The Nutrition Tool Box

The Nutrition Tool Box is a powerful health and nutrition software package with an intuitive user interface. The software provides a database to store your favorite recipes, with the ability to search the recipe database using multiple criteria including region, diet, and type of meal. However, this software is much more than a recipe database, as it will also analyze the nutritional content of any recipe, and compare it to a recommended daily intake (RDI) profile that you create for yourself. This RDI profile can reflect the USDA's recommendations for both the RDI and Upper Tolerable Limit (UTL), or you can set it to reflect any particular diet you may be following. Although the software ships with a USDA nutrition database containing over 7000 ingredients, you have the option of adding to this database using your own custom ingredients, which are easily created using the software.

You can also create a calendar that specifies what meals you have eaten (or plan to eat), and the software will analyze the average daily nutrients over a specified time period and compare them to your RDI profile. The calendar also allows specifying calorie-burning activities - such as hiking, gardening, running, weight lifting, and other exercises - and allows you to create plots of calories consumed versus calories burned over a specified time period. This plot takes into account your base metabolic rate, which is calculated from data that you specify in your user profile. The calendar can also generate a shopping list containing the necessary ingredients required to prepare recipes over a specified time period. The shopping list is sorted by the preferred source (i.e., Safeway, Trader Joe's, etc.) that is specified for each ingredient, and contains the estimated cost and the shelf life of each ingredient.