CulturEat

Inspiration

As 3 immigrant women of color, we recognize the lack of accessible nutrition guidance for people of color. Western ideas of healthy eating and fitness exclude other cultures, a contributing factor to health disparities among many others. We believe in the importance of being able to get personalized meal plans and dietary recommendations that take into account cultural background, preferences, and dietary restrictions.

What it does

CulturEat sets out to address this problem by providing a calorie tracker for users to keep track of their fitness goals and calorie intake. We also provide a platform for users to share and learn about different cuisines along with their health benefits and the origin surrounding the dish. Our platform makes it easy for writers to incorporate calories and other nutrient info into their posts. Our search and categorization system allows readers to easily find the content they're interested in and explore. Furthermore, writers can also share tips about eating, exercise, and even dances that are in their culture. We hope to turn this into a comprehensive resource for promoting culinary diversity, healthy living, and cultural exchange. CulturEat not only provides personalized guidance but also celebrates the diversity of dietary traditions and promotes health within the context of those cultures.

How we built it

We used React framework, JS, HTML, and CSS to create the UI for our website.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to integrate Terra API Graph to help users track their progress over time by providing visualizations, but we got cross-origin error due to Terra API being written in Python while we were working in JavaScript. We were also unable to gain access to a user_id because of the lack of a physical watch.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned

We were able to come together and identify the need for a cultural shift in mainstream narratives of fitness. By utilizing technology to promote achievable means of fitness among underrepresented communities, we hope to bridge the gap between culture and fitness.
We learned how to use React frameworks to implement our UI.
We made it through our first hackathon! :D

What's next for CulturEat

In the future, we hope to create additional features including:

integration Google Maps API and TerraAPI to make suggestions to local, ethnic restaurants based on the user’s health levels, fitness goals, and location. Our app will serve as an intermediary between restaurants that can input their dishes' ingredients and nutritional information and users who can access this information and see their restaurant as recommendations.
implementation of a scanner for users to take images of their food/ingredients for a more automated and user-friendly process of inputting calorie intake and calculation using computer vision.