FoodDataCentral

The USDA maintains a database of nutritional information, where different kinds of food are identified by an FDC number. They do not provide any data on prices.

To look up nutritional information, use api provided by the USDA at https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/. You should sign up for a free api key (see directions on page), then add that key here in place of “DEMO_KEY”.

apikey = "DEMO_KEY"  # Replace with a real key!  "DEMO_KEY" will be slow...

Looking up foods

I’ve written a little module fooddatacentral with the methods

• search
• nutrients
• units

FDC Search

Here’s a little code to help look up FDC codes for foods of different descriptions.

import fooddatacentral as fdc

fdc.search(apikey,"crunchy peanut butter")

FDC Nutrients

Once we know the fdc_id of a particular food we can look up a variety of information on it. We start with nutrients

id =     # Put an FDC ID HERE!
fdc.nutrients(apikey,fdc_id=id)

FDC Ingredients

We can also look up the ingredients for many foods (specifically Survey Foods) in the FDC:

fdc.ingredients(apikey,id)