Here’s a great data source for food and nutrition facts.

I stumbled across this earlier this food nutrient data set earlier this week: http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database.  What the author, Ashley, did was take food nutrient data from the US Department of Agriculture and make some sense of it.

It’s available as a free download on his site.  The data set comes as a single JSON file, so may be a bit hard to parse.

In this data set, there are…

• 6,636 unique foods
• 375,176 nutrient figures
• 94 unique nutrients across all foods

What you can do with this data is create a food nutrients site of 6-7 thousand pages (easily).  It would act as a great, value-added companion to a health site (e.g. food blog, fitness blog, recipes site). 

This kind of data is great for a number of reasons…

• It caters very well to long tail searches (e.g. “Vitamin E content in Red Bull” or something random like that).
• It’s providing quality, useful information to visitors.
• Lastly, it correlates to high paying ads (since it’s in the area of food and health).

Over the next few days, I will be playing around with this data and try to turn it into a site.

dave