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Nutritionix

A library for querying the Nutritonix food database.

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding nutritionix to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:nutritionix, "~> 0.3.0"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc.

Usage

Creating a client

To create a Nutritionix API client, you need three things:

  • From the Nutritionix Developer site
    • The Application ID
    • A generated key
  • The User ID you're searching for. In development, this should be 1. For production, this should be a value consistent for each user tracking meal information.

Put those values in a map, and give that to Nutritionix.client/1 like so:

{:ok, client} = Nutritionix.client(%{app_id: app_id, app_key: app_key, user_id: person.id})

There's also Nutritionix.client!/1 for if you want the client without the tuple around it.

Natural language parsing of meal descriptions

Pass the client and the meal description to Nutritionix.parse_description/2:

{:ok, response} = Nutritionix.parse_description(client, "steak, eggs, a cup of coffee")

The response will have a "body", which will have a "foods" list. For full details, see the Nutritionix.parse_description/2 docs.

Searching for meal ingredients

To search for ingredients to add to a meal, use Nutritionix.ingredient_search/2. This is intended to be used as an autocomplete mechanism for a search box.

{:ok, response} = Nutritionix.ingredient_search(client, "baco")

The response will have a "body" which will have a "branded" list and a "common" list. Branded foods are actual brand name items, and can be looked up via their "nix_item_id" value. Common foods are generic foods (think "grapes" or "white bread") and can be looked up by calling parse_description/2 with the "food_name" value.

Looking up Branded foods

As above, pass the "nix_item_id" value into search_branded/2:

Nutritionix.search_branded(client, "51db37b7176fe9790a898a66")

Looking up Common foods

As above, pass the "food_name" value into search_common/2:

Nutritionix.search_common(client, "grapes")

The Nutritionix.search_common/2 function is an alias for parse_description/2 as the Nutritionix API uses the same endpoint to handle NLP parsing of descriptions, and simply returning common food details by name.

If you'd rather ignore this and make the client code clear that the same endpoint is called for both operations, feel free to use parse_description/2 everywhere.