When you open a workspace, the default is a 30-year-old male called 'Someone'. Using this menu, you can change the age and sex group by clicking on the list on the left. This will be used for the DRVs. You can enter the weight and height. If you enter stones and pounds or feet and inches, click the respective 'Calculate' buttons to convert to metric measurements. WinDiets does not check whether the weights and heights are reasonable for a person of that age and sex, nor does it check the age you enter for validity. There is a button that can calculate the body mass index from the weight and height. Edit the name and address if you need it; there is a space for comments like 'smoker' and this can be as long as you need it to be. When complete, click the 'Confirm' button, which appears on the toolbar.
WinDiets includes the complete UK dataset published in 2008. The US food tables are also available. Local foods can be searched as well. This means that WinDiets will search the current workspace for foods that have been stored in it. These could be recipes or foods that have been used already in a diet, so for example you could find the code for the type of milk you have already entered into the diet. You can add local foods to a workspace but these remain available only in that workspace.
There is a box at the top left of the toolbar in which you can enter either codes of foods or words and parts of words you expect in the title of the foods. Codes for UK foods can be entered as given in the composite database, for example 16-250 or as 16250. USA codes are prefaced with a minus sign. Do not be too specific when searching for a word in case the word is spelled differently or words are placed in a title the other way round, e.g. chocolate, milk instead of milk chocolate. After entry press the return key. You can also use the 'Find foods' menu to look through the food tables. When foods are found on the screen, click one and its code will be entered for you. Press return and the food will be found, focus will shift to the other text box on the toolbar as shown by green colour. Enter a weight and press return. You may enter ounces if you put a tick by that option on the screen. Take care this is not ticked by mistake as it will create a large error if you intended to enter grams. Each time you click on a food in the list found, not only is its code entered but you can see the relative amount of several nutrients compared to DRVs on the right of the screen. Above this there may be information about portion weights. Note that a red colour means that no information about the nutrient is available in the food tables.
Sometimes a person eats the same for breakfast or some other meal every day. If you have already entered the meal on day 1, when you get to enter that meal on day 2, simply enter # in the box and the same foods will appear in that meal. On day 3, you will get a repeat of day 2 and so on through the diet.
The default method of finding foods will present you with a list that match the search criteria in a coloured box. Each food will have a background colour that tells you what proportion of a day's DRV is provided by 100g of that food. The default setting is to show this for energy so you can see which foods provide more energy by the intensity of colour, but you can change this on the toolbar to another nutrient.
There are buttons on the toolbar to help you move from one meal to the next. There are also options above those buttons that enable you to move to a particular day and meal, so you do not need to just keep clicking the buttons if say you want to get from breakfast of day to evening meal of day 6. There are 7 days and 6 meals available in the workspace.
On the right of the toolbar there is a face that may appear. This is happy or sad, appropriate to the day's diet selected. It is unlikely that two nutritionists would ever agree how to program what this face should show. It is obvious that we ought to consider the contents of other nutrients, but the main concerns at present are to lower saturated fatty acids and sugars and to increase dietary fibre. Saturated fatty acids probably have priority. The reduction of sugar is important for children especially, but you should explain that it is snacking and sweets that are especially bad. Dietary fibre is good to have, but not as critical probably for long-term health. These ideas are reflected in the way the face reacts to meals and diets. It is important to note that foods are not good or bad and the face should be considered only for mixtures of foods.
Before this menu item can be used, you must open a workspace and then a recipe file from the Workspace menu. If you have recipes already in the file, you can find one to use. At any time you can get a listing of the food components of the recipe (do not attempt to use 'List meal' for this as you will leave the recipe tasks). You can create a new recipe and whether you have found and altered an old recipe or made a new one, you need to save it before you can use it or make a label. You can not include local foods in a recipe (i.e. those saved in the workspace). To remove a recipe from the file, find it, delete all the ingredients and choose 'Save recipe'.
If you have opened a recipe file that contains recipes, this menu will list them. Click the one you want to use it.
When you are working on a recipe and have selected some other screen you can return to work on the recipe with this menu item.
When you have opened a recipe file, you can start a new recipe with this menu item. Then use the find routines to add foods to the recipe as if it was a meal. You can not include local foods in a recipe (i.e. those saved in the workspace).
Use this menu item when you have created a new recipe or when you have altered a recipe. There will appear a screen with a space for the name of the food and below it a larger box for you to write the cooking instructions. A list also appears on the right of the screen with some dishes named. It is hoped that your recipe will be similar to one of these and when you click it you will see the nutrient losses associated with it from the food tables. You can amend these if you wish before clicking the 'Confirm' button to save the recipe. Once it has been saved then you can use the recipe. To remove a recipe from the file, find it, delete all the ingredients and choose 'Save recipe'. Altering the name of the recipe will cause WinDiets to add it as a new recipe.
When you have found a recipe from the file or created and saved a new one then you can use it in a meal. This menu item causes you to leave recipe processing and return to the meal you were working on before. The code number assigned to the recipe is entered in the top right hand box so if you want to use it simply press the return key, enter a weight and press return again and it will be entered in the meal.
When you have selected a recipe from a file or saved a new one, you can create a food label for it. You may also use this for educational purposes. The calculations for this label are different to those for normal analyses. Protein must be calculated by multiplying the nitrogen content by 6.25 rather than using the protein analyses in the food tables which use different factors for each food. In order to show the carbohydrate content on the label, the amounts have to be multiplied by different factors for each carbohydrate. The reason for this is that the law requires the weight of carbohydrate, not the weight of component monosaccharides that are given in the food tables. WinDiets therefore finds the amounts of glucose, galactose and fructose and subtracts them from the total sugars. The rest are calculated as disaccharides, which have lost a water molecule on formation and hence weigh less than the monosaccharides. Starch requires another factor and any small remaining carbohydrate is treated as oligosaccharide with its own factor. These factors can be found in the food tables. If you redefine one of the nutrients required for the food label, the menu item will not be visible.
