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Introduction to FoodCalc

FoodCalc is a simple program to calculate intake of nutrients when given a list with amounts of different foods consumed and another list with contents of nutrients for the different foods (a food table).
Programs which does variants of such food calculations abound, but most have a fairly limited scope: Some are tied up to a specific food table; some requires that you type in all information, even if you already has the data in a computer file; and some do not handle reductions of nutrients due to cooking, or do so in an idiosyncratic way.

FoodCalc also has a limited scope, but inside this scope it tries to be both flexible and efficient. For starters FoodCalc expects the user to be a programmer or at least someone with enough skills to prepare text files and submit commands on a command line. If you, the reader, do not feel you fit those expectations, you should ask a programmer for initial help in using the FoodCalc program.
FoodCalc expects you to already have both the list of consumed amounts and the food table available in computer text files. If this is not the case, you must first enter the data in an editor or in some other system, e.g. a database system or an interview support system. Most such systems will then be able to export the data in a form understandable by FoodCalc. Also the commands telling FoodCalc how to do the calculations must be entered in a text file before the execution of the FoodCalc program. This may not seem very user-friendly, but it makes it easy repeatedly, systematically and well documented to do the same calculations but with different data, or to do different calculations with the same data. Also it makes it easy for programmers to use FoodCalc as a part of a larger system.
The calculations done by FoodCalc are rather simple, however it does have some flexibility, especially in how to do reductions of nutrients when foods are cooked by boiling, frying, etc.

FoodCalc is very efficient, making it possibly quite quickly compute intakes for tens or even hundreds of thousands of people each with hundreds or thousands of foods consumed. The time taken for FoodCalc to do the calculations will however largely depend on the computer used. At the time of writing FoodCalc is available for Windows 95, Windows NT and HP-UX. Also the source code is available, and can be easily compiled on most systems that have an ANSI C compiler.

The program is in the public domain. You may use it and change it in any way you like. However, you should always give due credit to Jesper Lauritsen. Also, neither Jesper Lauritsen nor the Danish Cancer Society can in any way be responsible for any damages done by this program. Also, neither Jesper Lauritsen nor the Danish Cancer Society give any guarantees regarding the functionality or correctness of this program.

For specific documentation please see FoodCalc documentation