Recipes for Cancer Patients

A sample filter specification and some of its results
A code snippet of our getrecipe function

Inspiration

The inspiration for this came from the fact that our group member's family member fought cancer. One of the biggest worries this family member and her family had while she was fighting cancer was what food she could eat that would not be harmful for her. Thinking back to this situation, we realized that although there is a ton of research on what specific ingredients are good for cancer patients, there is a severe lack of resources that detailed safe foods to make. Our goal when making this project was to help make the lives of those who are fighting cancer as well as their loved ones easier.

What it does

Our project uses the spoonacular API to filter recipes based on the user's specifications of meal type (Breakfast, Main Course, Appetizer, Drink) and the ingredients they wish to include. All the ingredients listed are beneficial to Cancer patients and survivors. There will be up to 16 results and the website will display an image and a title of the food, as well as a link to the recipe. The ingredients listed are divided into six categories: Vegetables, Dairy, Protein, Grains, Legumes, and Other.

To use our project, the user would first check off the ingredients they desire as well as a meal type, though they need not do both if they do not wish to. In order to display the results of their query, the user must click on the 'Filter' button. If there are no relevant results, the user will get an error message.

How we built it

We built our project using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we had issues when our queries returned no results. We also had issues with formatting the images and their corresponding links so that they appeared one after the other because fetching the image & title and fetching its source url require two separate API requests. Fortunately, we were able to resolve these issues through a lot of debugging!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud of our ability to develop the frontend for our project due to our lack of experience with web development. We are especially proud of our incorporation of the spoonacular API and our ability to make API requests using user input, since this was our first time using an API.

What we learned

We learned more about frontend development and the incorporation of APIs in our code. Prior to this project, we had close to no experience with these concepts.

What's next for Recipes for Cancer Patients

Some future features we may add to our project include:

Warnings for recipes that include ingredients that are harmful to cancer patients in large amounts.
A friends system since a sense of community is important among cancer patients
To create an authentication system so that users can save the recipes they liked.