You should find PINQ quite easy to use. It is arranged to be able to browse a database of over 6000 foods for their nutritional content. Unfortunately not all foods available have been fully analyzed. I will continue to update the database when further data is available.
The Pinq is a calculation of the nutrient quality of food. It uses the principle of measuring different foods against a common property, Calories.
When you eat a day's calories. Did you get enough nutrition when most of the calories you ate were chocolate? How about that tub of ice cream? Did you get the full recommended RDA of the recognized nutrients fom today's diet?
A food may be very high in one nutrient and lousy in others. Butter is high in Retinol ( vitamin A ) and especially high in Vitamin D with virtually no other nutrition. Butter still manages to achieve a good pinq score as it brings a high amount of vitamin D to the table. Butter is better for you than Margarine. Look for yourself.
All Data is from The NIH nutrition dataset. If you have any data for food not here please send it to me and I will include it in this database.
Category:Nutritional needs vary according to sex and age. Select the subject's particular information here.
There are three ways of looking at the data.
Personal Index of Nutritional Quality, which is a method of measuring the nutritional density of a food. The measure is done in relation to the caloric content of the food. The principle is that; If one was to eat only one food to obtain a days calories, does that food supply a balanced set of nutrients? From the PINQ one can quickly see if a food is just empty calories, or whether it is a good source of nutrition.
Shows the nutritional content in a standard serving, measured in grams.
If the page sticks, or any other errors click this.
This is the browse tables where you click to find the food that you are interested in.
This is a graphical display of the nutritional information. These show the results of the pinq calculation on each of the nutrients. The.individual bars are colour coded into red for bad, yellow for adequate, or close to the daily RDA needs, and green for good, where more than the daily RDA needs are met. A value of 1 (one) in the numeric bar means that exactly the RDA need for that nutrient per day will be met if only that food is eaten for a days calories.So meeting the RDA scores a 1 ( one ). If the nutrient is poor in that food the value will be less than one or maybe even a zero. Foods with high densities of nutrients will have pinq values of over one. As you can see the All Bran that is used in this example it is a very highly nutritionally dense food, it is not just fiber.
Here the overall PINQ score is displayed. This is an averaging calculation of each of the individual nutrient scores. A score of 1 means it has adequate nutritional quality. It may not supply all the individual nutritional needs but in combination with other foods it will supply a goodly portion of the RDA. Less than one means it is nutritionally deficient. For example sugar or honey have extremely low pinqs and are "empty calorie" foods.
Grams for one day is how much of the food has to be eaten to achieve a days allotment of calories. In this example it is 846 grams of All Bran This is about 2 pounds that will be the amount to eat to get a days calories. Just eating plain dry crunchy boring All Bran, kind of boring.There will be almost 7 times the minimum recomended amounts of vitamins and minerals. All Bran is a multivitamin supplement all by itself.
Kcal per serving is how many calories are present in a standard serving.
Gram per serving is the size of the standard serving for this food.
Servings per day are how many servings it takes to achieve a days allotment of calories.