The screen looks rather complicated and needs some explanation. On the left is a column of nutrients that are allowed on the label. In default we have ticks against the big four: energy, protein, carbohydrate and fat. At the bottom are other lipid components, but if you want to include any of them, you also have to include saturates which appear in the big eight. You will see this happen automatically and you can return to the big four if you wish with an option at the top of the screen. You will then see a portion weight, which you should enter. Now if the item serves one portion you can put a tick in that box and the item weight will be completed the same as the item weight. If this is greater than 100g, you are allowed to use that weight to calculate what proportion of RDAs are provided rather than using 100g of the food. The program will take this into account when you click the 'Validate' button in working out whether at least 15% of the RDA is supplied by the food (portion greater than 100g or 100g weight itself). For any nutrients that are then allowed on the label, an empty box will appear next to the nutrient and you can decide if you want it on the label. Any nutrients not supplied in great enough quantities by the food will not be allowed to appear on the label. If you decide to have a micronutrient in the label, the big eight will also automatically be selected.
There is also a large box containing the list of ingredients of the recipe in order of amount. You should edit this to make it look more like an ingredient list on a label. When all these tasks are complete, click 'Make Label' and one should appear on the right of the screen. You can not print or save this screen as it contains a program and is not attractive due to the input areas on the left. Therefore WinDiets gives you the option of clicking the 'Confirm' button on the toolbar to copy this label to an empty screen that you can copy, print and save. Please do not do this until you have finished work on the label screen as you will not be able to return to it.
Wherever you are in the program, you can return to a list of your meal with this menu.
Dieting requires that you take less energy than your body needs in order to lose weight. It helps if you choose lower energy foods, but how do you know what they are? In this screen there are two boxes. Above these are input boxes for you to type a word or part of one. When there are at least 3 letters, WinDiets will find all the foods in the UK database containing that word. Then do the same for the other box. Hopefully you will find the two foods you want to compare, colour coded so that the redder they are the more energy they contain and the less likely they are to be useful in a weight-reducing diet. Click on both of them and a message will appear under the boxes confirming your thoughts relating to the differences in colour, but this time telling you what % less energy one of them has than the other. When you want to use one of the foods that you have clicked, there are buttons that will put the code number into the box on the toolbar for you to use it.
The activity diary screen provides you with data entry for 8 different physical activity ratios. You can produce a diary with 24 rows, each containing 12 boxes for insertion of a number (1-8). After filling in the diary, you can enter this in each day. Move from one day to another in the same way as you do between meals. Each day has a new activity diary screen up to a week. The PAR for sleep is 1 so the default you are presented with is rows of 1s on the right of the screen. On the left you will find a button for each PAR and a description of some activities. These are taken from the book on dietary reference values. Now in order to enter data, choose the hour of rising by clicking on the appropriate number 1 at that time on the right. The light blue background will change to light green. Now click the appropriate PAR button or use the keyboard (keys 1-8) and enter data through the day. After each click or keystroke, the green area will move forward. If you make a mistake go back, click it and start entering new data over the same area. When you are satisfied that the data is correct, click the 'Confirm' button. You can return to the data using this menu item to review or amend it.
This is the main way to calculate nutritional composition of diets and recipes as well as activity diaries. Choose either the current meal or recipe, a complete day to include all meals or up to a week. This will take an average of all the days entered. If there is a food in a day, it will be counted as a day and the average will include it. You can have 7 or less days. The custom analysis is different because it can have any number of days in the diet. The analysis of activity diary will be different depending on the type of workspace.
This gives you the nutrient analysis for each food separately in tables (these can be set by Professional and Research users). There may be letters in front of some of the data; these are warnings and are explained in the Help Nutrients and abbreviations menu. At the bottom of each table, the total is calculated for each nutrient.
This provides only the total nutrient analysis, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
This lists all the foods in the meal or recipe with the weight. For 14 important nutrients, the amount in each food is compared to the DRV and expressed in terms of the intensity of blue colour. This way it is easy to see which foods are the main providers of each nutrient.
This gives you the nutrient analysis for each meal separately in tables (these can be set by Professional and Research users).
This provides only the total nutrient analysis, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
This provides the total nutrient analysis (Amt), the DRV set for the person (check that you have entered the correct DRV by looking at the data for the person in the Workspace Edit person data menu), the % of DRV achieved and an explanation of the DRV used. For energy, fat and non-milk extrinsic sugars, it is the estimated average requirement that used. The macronutrient DRV is calculated using the % energy of the diet suggested in the DRV. Other nutrients use the reference nutrient intake, which allows for most people's requirements in the group.
This provides only the total nutrient analysis as averages per day, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
This provides the total average daily nutrient analysis (Amt), the DRV set for the person (check that you have entered the correct DRV by looking at the data for the person in the Workspace Edit person data menu), the % of DRV achieved and an explanation of the DRV used. For energy, fat and non-milk extrinsic sugars, it is the estimated average requirement that used. The macronutrient DRV is calculated using the % energy of the diet suggested in the DRV. Other nutrients use the reference nutrient intake, which allows for most people's requirements in the group.
The report will first analyse the activity diary if there is one entered. This will include a table of activity levels showing their contribution to the energy requirement. A report on the diet will include the face that tells you something about the 'healthiness' of the diet. There is a table of the average daily intake compared to the DRVs. Some suggestions about how to improve the diet follows.
This is entitled the easy screen because it is the simplest way to learn about the 'healthiness' of foods in diets. A list of breakfast foods appears and you can select them with the mouse simply by clicking on them; the colour changes to show they are selected and the bar chart responds. They are just as easy to switch off. This shows the day's diet with a vertical line for the DRV. Move between meals using the arrow buttons and note the response of the face to the meals you enter. You can also see a simple table of the diet and switch back to the bar chart using the buttons.
This menu item simply puts photos of 8 different types of food on the screen, each in 5 different amounts to help you learn what different size portions look like. The foods have been chosen to include a range of different shapes and colours.
