the US. In the late 1980s the USDA had updated several of food items in the handbook 8 (tropical fruits, seafood, low fat/reduced fat food products), and at that time the University of Georgia was one of the Universities getting contract to do the nutritional analyses of some of those products. Actually, I was working on a research assistantship (with my former advisor) to work on the 35 tropical fruits and some of my other labmates were working on other products.
Speaking for the items that we worked on at that time, for plant products, we collected samples twice a year (for seasonal variation) and for products that come out once a year, we do the sampling for two years.
From my years of experience with food composition and analyses, I can say that it would give some indicator of nutrient contents, but will not totally represent true nutritional status of people. There are a lot of variations in those data. Because complete nutrient analyses is very expensive, the sample size for some entry of the USDA database as low as one sample. In some cases there are more samples. Furthermore, when people say they eat something, they may not and the only way to know is to do wht blood work. Which nutrients are you looking for? The link below will give you some additional information. Sorry for a long answer.
http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/80400530/pdf/fndds/fndds5_doc.pdf
Thank you for the information apparently RSA has software specifically for their foods only and I managed to get a website of a food dealer http://www.zambezifoods.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=43_76
these foods have nutritional information but I have not found the database for the country.
Patrick thank you very much for the information the second link is very close to what I am looking for and will play around with the software and will let you know the progress.
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