The Food Processor diet analysis and fitness tracking software helps you accurately assess your clients’ dietary intake needs so you can more easily design a nutrition plan customized to each client. The program uses age, height, weight, gender, and activity level to calculate intake recommendations for calories and other critical nutrients. You can use this data to evaluate your client’s current diet and adjust for optimal nutrition.
This blog will provide a brief overview of how you can use the Food Processor to evaluate and create individual nutrition plans for each client. We will look at:
- Calculating Client Dietary Intake Recommendations
- How to Override Calculated Intake Recommendations
- Dietary Recall Entry
- Nutrition Analysis & Comparison Reports
Calculating Client Dietary Intake Recommendations
The recommended daily nutrient intake is based on DRI standards, which differ depending on age, gender profile, activity level, height, and weight. Again, the Food Processor takes all of this into account when calculating your client’s recommendations. To get started, you will first create a profile for your client and enter personal data. In this example, Jane is a 30-year-old woman who is very active.
If we enter her data and check the recommendations screen, we’ll see that she should consume 2623 calories every day and 36.73 g of fiber.
Now, if we change her age to 50, her recommendations are recalculated and we see she should consume 2485 calories and 34.79 grams of fiber.
And if we select “Less Active” as her activity level, the Food Processor recalculates the recommendations yet again and here we see she should consume 1921 calories and 26.90 grams of fiber.
The program also uses gender profiles and optional weight-loss goals to determine recommendations.
How to Override Calculated Intake Recommendations
Sometimes you will want to modify intake recommendations to suit the particular needs of your clients. Say, for example, a client requires a lower intake of carbohydrates. You will likely need to adjust the recommended carb, protein, and other intake amounts. Food Processor lets you do this by simply entering values in the Override column on the Recommendations screen.
If you change the recommended value for calories the program will ask you if you want to update dependent nutrients and will re-calculate those automatically.
Note: All calculations and reports will use the override values.
Dietary Recall Entry
Your next step is to evaluate your clients’ actual dietary intake compared to their recommended intakes. To do this, you will need to record their food intake on the Diet Recall screen. You can either instruct your clients to use FoodProdigy to log their foods and activities (you will then import that information into Food Processor) or manually enter the data yourself.
When logging dietary intakes, foods and beverages can be categorized by meal, which will allow you a more complete understanding of your clients’ eating habits.
A finished day for our example client looks like this:
Nutrition Analysis & Comparison Reports
The many reports included with the Food Processor give you options for evaluating and discussing your clients’ dietary intake. You can use these reports to show your clients if there are any nutrient deficiencies or excesses in their diets, and how their diets could be improved. Reports include MyPlate recommendations, a calories and fats overview, bar graphs, spreadsheets, and more.
Bar Graph Report
The Bar Graph displays both in text and graphically the overall picture of how well your clients are meeting their intake goals. Bars shown in blue mean there is no assessment for that nutrient. Bars shown in green indicate that the intake goal has been met. Yellow indicates that the intake is slightly low. Red indicates that the intake should be evaluated and likely increased.
Spreadsheet Report
The Spreadsheet breaks down what foods, meals and/or days are contributing which nutrients. You can see totals for each meal and day, and see the percent recommendation met at the bottom of the report.
Look for double dashes. These show you where there is missing nutrient data for a food item, which would cause the comparisons to be inaccurate and should be accounted for when evaluating your clients’ intakes.
Multi-Column Report
The Multi-Column report provides an overall nutrient data summary of the Daily Intake. The information is shown in several columns, depending on which nutrients you have selected to display. This report shows both the amount and the percentage of nutrient goals met if this analysis is for a Person.
Watch the Tutorial
For more information on using the Food Processor to create client plans, please see this tutorial.