One of the best ways to learn nutrition is to use a quiz that gives you feedback when you make a mistake and a score to show that you are getting better. This has been tested with students. The quiz randomly selects foods and presents their nutrient analyses compared to DRVs. Click the food you think is correct and see the answer. A score will appear and after some time, clear the score and see if you are getting better at recognising the nutritional composition of these foods.
Most of the tables of analytical output can be output in three different ways. You can tell if this is possible by the fact that they are grey unless they are enabled and change colour on activation. Output to word processing programs is encouraged because this allows you to make sure that tables are not split between pages; use the 'Copy' menu for this. You can also save files as web pages or print them directly. For some screens, you can save the whole page as a working web page including all the programming instructions.
When you copy an analysis, it goes to the clipboard. This can then be pasted into any appropriate program. This is recommended since printing from WinDiets does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets, but this is not true if you copy to a word processing program.
You can save analyses to a web file in HTML. This type of file can be opened in many word processing programs. This is better than printing from WinDiets, which does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets, but this is not true if you copy to a word processing program. The web files can be read by browsers to look like they do in WinDiets, so it is possible to put the analysis on a website or email it to someone to view in a browser.
Printing from WinDiets does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets. You will find this menu takes you to the Print Preview screen of Internet Explorer so you can see if the background colours will print and where pages will break. Confirm you intention using the Print button on this screen.
This help file is the main means of aiding your use of WinDiets. It is arranged by the order of the menu items and colour coded so that all white background text refers to the Standard version, green to Professional and above and blue only to the Research version. You can use the F1 key and dynamic help when puzzled about a screen. There is a key word index to help you. A brief video shows you the operation of the main features of the Standard version. You can find some notes and links to nutrition on the internet. Abbreviations are also explained in this menu.
This menu item starts the help file at the contents page so you can see all the menus in the program in the order they appear on the screen and choose the most appropriate help topic.
Whatever screen you are on in WinDiets, either use this menu or the F1 key and you will get help appropriate to that screen.
This shows the key words that have been entered into the help file. Sometimes there are several topics for a key word.
There are videos showing the main features of WinDiets.
WinDiets provides some simple notes about nutrition that are not referenced. Links to nutrition-related pages on the internet are also available. There were carefully selected but are not guaranteed. There is no intention to withdraw this service at any time, but it is not guaranteed to continue throughout the lifetime of this program.
The names of nutrients have been shortened for tabulation and explained here. For each nutrient, you can link directly to the notes that explain something about it. There are also abbreviations used for warnings that appear in tables.
Before the program runs, you will be asked a question about file storage. Windows does not allow a program to alter data in the area where programs are stored, but does allow you to open and read the files. If you only intend to use the program exactly as provided then you do not need to alter the data in the main databases and at the first question you can just choose the default given. In this case you will not be able to use any of the password-controlled functions, but you can save workspaces and recipe files and otherwise use the program normally. If you intend to alter the databases, for example if you want to add or change a nutrient value or update the dietetic product database, then you must use copies of the files that are in an area of the computer under your control. In this case, answer 2 to the question posed at the start of the program and show where to store the files. Although you will name only one file ‘windiets.wdn’ at this stage, two other files will also be copied. There are instructions on the screen at this point and even if you type the file name wrongly, the correct one will be copied and named as required by WinDiets. It is advisable to create a folder to store this data. If you subsequently delete any of these files, WinDiets will not be able to recover the altered data. After altering the data, you are advised to backup these files. Since each user can have copies of these files, you can make changes without affecting anyone else, but you may wish to change the password so that only you are able to open your own files. After making the copies, you should not attempt to copy them again when running WinDiets subsequently, so answer 3 and show the program where you stored windiets.wdn. If you need to, you can have more than one copy of these files as long as they are stored in different folders.
A few functions are available without opening a workspace, but most require that you open one first. You may create a new one at the first time you use WinDiets and continue using that single workspace, adding to its data as you go along. You may however decide that you want to have a different workspace for each diet. Users can have unlimited number of diets in the workspace. You may however decide to have workspaces for different types of clients since it may become excessively complicated if you have too many diets in a workspace. There is also a custom workspace available that is described in another section. The Combine workspaces menu will add the data from the workspace you name to the one currently open in WinDiets. Settings will remain as in the current workspace. This is designed to facilitate research when several people can enter data in different workspaces knowing that they can be combined at the end into a single one for analysis.
When you open a workspace or add a new person, the default is a 30-year-old male called 'Someone'. Using this menu, you can change the age and sex group by clicking on the list on the left. This will be used for the DRVs. You can enter the weight and height. If you enter stones and pounds or feet and inches, click the respective 'Calculate' buttons to convert to metric measurements. WinDiets does not check whether the weights and heights are reasonable for a person of that age and sex, nor does it check the age you enter for validity. There is a button that can calculate the body mass index from the weight and height. Edit the name and address if you need it; there is a space for comments like 'smoker' and this can be as long as you need it to be. When complete, click the 'Confirm' button, which appears on the toolbar. The Delete person menu simply deletes all reference to the current person and goes to the first person in the list.
WinDiets includes the complete UK dataset published in 2008. The US food tables are also available. Local foods can be searched as well. This means that WinDiets will search the current workspace for foods that have been stored in it. These could be recipes, fried foods, dietetic products or foods you have entered if you have the Professional version. Local foods also means those that have been used already in a diet, so for example you could find the code for the type of milk you have already entered into the diet.
Global foods are those that have been added by the password holder to the database that is available for all users. There is also available in the Password menu the facility to download food tables from other parts of the world and these will be stored with the global foods.
There is a box at the top left of the toolbar in which you can enter either codes of foods or words and parts of words you expect in the title of the foods. Codes for UK foods can be entered as given in the composite database, for example 16-250 or as 16250. USA codes are prefaced with a minus sign. Do not be too specific when searching for a word in case the word is spelled differently or words are placed in a title the other way round, e.g. chocolate, milk instead of milk chocolate. After entry press the return key. You can also use the 'Find foods' and ‘Find US foods’ menus to look through the food tables. When foods are found on the screen, click one and its code will be entered for you. Press return and the food will be found, focus will shift to the other text box on the toolbar as shown by green colour. Enter a weight and press return. You may enter ounces if you put a tick by that option on the screen. Take care this is not ticked by mistake as it will create a large error if you intended to enter grams. Each time you click on a food in the list found, not only is its code entered but you can see the relative amount of several nutrients compared to DRVs on the right of the screen. Above this there may be information about portion weights and a button indicates that there is more information available; this will be a full analysis of the food and what extra nutrients are available, but not shown in the normal analysis. It is possible to use these data if you use the Password menu explained later. Note that a red colour means that no information about the nutrient is available in the food tables.
