HealthyEats

Inspiration

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I did a poor job of tracking my diet, skipping meals while also eating tons of junk food. As a result, I lost 20 pounds and had very elevated cholesterol levels. Since then, I struggled to recover my weight while also lowering my cholesterol levels, simply because I had no idea what foods could properly fit my needs. This resulted in me being too scared to eat certain foods while also being unaware of how harmful consistently consuming certain foods could be. With HealthyEats, I want to make it easier for people like myself to gain quick and easy access of specific nutritional values of food and clarity on whether that item is safe to consume based on their dietary and health needs.

What it does

The website prompts a user to input any type of food or ingredient, then searches a large database of food. Based the user's needs, whether it's to account for diabetes or eating higher protein, it will grab the specified nutritional value and make a decision whether the item is safe for consumption, as well as displaying the important nutritional value for it.

How we built it

The frontend was designed by me with HTML and CSS. The actual search engine implemented through the Food Data Central API, which allowed me search a large database of food while also having access to a large variety of nutritional facts for each item in the database. I used node.js to fetch the data in the background and also used plain JavaScript to display the correct data according to user choices.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge wasn't building the app, but the fact that I did it alone. There were a bunch more ideas for functionality and usage that I would've loved to implement, but due to the short time constraint I had to cut down on a lot of it.

Additionally, this is my first time using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a setting such as a Hackathon, so it was even more difficult for me to actually produce the ideas I sought out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Besides completing my basic goal with coding/marking languages I'm unfamiliar with, I'm most proud of being implementing an API for the first time within a project.

What we learned

I learned how to make an HTML website responsive with JavaScript, as well as how to implement an API within my JavaScript program.

What's next for HealthyEats

I hope to implement more accurate food decisions, as things such as high cholesterol do not solely rely on cholesterol levels, but also fats. I also want to allow users to implement a list for the input so that the user could potentially list out multiple items they've eaten in a day and measure if this satisfies their dietary requirements for the day or not.

Built With

• css
• fooddata-central-api
• html
• javascript
• node.js