Dear Irene,
I use Diet Analyst from Parson's technology. It gives a complete
breakdown of all the majot vitamins and minerals. It also keeps track
of your exercise program. All you do is enter everything you ate for
the day and hit the analyze button. It will also tell you your
percentage of carbs/protein/fat. It comes with a database of a lot of
foods but it is fully customizable. (Actually, I had to add a lot of
stuff into the database. I also deleted a lot of stuff that was not
needed. It was a little time consuming at first but it really
streamlined things)
You can also change the RDA's to whay you want. For example, I changed
the caffeine allowed to 0, I changed the sodium to 1000 mg and I changed
the cholesterol to 0. I changed the precentage of carbs/protein/fat to
75/15/10
You plug in your weight, age, height (and you also tell it if you want
to lose weight and if you want your exercise calories added to your
total) It then calculates your daily needs for each individual person
based on the RDA's (or your modified RDA's)
They also have a companion program called Personal Chef. This is a
recipe database program that works with the Diet analysis. It also has
a completely customizible data base. What is nice about this program is
that you can add meals/recipes to the Diet Analyst instead of trying to
add just the individual ingredients. For example, for today's diet I
can just punch in 1 serving of lasagna, 1 serving of garlic toast, 1
serving of tossed salad, one serving of broccoli, one serving of rice
pudding from the recipe database instead of trying to add all the
individual ingredients. The PErsonal Chef program also has it's own
nutrition analysis built in so when you are adapting recipes you can
play around with it until you get the numbers where you want them (for
example, you can see how it would effect the nutrition if you cut back
on oil by one Tbsp or added 1/2 cup wheat germ etc)
Parsons Technology has a wesite at http://www.parsonstech.com after you
read about it if you want to order then call them on the phone because
they always have phone specials and will cut you a deal if you order
both programs. 1-800-779-6000 I bought one program for $29 and they
gave me the second program for $19 plus gave me some free stuff too.
I hope this helps
michele
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