Diet

This is a module to register food intakes. This module is used in the clinical study part of the project predircam to promote dietary changes for the prevention of diabetes mellitus and cardiometabolic risk and it is being generalized before to made it public.

There will be a showcase about this module, and others, used in the predircam project on Drupalcon Paris 2009 if enough users vote for it. If you want to see this showcase in Paris, please, vote for it.

The diet module creates three main types of nodes: food, meal and intake. Foods may be grouped to create meals, and meals may be grouped to create intakes. Foods are created from a standard food database. In our particular case in predircam.cat, we are using a Spanish food data base (cesnid), because of the localization of food names and food types, but are also using the USDA National Nutrient Database to import missing foods in the Spanish food database. We are using these ddbb because we are using their nutritional information of each food to show nutritional information for each meal and intake on different reports and graphs all along the website.

There are many web services out there which register food intakes, so why we decided to go drupal? Because we needed a localized service, first of all. All (almost) other web services are English websites based on the USDA data base. Although this is maybe the best food data base out there, there are many food entries which will not be barely, or nothing at all, used in our project, based in Barcelona and with a mediterranean food tradition. Also, language localization was important.

There is a new approach in this diet module, also, which we could not find in other web services on food intake registration. This is the capability of showing images of food weights, which we decided it was very important. When a user is creating a meal, she needs to set a weight for each food, being this a critical process in order to get a proper nutritional value for a meal or intake. By the use of an image for each different weight of a food, we are allowing the user to be more accurate.

The diet module makes extension use of ajax for the intake addition page, shown in the image of the module, for the sake of usability.

The predircam project is being carried out by:

• CIBER-BBN - Endocrinología y Diabetes, Hospital de Sant Pau - Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (EDUAB-HSP), Barcelona, Spain
• CIBER-BBN - Grupo de Bioingeniería y Telemedicina (GBT), Madrid, Spain
• CIBER-BBN - Grupo de Investigación de Ingeniería Biomédica de la Universidad de Sevilla (GIB-US), Sevilla, Spain

Acknowledgements:

• This study is supported by Networking Research Center on Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN)
• Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, for providing human an economical resources
• Centre d’Ensenyament Superior en Nutrició i Dietètica (CESNID) – Universitat de Barcelona, for providing the food database