Long/short term vitamins (and minerals)
Please read this link about the body (not) storing vitamins and minerals.
I've tried to reach my daily goals. Meaning all vitamins and minerals at 100%. That seems to be impossible. Even if eat ingredients instead of menus.
Well, it is possible if I eat a lot of food. But that classes with the calorie goal.
QUOTE
vitamins A, D, E and K, are stored in the liver and the body’s fatty tissues when you consume more than you need. Because of this, you don’t have to ingest them every day, and, in some cases, weeks or even months can pass before stores are depleted.
I'm not even starting to pretend how many days a full vitamin A storage lasts, so I'll just assume it's 1 week. Just to explain my feature request.
Cronometer should keep track of how full the vitamin A storage is.
Now assume on a certain day both vitamin A and C are way below the 100% levels.
When I press "Suggest food" cronometer should heavily bias vitamin C if the A store is has enough in stock.
A suggestion how to easily handle this and make it visible to the user.
If the vitamin A store is fully stocked, the simply start the day with 100% vitamin A, even if not a single ingredient is added yet.
That method would also require minimal/no extra programming on the "Suggest food" routine because it's being fooled into thinking today's menu has plenty of vitamin A.
At the end of the day when the user marks the day completed the excess vitamin A is moved to storage.
A problem with this approach is that cronometer has no way to know how full the vitamin A store is of a new user. A solution to that could be assuming half full vitamin A storage at the first use of the program. The storage will be quickly filled that way. If storage was full from start the body will dispose the extra.
If the storage was completely empty from start cronometer assumes a full storage when it's not.
Two ways around that. At first use just assume that the storage is completely empty.
Or assume 50 from start and every day after that transfer only 95% of the excess vitamin A to the store.
That way the store is filling up (an extra) 5% a day.
If the store is assumed to be 100% full, discard all excess vitamin A.
Do this for all storable vitamins.
Doing things this way "Suggest food" can heavily bias the vitamins that can't be stored and/or the ones of which storage is low.
Comments
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A (much) related feature request is this. (can't find a way to edit my previous post)
"Suggest food" shouldn't use the daily nutrient targets, but a longer range. For example the range set in Trends->Nutrition report. Or set a number of days in the Dairy section.I can't cook (that's why a dining regular) and you can dump about everything in me like a trash can. So I wouldn't mind to let "Suggest food" generate a whole menu for me once in a while. The combination of ingredients may be utterly weird. No problem as long as it moves as many as possible nutrients to 100%. Especially the ones the cronometer experts consider the most vital.