MoodyFood

Discover better food for a better mood :)

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Inspiration

Food has a huge impact on humans. Having a healthier diet has numerous benefits and can significantly improve physical and mental health. Healthy eating habits have been shown to decrease the likelihood of heart attacks and decrease the symptoms of depressioon. However, while most people believe that it's important to eat healthily, it's hard to adopt a healthier eating habit. Current options to help people start eating healthy are either extremely stressful with specific calorie targets that need to be hit or information that isn't personalized to the user. Therefore, I wanted to create an app that allows users to start adopting healthier eating habits centered around how the food makes them feel instead of calorie counting.

What it does

MoodyFood takes in information about the user's current dietary habits and calculates what nutrients they are lacking (or consuming in excess) to determine what foods they should consume to have a more well-balanced diet. Users can choose how much of their diet they want to change so that they can gradually ease into a healthier diet based on what they believe is attainable. By having users set the difficulty level of their goals, they are more motivated to achieve the goals since they believe the goal is attainable. After gathering the initial data, MoodyFood recommends meals for the user. Users can also explore other meals based on how they want to change their mood. MoodyFood grows with the user and changes the recommendations based on the recipes and foods that the user consumes to make sure that their diet (and mood) is always improving.

How we built it

First, I looked at datasets and APIs on food to gather nutritional information on food and recipes. Recipes were gathered from various scrapers online and the nutritional information on food was gathered from the USDA food API. From there, I researched ingredients/types of food that helped boost mood, boost energy, reduce anxiety, and increase focus. I then iterated through recipe ingredients to see if the ingredients found in the recipes are included in the ingredients that improve emotions. Using the input data and the USDSA food API, I have a snapshot of the user's macronutrients and I compare it to the macronutrient level the user should be at according to DRIS (dietary reference intake). Recipes that help balance out the user's DRIS are used for the daily recommendations.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was that the dataset on food wasn't labeled with the categories I wanted such as Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. In addition, the DRIS was not available as an API and since I am not a nutrionist I was unsure of how to calculate the nutrients that the user should have. Since I was working on this hackathon alone, time was a huge issue since the hackathon is a short period of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of the idea and how it can help people adopt healthier eating habits without making them stressed and overly critical about everything that they eat. If people are overly critical of everything they eat, then they start to develop an unhealthy relationship with food. Therefore, this app helps people transition into healthier eating habits through self-made goals and the discovery of fun recipes. I am proud that given the time constraint, the frontend's navigation is fully linked and all the pages are functional. I am also proud that I learned a lot more about food in the process and how it can impact people's mood.

What we learned

I learned a lot about using hooks in react and linking pages together in react. I also learned a lot about nutrition and the impact of nutrition on the body. Since I was short on time, I learned how to quickly determine if a feature was essential to the app. Therefore, I was able to understand the core value of the app more quickly and prioritize the importance of features.

What's next for MoodyFood

I want to do some market research to see how potential users feel about healthy eating and wether MoodyFood is a good application to incorporate into the lives of people who are trying to eat healthier. I would also like to clean up the UI and the backend. I would also like to create a better ML algorithm that takes into consideration more factors such as dietary constraints and ingredient preferences.

Some Links About Food and Mood Boost Mood: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/mood-food Boost Energy: https://integrisok.com/resources/on-your-health/2021/september/healthy-foods-that-give-you-energy Reduce Anxiety: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/6-foods-that-reduce-anxiety Increase Focus: https://www.betterup.com/blog/food-for-concentration

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