Food Allergy Tracker

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavor.

Similar programs to this student project suggestion could have all sorts of uses besides detecting food allergies. It might track drug allergies or determine the optimum exercise program. You enter the foods you eat each day. You record your "symptoms", how much energy you had, whether you had headaches, etc. You just each normally, recording what you eat. Then the program uses statistics to look for correlations. Ideally it would say something like, when you drink 200 ml of milk, you get nauseated with probability 0.5 with an error of ±0.1. When you collect all this data, you might as well analyse it for calories and various vitamins.

Alternatively you let the user look for his own correlations by plotting x-y graphs in colours of the spectrum there the wavelength is proportional to how many times the two thing were correlated, number of apples eaten in the past three days vs mood on a scale 0 to 10. Uniform colouration shows little correlation; rainbow ripples show high correlation.

If you are an American you must be very careful if you write such a program or you could land in jail for practising medicine without a license. The doctors "union" is strong and they don’t put up with anything remotely ressembling competition. You can do it, but you will need all sorts of weasly language and plenty of "see your doctor plugs"

You could also use it to track fat, protein, vitamins and their effects. The program could analyse your diet by constituent and let you seek for correlations in constituents too.

Using food tables, it could compute the amount of each vitamin, amino acid, omega-fatty acid, mineral, fibre, phytogchemicals consumed each day, to whatever degree of detail the user desired. It could recommend various foods to increase (or decrease) each nutrient.

It could be preprogrammed with a brand of food supplements, and given away free to promote sales of that line of supplements. There you have graphic proof that the improved diet is making a difference. Sometimes gradual changes slip by unnoticed.

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