Sometimes a person eats the same for breakfast or some other meal every day. If you have already entered the meal on day 1, when you get to enter that meal on day 2, simply enter # in the box and the same foods can appear in that meal. On day 3, you will get a repeat of day 2 and so on through the diet. This will be the first option offered to you in a numbered sequence appearing in a new box on the screen. Other options allow you to copy the meal, whole day or whole diet to the clipboard and the last option is to paste what you have previously copied in a new location. This allows you to duplicate days or even whole diets.
The default method of finding foods will present you with a list that match the search criteria in a coloured box. Each food will have a background colour that tells you what proportion of a day's DRV is provided by 100g of that food. The default setting is to show this for energy so you can see which foods provide more energy by the intensity of colour, but you can change this on the toolbar to another nutrient.
This screen contains instructions to help you. The idea of advanced find is when you want to choose foods for a diet rather than simply analyse a diet that has been eaten. You may want to find foods high or low in a particular nutrient. In this case simply select nutrient 1. Decide if you want these presented in the normal order they come in or in order of the nutrient using the Order menu. If you are interested in how much of a food you would need to provide a certain amount of nutrient, this is called an exchange. In this case fill in the amount of nutrient you want. Ratios can sometimes be useful ways to differentiate between foods. for example the % energy from fat could be useful or the potassium to sodium ratio. In the first case you need to put fat in nutrient 1 and energy in nutrient 2. When calculating this you would have to multiply the fat by 37 to get the kJ and by 100 to turn it to a %, hence the factor is 3700. For the second case, the factor would be 1 if the ratio required is g/g. Use the normal methods to find the foods, but when shown they will be listed with the information you requested. When you click a food, the complete nutritional analysis will be shown underneath it. For users of the Research version, this will also indicate any extra nutrients that are available for production of a database. Remember that for the instructions to take effect you must click the 'Confirm' button.
Sometimes you might want to find foods that are high in fibre and low in fat, for example. You could do this separately with advanced find, but not at the same time. This menu allows you to set limits, upper and lower, for the nutrient analyses for one or more nutrient. You should also indicate that you want WinDiets to include these parameters in searches by putting a tick next to the nutrient. When doing a normal search, a * will be placed by any foods that comply with the restrictions set. You must switch off any nutrients in the advanced find screen for this to take effect as these have priority in deciding which method of food presentation is chosen by the program. In order for the instructions to take effect, remember to click the 'Confirm' button.
The food box can be made visible, in which case it covers up the password box and the face. The food box is the equivalent of the clipboard in other Windows programs; it is a temporary place to store foods and their weights. This memory is lost when you exit the program. You may want to use it when you know that someone has consumed a food many times and you do not want to look for it each time. This might happen for milk in tea, for example. You can copy the food by clicking on the edit button next to the food when it is listed in the meal. Instead of entering a new weight, simply enter # and the food and weight will be transferred to the food box. Any time you can enter that food and weight into another meal by simply clicking on the food in the food box.
There are buttons on the toolbar to help you move from one meal to the next. There are also options above those buttons that enable you to move to a particular day and meal, so you do not need to just keep clicking the buttons if say you want to get from breakfast of day to evening meal of day 6. There are 7 days and 6 meals available in the normal workspace, but custom workspaces with unlimited days and meals.
The custom option causes considerable reshaping of the menus and toolbar. You have to enter the day number and time (24 hour clock: 0900 for 9 o'clock and 2315 for 11:15 pm, for example). Then click the 'Set new day/meal' button to activate the new meal. The custom menu also has submenu items that let you list the days that have already been entered for that person in case you want to review or edit them. Similarly you may have forgotten the times entered so when you have selected the day, from the same menu, you can find the mealtimes during that day.
On the right of the toolbar there is a face that may appear. This is happy or sad, appropriate to the day's diet selected. It is unlikely that two nutritionists would ever agree how to program what this face should show. It is obvious that we ought to consider the contents of other nutrients, but the main concerns at present are to lower saturated fatty acids and sugars and to increase dietary fibre. Saturated fatty acids probably have priority. The reduction of sugar is important for children especially, but you should explain that it is snacking and sweets that are especially bad. Dietary fibre is good to have, but not as critical probably for long-term health. These ideas are reflected in the way the face reacts to meals and diets. It is important to note that foods are not good or bad and the face should be considered only for mixtures of foods.
Probably no nutritionists would agree on exactly what sensitivity values to set for the face or even whether the face is useful or not. It is provided anyway and you can ignore it if you feel it is not useful. However it is thought that it simplifies the task of understanding the 'healthiness' of diets. It responds only if the amount of energy in the diet is sufficient, set by the energy sensitivity. It could be difficult to explain why a single carrot could appear 'unhealthy' due to the main provider of energy being sugar and hence the sensitivity is set high enough that such anomalies do not appear. However the face could respond to a single food if there is enough in the diet, so you can lower the sensitivity in the Settings menu. The sensitivities of fat, saturates, non-milk extrinsic sugars and dietary fibre can also be altered. You can return to default values using that menu item.
Before this menu item can be used, you must open a workspace and then a recipe file from the Workspace menu. If you have recipes already in the file, you can find one to use. At any time you can get a listing of the food components of the recipe (do not attempt to use 'List meal' for this as you will leave the recipe tasks). You can create a new recipe and whether you have found and altered an old recipe or made a new one, you need to save it before you can use it or make a label. You can not include local foods in a recipe (i.e. those saved in the workspace). To remove a recipe from the file, find it, delete all the ingredients and choose 'Save recipe'.
