Website Review: My Pyramid Tracker
For an assignment in my health class I was to keep very close track of what I ate over the span of 3 days and then use the site My Pyramid Tracker to keep track of my diet. It turns out that I did better than most Americans, I just need to eat more vegetables.
I found this assignment interesting even though I did not learn much from it that I did not already know. Basically it confirms that I drink enough milk, eat an adequate amount of fruit and meat, and that I need more vegetables. My sodium intake, unlike most Americans, is, on average, within it’s limits. The average sodium intake for the 3 days is 2145mg, which is below the 2300mg limit. Basically if I were to simply add more vegetables to my diet I would be in good shape. Now if only vegetables tasted better…
I found several flaws with the system that we used for this assignment. Most of the food items that were in the database appeared to be from fast food restaurants, which is not a very good place to get information about food from. A cheeseburger from McDonald’s is going to have very different nutrient values when compared to a cheeseburger made at home by hand. This was my largest issue with this website. A shortcoming of this assignment was the time span that we were given. Three days (data points) is not enough quantitative data to obtain an informed opinion of what is going on. A full 30 or 60 days of data collection would have been much more informative and accurate, although I realize that it would have been unpractical to collect that much data for this class.
Although not related to the calculations themselves, the database server for the website either failed or went down for maintenance while I was attempting to input my list of food. That to me looks like bad management skills on behalf of the site owner and operator. (If you must preform website maintenance, you do so during off hours, not in the middle of a weekday). The website could also have been designed better. There should be a standard menu, like the one that can be found while adding food items to your day, that is shown on all screens. This would allow for easier navigation to the different features of the site. Overall, the website is very interesting, and I would recommend it to a friend interested in tracking their food intake.