NUT Nutrition Software

Thanks to the good graces of , I now have my very own web page. Isn't it hip.

I have written open-source free nutrition software, NUT, which records what you eat and analyzes your meals for nutrient levels in terms of the "Daily Value" or DV which is the standard for food labeling in the US. The program uses the free food composition database from the USDA. This free nutritional analysis software was written for Unix systems (I use Slackware Linux), but can be compiled on just about any system with a C compiler. (To get a free C compiler, Windows people might look at Cygwin or MinGW, and Mac people might look at xcode.) By experimenting with NUT, you can find the optimal level of the various nutrients and how to implement this with foods available to you. NUT can help reconstruct the lost instruction manual to your care and feeding because, when the authorities and crackpots disagree on the proper human diet, you can design an experiment using the food composition tables to discover the truth!

Features of NUT include:

8194 foods and 146 nutrients--the complete, latest USDA database
Foods easy to find and add to daily meals
Configurable for 1-19 meals per day and any dietary plan--including ketogenic, low carb, zone, low fat
Comprehensive meal analysis for any number of consecutive meals
Presents both easy-to-read percentage summaries and in-depth nutrient analysis, including Omega-3 and Omega-6 essential fatty acids
Defaults to ounces or grams based on user input
Suggests foods based on current diet
Includes novel meal planning feature: you choose the food, NUT adjusts the quantities to your plan
Calorie Auto-Set feature uses linear regression on daily scale measurements of weight and body fat percentage to find optimal calorie level for improved body composition
Can easily create additional databases for other family members
Allows recording of recipes and customary meals for fast data entry
Guesses recipes of packaged foods
Creates graphs of nutrient intake showing daily and monthly trends
Sorts foods richest in each of the 146 nutrients
Reveals which foods contribute most to user's nutrition
Runs on Linux and just about everything else that can compile a C program, and NUT has no dependencies on other programs (unless you want the graphical user interface, which requires C++ and FLTK). It runs fast and it's not huge. NUT is not a quantum leap--it's a squirrel leap.
The price is right--it's free! And you can read and modify the source code.

If you just want to "track" nutrients, there are a zillion applications and web sites to do it. NUT is for the person who wants to actively experiment and change diet toward the optimal, not just "track" it. When you make a dietary change, say lowering carbohydrate, you will experience benefits but you will also experience problems, and you will have to make other changes in order to solve those problems. It is like computer performance tuning: after you fix the biggest bottleneck you then see the second biggest bottleneck that was behind it. There are a lot of nutrients you will have to look at and a lot of tough food choices you will have to make. NUT is the best tool for the job because I designed it to optimize my own diet, and I have used it and maintained it for years, adding necessary features and discarding useless features as I saw what works and what doesn't.

ATTN Ubuntu users: The console version of NUT runs when invoked in a terminal, so if you installed the Ubuntu/Debian version, then open up an xterm or other terminal and type "nut-nutrition". If their version doesn't work for you, take the latest version from here and compile NUT yourself--it's not hard to do. Just read the README, and if you don't get it, send me an email telling me what you don't understand and I'll help you with it.

Here are:

the latest source code archive compressed with gzip: nut-18.9.tar.gz
the best version of FLTK to use with NUT: fltk-1.3.2 (fltk-1.1.10 also works very well, is the version I used to build NUT, and is the best for older systems.)
the precompiled executable of the console program for 32-bit Windows systems: nut-dos-18.9.zip (includes source code for console program if you need to compile)

How NUT's Polyunsaturated Fat Reference Values Are Derived
my opinions on how to improve your nutrition

Some of my musical compositions:

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