If you have opened a recipe file that contains recipes, this menu will list them. Click the one you want to use it.
When you are working on a recipe and have selected some other screen you can return to work on the recipe with this menu item.
When you have opened a recipe file, you can start a new recipe with this menu item. Then use the find routines to add foods to the recipe as if it was a meal. You can not include local foods in a recipe (i.e. those saved in the workspace).
Use this menu item when you have created a new recipe. There will appear a screen with a space for the name of the food and below it a larger box for you to write the cooking instructions if you wish. A list also appears on the right of the screen with some dishes named. It is hoped that your recipe will be similar to one of these and when you click it you will see the nutrient losses associated with it from the food tables. You can amend these if you wish before clicking the 'Confirm' button to save the recipe. Once it has been saved then you can use the recipe, make a food label or recipe book. To remove a recipe from the file, find it, delete all the ingredients and choose 'Save recipe'. Altering the name of the recipe will cause WinDiets to add it as a new recipe. It is important to understand that the recipe is stored in the recipe file rather than the workspace and includes information about cooking losses. In versions higher than the Standard, there are two extra menu items related to saving that are explained here. After saving a recipe or finding it again from the recipe file you can alter it and test these alterations to see if they improve the nutritional content of the recipe. When you are satisfied that you have an improved recipe, you can resave it. This does not alter the cooking losses or name of the recipe and the contents of the earlier version of the recipe will be lost; if you want to keep this, you need to use the Save menu and give it a new name and enter cooking losses. Note that a workspace can not contain two recipes of the same name so if you click the Use recipe menu and then alter the recipe, you can not resave and click the Use recipe menu again since the recipe will have the same name. Hence only click the Use recipe menu when you have made any alterations to a recipe and are finally satisfied with it for use in a diet.
When you have found a recipe from the file or created and saved a new one then you can use it in a meal. This menu item causes you to leave recipe processing and return to the meal you were working on before. The code number assigned to the recipe is entered in the top right hand box so if you want to use it simply press the return key, enter a weight and press return again and it will be entered in the meal.
When you have selected a recipe from a file or saved a new one, you can create a food label for it. You may use this for educational purposes[1] and with the Professional and Research versions you can save the screen as a program from the Output menu. The calculations for this label are different to those for normal analyses. Protein must be calculated by multiplying the nitrogen content by 6.25 rather than using the protein analyses in the food tables which use different factors for each food. In order to show the carbohydrate content on the label, the amounts have to be multiplied by different factors for each carbohydrate. The reason for this is that the law requires the weight of carbohydrate, not the weight of component monosaccharides that are given in the food tables. WinDiets therefore finds the amounts of glucose, galactose and fructose and subtracts them from the total sugars. The rest are calculated as disaccharides, which have lost a water molecule on formation and hence weigh less than the monosaccharides. Starch requires another factor and any small remaining carbohydrate is treated as oligosaccharide with its own factor. These factors can be found in the food tables. If you redefine one of the nutrients required for the food label, the menu item will not be visible.
The screen looks rather complicated and needs some explanation. On the left is a column of nutrients that are allowed on the label. In default we have ticks against the big four: energy, protein, carbohydrate and fat. At the bottom are other lipid components, but if you want to include any of them, you also have to include saturates which appear in the big eight. You will see this happen automatically and you can return to the big four if you wish with an option at the top of the screen. You will then see a portion weight, which you should enter. Now if the item serves one portion you can put a tick in that box and the item weight will be completed the same as the item weight. If this is greater than 100g, you are allowed to use that weight to calculate what proportion of RDAs are provided rather than using 100g of the food. The program will take this into account when you click the 'Validate' button in working out whether at least 15% of the RDA is supplied by the food (portion greater than 100g or 100g weight itself). For any nutrients that are then allowed on the label, an empty box will appear next to the nutrient and you can decide if you want it on the label. Any nutrients not supplied in great enough quantities by the food will not be allowed to appear on the label. If you decide to have a micronutrient in the label, the big eight will also automatically be selected.
There is also a large box containing the list of ingredients of the recipe in order of amount. You should edit this to make it look more like an ingredient list on a label. When all these tasks are complete, click 'Make Label' and one should appear on the right of the screen. You can not print or save this screen as it contains a program and is not attractive due to the input areas on the left. Therefore WinDiets gives you the option of clicking the 'Confirm' button on the toolbar to copy this label to an empty screen that you can copy, print and save. Please do not do this until you have finished work on the label screen as you will not be able to return to it. When you have made a food label from a recipe from the View Recipes menu, you can save it as a web file that can be used to illustrate the principles of nutrition labelling of foods. Prior to saving, it would be best not to click the 'Make Label' button since the label you create will appear in the web page. After creation of the web page, it can be put on the Internet or sent by email.
Once you have created and saved a recipe or found one in your recipe file, you can output the ingredient list with weights in grams, the instructions for cooking and the analysis per 100g in tables setup according to the settings menu. You are given the option of additionally having a table of analysis per serving/portion. If you change the weight from 100g, two tables will be produced; this does not make any change to saved information so you can leave this as 100g, find the total weight of cooked recipe in the Recipe book and calculate the portion weight from the number consuming it and enter that weight next time. The analysis takes into account cooking losses you set when saving the recipe. The analysis for non-milk extrinsic sugars (NMES) may differ from the normal one. It is assumed the recipe is to be cooked; if this is not the case, you will need to remember that this assumption has been made and adjust the figure yourself. When food is cooked, it is assume that plant cell walls are broken and all sugar becomes extrinsic, i.e. not within cells, and hence cariogenic. In raw fruit, for example, sugars are not counted as NMES on the basis that they may not be as cariogenic, but on cooking this is not true. Since lactose should be excluded from the value of NMES, this is subtracted from the total sugars to calculate the NMES in the analysis given by this menu item. This page can be copied to a word processor to build up a collection in a recipe book.
Wherever you are in the program, you can return to a list of your meal with this menu.
