Chapter 01 Choices
     Life is not cut and dry , set in stone, impervious to change. It is a collection of seconds making minutes, which make hours, then days, weeks, years, decades, centuries, millenniums and so on. In respect to the vastness of time passage, we are here for just brief instant. How long that instant will last may have more to do with how we tend to to our health and surroundings than may realize.

     I hadn't really thought of health and nutrician much. I was going along with the everyday. Get up, Clean up, go to work, come home, eat and sleep to do all over again the next day in succession. I wasn't experiencing any health issues but I took notice that two members of my family and two people I knew of in an online community were not so lucky. In all four cases they had dietary restrictions and the need to track and report calories, exercise, and nutritional data. So I watched as my sister gave herself insulin injections, took blood sugar readings and faught to figure out all the nutritional stuff for the meals she had. Wow it took 3 weeks for her to find and record all the info the doctor was asking for and this was for just one of 15 meals in that week!

     To get the nutrition information she had 3 rather incomplete books that each provided her part of the information and then had to fill in the gaps with online searches that tended to be a combination of fact and hear-say. Then she had to figure out the correct values of proportions she used and hope her use of the calculator was accurate. By the time she had concluded the first meal of the week she was exhausted. In a perfect world, Everybody would have excellent deductive and computational skills and would have readily available concise information. Our doctors and dietitians know the importance of the information in the treatment of a patient. Far too often it is ASSUMED to be available and in every household.

     For a good system there are some key points that will be needed. The primary must be ease of use with the least amount of interaction and computational work. This is seconded by the need for personal security of information. The third is a means of matching recipe' to ingredient use on a per meal per person use. Finally, it also must take into consideration exercise and readings for blood glucose and maybe other factors like blood oxygen and heart rates. It must be able to format this information in a clear / concise manor for presentation to a physician or dietitian. If I do it right the system should be able to be used by institutions too.

Initial planning and gathering

     The first step was to gather together all the information that I could find on nutritional information from online sources, and personal scans of labels on products locally. While the automated computer program did great, it compiled over 267,000 products which then had to sorted looking for duplicates and having the duplicates compared for accurate information. I used the scanned in product labels to form a basis for comparing online content. The screening process reduced the unique product listing down to 50,800+ entries. But what became evident was that each product had the information stated in different labels descriptions and different order. By the time I had usable information almost 2 years had passed. I settled on 16 basic labels in a strict order and rearranged the database entries to conform.

     Life progresses for some time with the data just sitting there. Then in 2013, I was on a forum reading a post from someone wanting the try and program up a database for his difficulties on diabetes. We exchanged for a while but it didn't go very far. He wanted an online program that would have the database, his and every other users info also online, no meal planning, and online reports to doctors and dietitians. The complexity of doing an online approach and the inherent risks was not going to be achievable at my level of expertise, and he lacked the programming skills to even fathom the extent of what he was asking for. I wish him well in his endeavors and it did one thing, it re sparked me into working on the program itself. To this end I put together a crude program to try and pull the pieces together.

     For the computer to work with the information fast and accurately, it doesn't need to be converting text to values at every turn. So I converted the database into a new one that is for computer use only. Made a client database to hold each person of the family or institution info, Made a planning database to hold 365 days of 6 meals per day, with link to the recipe' or item being consumed. Which brought me full circle back to the need for a recipe database. After all you don't want to have to calculate the values for each person and each recipe'. Better that the recipe' link to the ingredients being used and only recalculate when ingredients are changed. Last of the planning is to have the results able to be printed or faxed for the physician or dietition. An afterthought came with printing a list of ingredients needed for the meals planned for the week or month so you can go shopping.
     With no permanent plans, and no support towards the development and now faced with trying to create a recipe' database the can be added to this project ended. Now, 5 years later, I offer the part that is functional in this book in html form so it can be developed by someone with more desire than me. For the reader the data is invaluable as a resource.