I do my best to ensure my family is consuming a balanced diet, but how good a job am I actually doing?  At the beginning of each week, I select recipes from various sites that I like and from a stack of recipe books, and I make sure to add fruit, cereal and healthy snacks into the mix, but I often wonder if I am missing vital nutrients.

My challenge is to have someone create a nutrition requirements calculator, where I can enter recipes and other quantities of available foodstuffs (fruit, vegetables, cottage cheese, corn flakes, etc) that we plan to consume for the week, and have the calculator return a list of suggested supplemental items to round out any missing nutrients.  For example, I would include a link to a recipe with a list of ingredients and indicate that the recipe is for six servings, and that we each plan to have the meal twice.  In that day will also be the cereal, milk, juice, fruit, snacks, etc. that we will also plan to eat, and a report will be returned.  Commonly available brands would be stored in the computer so that specific cereals or brands of yogurt could be marked.

While I recognize that there are other calculators out there, they don't really address specific nutrients - copper, folate, DHA, etc., which are gaining increasingly more recognition for their importance in our daily diets.  Such a program would be invaluable to ensure the health and welfare of our families for years to come!

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