Dieting requires that you take less energy than your body needs in order to lose weight. It helps if you choose lower energy foods, but how do you know what they are? In this screen there are two boxes. Above these are input boxes for you to type a word or part of one. When there are at least 3 letters, WinDiets will find all the foods in the UK database containing that word. Then do the same for the other box. Hopefully you will find the two foods you want to compare, colour coded so that the redder they are the more energy they contain and the less likely they are to be useful in a weight-reducing diet. Click on both of them and a message will appear under the boxes confirming your thoughts relating to the differences in colour, but this time telling you what % less energy one of them has than the other. When you want to use one of the foods that you have clicked, there are buttons that will put the code number into the box on the toolbar for you to use it.
When some foods are fried in fat, the take up some fat. A good example is fried bread, which soaks up a lot of fat. Some others however contain so much fat that they actually lose fat on frying. They may however exchange some fat with the cooking medium or some may adhere to the product. This can not be allowed for by WinDiets, but the foods that take up fat can be used in the screen produce by this menu item and the amount of fat taken up and its composition can be calculated. Other fried foods that do not take up fat are included here for completeness, but you should not expect any difference in analysis. Foods are only included that have raw and fried codes, both of which are used in the calculation. Choose first the fried food from the drop-down menu at the top left of the screen and click one of the fats below. WinDiets will calculate the fatty acid composition and enter a name for the food. When completed, click the 'Confirm' button. You will find a code number assigned to the new food will appear in the top left of the toolbar. If you want to include the food in a meal, press the return key, enter a weight and the return key again.
Dietetic products are produced by several manufacturers and are continually changing. Periodically they are checked and the database is updated[2]. This can be downloaded by the password holder or you can edit the database yourself. Using the database provided or the updated one, this menu item gives access to the information in it. There are instructions on the screen to help you, but the main thing to note here is that there are two ways to find a product. You can either enter a word or part of a word in the box at the top left, or you can use a combination of classifications for the product you want. For example you will know if you need a tube feed and whether it is to be prescribable for a dialysis patient, for example. If products appear in the list below, click one and the information will appear on the right of the screen. This will list all the ways in which the product has been classified as well as the nutritional composition, if it has been entered into the database. There will be a 'More' button that will try to access the company website where the information was found in the first place. You can check that it is still correct. If the company has changed the web address or deleted the product, you will not find the page. Maybe there is a new database file or you could alert the author to this problem. You can also search the internet for the file and alter the database yourself using the Password menu. When you want to use a product that has nutritional analysis in the database, click the 'Confirm' button and it will be entered into the workspace. A code assigned to it will appear in the top left box of the toolbox. If you want to use it in the meal, press the return key, enter a weight and press the return key again.
The activity screen is completely different depending on the type of workspace.
The normal type of activity diary screen provides you with data entry for 8 different physical activity ratios[3]. You can produce a diary with 24 rows, each containing 12 boxes for insertion of a number (1-8). After filling in the diary, you can enter this in each day. Move from one day to another in the same way as you do between meals. Each day has a new activity diary screen up to a week. The PAR for sleep is 1 so the default you are presented with is rows of 1s on the right of the screen. On the left you will find a button for each PAR and a description of some activities. These are taken from the book on dietary reference values. Now in order to enter data, choose the hour of rising by clicking on the appropriate number 1 at that time on the right. The light blue background will change to light green. Now click the appropriate PAR button or use the keyboard (keys 1-8) and enter data through the day. After each click or keystroke, the green area will move forward. If you make a mistake go back, click it and start entering new data over the same area. When you are satisfied that the data is correct, click the 'Confirm' button. You can return to the data using this menu item to review or amend it.
The custom workspace uses a completely different database from the simple one used by a standard workspace. Rather than divide up the day into 5-minute sections and have only 8 different PAR values, this is divided up into 15-minute sections, but has hundreds of activities to choose from. It is not so useful if you do something very brief like walking up stairs, but for a more sustained time you undertake a particular type of activity, you can map it out over the day and link it to your energy intake.
In order to use this screen, take the mouse down below the line of green bars and type a word or part of a work of an activity in the green box below and press the return key. Matching activities should appear in the list below. You can have nothing in the box and press the return key, in which case all the activities will appear for you to review. Click an activity and the mouse is charged. It will not look any different, but if you pass it gently and carefully over the green bars in the centre of the screen, the height of bars will change to reflect the extent of energy required for this activity. The system used is call the MET and is commonly used and derived from Ainsworth BE, Haskell WL, Whitt MC, Irwin ML, Swartz AM, Strath SJ, O'Brien WL, Bassett DR, Schmitz KH, Emplaincourt PO, Jacobs DR & Leon AS (2000) Compendium of Physical Activities: an update of activity codes and MET intensities. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 32 (9), S498-S516. When the mouse is charged and you want to remove the charge, click the 'Cancel Choice' button. Be careful with the charged mouse as if you take it carelessly over the bars to go to the toolbar, you will change one of the bars. It is best to discharge it first and then go to the toolbar or skirt around the side. Any bar you alter by accident can of course be reset after finding the appropriate activity. The data is not recorded until you click the 'Confirm' button on the toolbar.
Some of the analyses provide tables of nutrients in the order specified by this setting. The default is to have 6 tables starting with macronutrients, then vitamins and finally minerals and trace elements. This may be excessive to your needs or you may want to include some extra nutrients using the Password menu. If you wanted to have a single table, click the option next to the first row of nutrients and go through the drop-down menus across the first row choosing the nutrients you want. This may seem like a long task, but it will be remembered for this workspace so it only needs to be done once, unless you want to keep changing this setting. If you want to return to the default setting, click the 'Default type 1' button. Default type 2 is for 3 tables in which the nutrients are those with DRVs set and this helps in the layout of the table where you want to use the DRVs. When finished, remember to click the 'Confirm' button on the toolbar.
This is the main way to calculate nutritional composition of diets and recipes as well as activity diaries. Choose either the current meal or recipe, a complete day to include all meals or up to a week. This will take an average of all the days entered. If there is a food in a day, it will be counted as a day and the average will include it. You can have 7 or less days. The custom analysis is different because it can have any number of days in the diet. The analysis of activity diary will be different depending on the type of workspace.
