What is this?

Most likely, you're sometimes a little unclear about what you're putting into your body. These charts show the nutritional equivalents of a large collection of foods.

• Don't eat meat for health reasons? Then you'd probably better avoid falafels and coffeecake, since these effectively have chunks of pork in them.
• Enjoy eating crackers? Then you should probably choose the low-sodium, low-fat kind, since otherwise you're eating fast food.
• How much fast food does your baby food have in it?

Data

USDA Foodgroups

This data is from the USDA's nutritional information database. This database contains 7412 foods. The food groups are:

1. Legumes and Legume Products
2. Beef Products
3. Soups, Sauces, and Gravies
4. Fats and Oils
5. Baked Products
6. Meals, Entrees, and Sidedishes
7. Fast Foods
8. Beverages
9. Sweets
10. Spices and Herbs
11. Vegetables and Vegetable Products
12. Nut and Seed Products
13. Pork Products
14. Finfish and Shellfish Products
15. Dairy and Egg Products
16. Breakfast Cereals
17. Ethnic Foods
18. Baby Foods
19. Poultry Products
20. Cereal Grains and Pasta
21. Snacks
22. Lamb, Veal, and Game Products
23. Sausages and Luncheon Meats
24. Fruits and Fruit Juices

Latent Foodgroups

1. Unsaturated vegetable oil (nuts and mostly unsaturated vegetable oils) (monounsaturated fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, beta-sitosterol, arginine, niacin, saturated fat, thiamine, copper)
2. Fortified cereal (e.g., multigrain cheerios)
3. Starch nutrients (Folate, starch, cystine, phenylalanine, serine, glutamic acid, thiamin, tryptophan, proline, pantothenic acid)
4. Good meat nutrients (thiamin, calcium, iron, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin b6, phosphorus)
5. Mustard oil (mono) (vitamin D, monounsaturated fat, vitamin A RAE, cholesterol, tocopherol)
6. Flaxseed oil (mono, poly) (polyunsaturated fat, phytosterols, monounsaturated fat, vitamin K, saturated fat)
7. Tangerines (beta cryptoxanthin, beta carotene, lutein, vitamin A IU, vitamin A RAE, fiber, vitamin C)
8. Carbohydrates and thickeners (gelatin, cornstarch) (Carbohydrates, fiber, NaCl, Energy, Ash, phosphorus, total fat, selenium)
9. Salt (NaCl, NaHCO3) (NaCl, water, maltose, ash, fiber, protein, potassium, calcium, vitamin A, vitamin D, fats)
10. Fiber and minerals (foods: potatoes, wheat bran, tea, spices) (fiber, manganese, copper, magnesium)
11. Liver (vitamins A, B12, D, copper)
12. Industrial Coconut/Palm oil (Saturated fats, total fat, phytosterols, vitamin K, monounsaturated fat, vitamin E)
13. Decaffeinated softdrinks (with fluoride) (vitamin C, water, fluoride, vitamin K, vitamin A)
14. Desalted egg whites (lysine, methionine, histidine, glycine, alanine, leucine)
15. Animal byproduct nutrients (cholesterol, vitamin b12, zinc, selenium)
16. "Alcoholic / caffeinated drinks" (ethyl alcohol, caffeine, theobromine, lycopene, water)
17. Greens (e.g., turnip, kale, cress) (lutein, beta carotene, vitamin K, galactose, vitamin A, fiber, folate)
18. Cheese (cholesterol, retinol, calcium, saturated fat)
19. Beets (beta tocopherol, vitamin E, betaine, phytosterols, gamma tocopherol)
20. Cupuassu oil (undifferentiated, monounsaturated and saturated fats, cholesterol)
21. Trans fats (hydrogenated and soybean oils)
22. Raw sugars (sugar, lactose, sucrose, fiber)
23. Carrots (beta carotene, fructose, glucose, vitamin A, maltose, fiber)
24. Fish oil (cholesterol, vitamin D, unsaturated fat, saturated fat, vitamin b12)

1. Lard
2. Fortified cereal
3. Lean meat
4. Walrus liver
5. Flavored water drinks
6. Commodity shortening, (hydrogenated) soybean
7. Carrots or Squash
8. Industrial shortening, (hydrogenated) palm or coconut
9. Gin
10. Dried tea (and spices)

Methodology

We found these breakdowns using topic models. Topic models are a way of finding collections of themes in text documents. Here we treated foods as documents and nutritional information as word counts. Generally, topic models can discover these themes automatically. To keep a common vocabulary, we chose to define these themes (formally, "topics") based on food group labels provided by the USDA. This is useful because it is not necessarily based on preconceived notions of the major food groups; instead, it defines food groups, or "nutritional themes", that best explain the variance in the dataset. In statistical terms, this is a bit like applying principal component analysis. To convert nutrients to words, we first normalized all nutrients to have mean 100 (unitless) and then rounded nutrient weights to the nearest integer.

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