Optimal Diet Formulation System (ODFS) if a very powerful, open source, human diet formulation and optimization software. It supports unlimited number of contacts (people) and it is designed to optimize and track their nutrition. Record keeping of physical exercise and medical history (blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol) is also supported.
The food database currently holds more than 8500 food ingredients with their chemical composition (USDA SR 28). The user can create new food database sources, define new food categories and add new ingredients also. The existing ingredients can be combined to create more complex entities, called recipes. The nutrient composition of recipes can be either calculated and/or edited as well. The only limitation is that a recipe cannot reference another recipe. In order to include a recipe in another recipe, it must first be duplicated as a plain food (ingredient).
Diets are organized in nutritional profiles. In other nutrition software programs, those profiles are called “targets”. An unlimited number of nutritional profiles can be defined per person. Typically, the information required per profile is the age, the weight, the height, the physical activity and the target weight change per month (positive or negative). This information is used to calculate the daily nutritional requirements of a person. An alternate way to calculate daily energy requirements for physical activity, is to use the information recorded in the workout history of the individual.
There are two types of diets. The formulated ones, with the use of ordinary or mixed type linear constrained optimization, and the historical ones (already consumed). Linear optimization can produce many different diets (solutions) for the same set of dietary constraints. All these solutions are available to the user as the formulation process progresses. The food solution quantities can also be edited by the user. When a specific solution is of interest, it can be saved to the database for later access. The stored solutions can serve as diet templates and can be viewed side by side with the actual diets (historical).
ODFS also includes many tools such as nutrient quality indexes for ingredients, recipes and diets, a BMI calculator, a percentile calculator for the weight and height of young individuals, a workout calculator and an energy factor checker for protein, fat and carbohydrates. The last tool can be quite useful in order to assess the quality and the completeness of the nutritional information of the ingredients stored in the database.
IMPORTANT!!
ODFS is a personal project to test new ideas and experiment. It doesn’t follow any particular standard or comply with any regulation or legislation (national or otherwise). If such a compliance is a requirement, look for something else. ODFS is provided as-is. You agree to use the program at your own risk. You should always consult your dietitian, especially if you have health problems.