Sometimes you may want to have a record of whose diet was analysed and other times it may not be important. The information can be placed before the analysis every time if you put a tick by the Include person data menu item in the Settings menu. The name will also appear on the screen when you are entering data to remind you (after editing the name it may take a while before the name changes on this screen).
This gives you the nutrient analysis for each food separately in tables (these can be set by Professional and Research users). There may be letters in front of some of the data; these are warnings and are explained in the Help Nutrients and abbreviations menu. At the bottom of each table, the total is calculated for each nutrient.
This provides only the total nutrient analysis, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
This lists all the foods in the meal or recipe with the weight. For 14 important nutrients, the amount in each food is compared to the DRV and expressed in terms of the intensity of blue colour. This way it is easy to see which foods are the main providers of each nutrient.
This provides a bar chart of the totals of 14 major nutrients in the meal or recipe.
This gives you the nutrient analysis for each meal separately in tables (these can be set by Professional and Research users).
This provides only the total nutrient analysis, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
This provides the total nutrient analysis (Amt), the DRV set for the person (check that you have entered the correct DRV by looking at the data for the person in the Workspace Edit person data menu), the % of DRV achieved and an explanation of the DRV used. For energy, fat and non-milk extrinsic sugars, it is the estimated average requirement that used. The macronutrient DRV is calculated using the % energy of the diet suggested in the DRV. Other nutrients use the reference nutrient intake, which allows for most people's requirements in the group.
You can set a different amount to compare diets to using the Settings menu; this is referred to as the RDA in WinDiets and using this menu will let you compare your data to these values.
WinDiets uses the UK DRVs for comparison of diets, but these might change within the currency of the program or you may want to compare diets to those of some other country. Since these have frequently been called RDAs, that term is used here, although they may have other names now. Select the RDA you have added using the Workspace menu using the Choose RDA menu item in the Settings menu.
The RDA function can be used to analyse school meals in the UK, for example the required data for England is given in the workspace. Open a new workspace and enter meals as normal according to the type of work you are doing. For example, if you intend to analyse single meals, enter them in one of the meals of day 1; this could be lunch if you want to make it clear that the school meal is intended for lunch. You may enter one meal per day and there are 7 days available. Normally this is intended as a diet of a person, but can be used for this purpose. However, you may prefer to enter each meal as the only one and name it; in order to do this it is suggested that each meal is placed alone in day 1 of a different person. Use Add Person from the Workspace menu and then Edit Person Data to enter the name of the meal instead of the persons name. Later when you want to find a particular meal you can use the Find a Person menu. As long as there is only one meal in a day, compare this to the guidelines using the RDAs provided that start 1d, for example - secondary. Use the Settings menu and Choose RDA. You will be presented with a list of different catering situations to choose from, as in the tables provided in the book. After choosing, from the Analysis menu, find Day and then RDA in the submenu that appears. This will show the nutrients required in the same order as the table in the book, with the amount in the meal, the guideline and the % guideline achieved by the meal. The non-milk extrinsic sugars analyses provided in this table are specifically in accordance with the method recommended for analysis of school meals.
If you are planning a week of menus or perhaps 4 weeks of menus, there will be 5 days per week each containing a meal. These should be entered into one day; i.e. enter the meal for the first day in breakfast, the second in morning snack, and so on. There are 6 meals in the day so the last meal will be empty. Enter the second week into day 2 and so on. To analyse a week, rather than "1d-secondary", you would choose "5d-secondary" as this has 5 times the amount in the guidelines and then if you analyse using Day and RDA in the Analysis menu, you will get the average data for a week. If you have 2-7 weeks of menus then you would use the Up to a Day menu from the Analysis menu and then RDA in the submenu; this will provide the average analyses of the 2-7 weeks; WinDiets knows how many you have entered and divides appropriately.
This provides a bar chart of the totals of 14 major nutrients in the day.
This provides only the total nutrient analysis as averages per day, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
This provides the total average daily nutrient analysis (Amt), the DRV set for the person (check that you have entered the correct DRV by looking at the data for the person in the Workspace Edit person data menu), the % of DRV achieved and an explanation of the DRV used. For energy, fat and non-milk extrinsic sugars, it is the estimated average requirement that used. The macronutrient DRV is calculated using the % energy of the diet suggested in the DRV. Other nutrients use the reference nutrient intake, which allows for most people's requirements in the group.
You can set a different amount to compare diets to using the Settings menu; this is referred to as the RDA in WinDiets and using this menu will let you compare your data to these values.
This provides a bar chart of the totals of 14 major nutrients in the average analyses of the days.
This calculates the amount of the nutrient set using Settings Advanced find provided by each food and this can be provided in order of the amount if you put a tick by the Order menu in the Settings menu.
This calculates the number of times different types of food are included in the diet and the average and total weights of them. When you have set a nutrient in Advanced find this provides a bar chart showing how different food groups contribute to the total analysis of the nutrient set using Settings Advanced find.
This provides a complete listing of each food and amount in each meal during the days entered in the week. After each day, a table of the totals for the nutrients (Professional and Research users can set the tables using the Settings menu) appears after the list of foods. At the end appears the analysis of the average daily diet compared to the DRVs. After that is a table showing the average analysis of each type of meal. This is followed by an analysis of each food's contribution to all the nutrients in the tables. The preparation and layout of this table will take WinDiets some time to complete.
The report will first analyse the activity diary if there is one entered. This will include a table of activity levels showing their contribution to the energy requirement. A report on the diet will include the face that tells you something about the 'healthiness' of the diet. There is a table of the average daily intake compared to the DRVs. Some suggestions about how to improve the diet follows. The wording of these can be altered from the Settings menu. For every nutrient that can appear in the report in the 'Up to a week' Analysis menu, the settings can be altered on this screen. In default you should see a tick by energy on the left with 80 next to it. This shows that the report will provide the message next to these if there is less than 80% of the energy estimated average requirement provided by the diet. On the right of the screen there is a tick next to 120. This means that the message next to it will be given if the energy provided is over 120% of the requirements. The number on the extreme right shows that energy will be first in the report. Look through the default settings and run a report to see how it looks, then you can alter these settings. These will remain in the workspace, but will not affect any other workspaces, so you could have different types of messages to people of different types by putting their data into different workspaces. When done, please remember to click the 'Confirm' button.
