About Food Data Insights
Nutrition can be surprisingly tricky. You decide you need more protein, less sugar, more vitamin C, or fewer carbs — but then comes the real challenge: what exactly do you eat? Among the countless fruits, vegetables, meats, and grains, which ones actually meet your goals?
Let’s say you’re looking for foods high in vitamin C. A quick search gives you a list… but it doesn’t tell you which of those are also low in sugar, which might be equally important to you. Or maybe you’re focused on fats — aiming for more saturated fats and fewer polyunsaturated fats — and you want to compare your options. Or perhaps you’re chasing vitamin A, but not the plant-based beta-carotene you see everywhere; you want retinol, the active form your body can readily use.
These kinds of specific, practical questions often don’t have simple answers in typical nutrition resources.
What I Do Here
That’s where Food Data Insights comes in. Using the USDA food database as my starting point, I create interactive data visualizations that let you explore nutrient information in ways that standard lists simply can’t match.
With these tools, you can:
- Compare foods not just by a single nutrient, but by combinations or ratios (e.g., vitamin C per 100 grams of sugar).
- Explore nutrient differences across similar foods (like different cuts of meat or varieties of fruit).
- See how preparation methods — raw, boiled, roasted — change nutrient content.
Every post here features an interactive Plotly chart you can explore yourself. The goal is simple: give you clear, flexible insights so you can make food choices that truly match your priorities.
Whether you’re a nutrition professional, a data enthusiast, or just someone curious about what’s on your plate, I think you’ll find plenty here to explore — and maybe even a few surprises.