This produces stacked bar charts showing the % energy from carbohydrate, fat, protein and alcohol.
There are several different unformatted tables of output that duplicate the output from the Comprehensive menu item; use the Copy menu and paste into a spreadsheet like Excel.
This analysis will provide the totals for each day in the diet according to the table setup requested in the Settings menu.
The normal workspace provides a graphical analysis of activities for each day. This shows how the energy requirement changes through the day due to activity level. the total time (mins) at each level is shown along with the % of the time taken at that level and % energy required for activity at that level. The total for the days in the period, up to a week, is also given.
This provides a tabular output, showing for each hour the energy requirement according to the activity level (MET) multiplied by the body weight. the energy intake during that hour is also provided. Since people do not each every hour, many of these figures are zero. Starting at the beginning of the period, the balance of intake and output of energy is zero, probably becoming negative until breakfast may help to bring it back towards zero again. At the end of the day, and certainly after a long period, this will show how energy balance may have drifted to indicate probable weight loss or gain. However, it must be emphasised that the energy expenditure is only an approximation and the food tables are not accurate enough either to indicate precise energy balance. This should be take only to indicate gross inequalities between intake and output and show the pattern of this during a day.
This is entitled the easy screen because it is the simplest way to learn about the 'healthiness' of foods in diets. A list of breakfast foods appears and you can select them with the mouse simply by clicking on them; the colour changes to show they are selected and the bar chart responds. They are just as easy to switch off. This shows the day's diet with a vertical line for the DRV. Move between meals using the arrow buttons and note the response of the face to the meals you enter. You can also see a simple table of the diet and switch back to the bar chart using the buttons.
Users can create their own easy screens from the Output menu. The easy screen is a simple web page that contains food names that can be clicked on and off. A bar chart shows the content of key nutritional components that are important determinants of the 'healthiness' of the diet. A face also interprets the screen. You can create your own easy screen using foods from the food tables, but not including any local foods you have entered yourself (for technical reasons this is impossible). Put the foods in the meals of the day as you would normally, but make sure there are enough of them to fill the screen like in the example provided in WinDiets. When food names are too long, click them on the screen and edit them to shorter names that fit the boxes in the easy screen. Then choose this menu item, select a name and folder for the file and a new easy screen should appear. If you want to use this web page outside WinDiets, please note that you must copy the face files that you will find in the folder otherwise there will be no face on the screen.
This menu item simply puts photos of 8 different types of food on the screen, each in 5 different amounts to help you learn what different size portions look like. The foods have been chosen to include a range of different shapes and colours.
One of the best ways to learn nutrition is to use a quiz that gives you feedback when you make a mistake and a score to show that you are getting better[5]. This has been tested with students. The quiz randomly selects foods and presents their nutrient analyses compared to DRVs. Click the food you think is correct and see the answer. A score will appear and after some time, clear the score and see if you are getting better at recognising the nutritional composition of these foods. You can make your own quizzes and save them as interactive programs for your students. As long as you have at least 10 foods in the meal, you can create a quiz that asks you to select which food has been presented in a bar chart of nutrient analyses. For technical reasons, locally added foods will be ignored, so if they are present you will need more than 10 foods in the meal. Other meals in the day are ignored. You can use the web page created in a browser, so it can be used for education after placing it on the internet or you can email it to people.
Find the videos in the Help menu and watch ‘How to find foods and enter weights’; note how the mouse moves around the screen. You can not see some keystrokes however, so it is important to note that in the main command box at the top left you complete a line with the Return key. You can not pause the video, but you can watch it as many times as you need.
Having watched the video, you should follow these instructions. The first essential is to start a new workspace file; ‹ Workspace ‹ New workspace and start one (name it yourself) in your area on the network. You can back up important work onto a pen drive. Then, click on the main command box and type:
bran
and press return. Always ask for the simplest part of a food name in case it is written differently in the food tables, for example milk chocolate is written ‘Chocolate, milk’. To find yoghurt, if you are unsure of the spelling, type ‘yog’. WinDiets uses the full dataset of foods, not the codes in the latest edition of the single book sold as the food tables; this only contains some of the foods in the dataset. When foods are presented for selection, they have a background colour, the intensity of which depends on the amount of energy in them. You may be interested in another nutrient, in which case you can change this on the toolbar. It makes no difference to the exercise you are going to work through.
You should now find bran flakes, click it and see that a lot of information about it appears on the right of the screen. For many foods, there is information about portion weights that help you when you do not know the weight. This may help you if it was not possible to take your balance with you to all locations and perhaps you need to estimate how much you ate. The nutrients that appear also have colours depending on the amount of nutrient compared to the dietary reference values. Red colour means that information is lacking in the database for this nutrient in the food. This is helpful when you have to decide which food to choose for a diet. The ‘more’ button gives all the nutrients, i.e. more than in this table. Note that the food code is entered in the command box, so press the return key and enter a weight after reading the information about portion size on the screen. Please note that the colour of the boxes on the toolbar changes to green when highlighted for you to enter data and that you enter the weight in a second box, not the command box that you entered ‘bran’.
As soon as you have entered the weight, you will see bran flakes in the breakfast appearing on the screen, with the weight that you entered. Now this is already entered into the workspace, so if you leave the program, you will not lose the data and never need to bother to save it. You can easily delete a food using the button next to it or edit the weight by clicking that button. Should you wish to edit the name of the food, you can click on the name and a box will pop up to enable you to do this.
Find the videos in the Help menu and watch ‘Create a recipe and food label’. In order to analyse a diet, you may need to be able to create codes for recipes and enter food analyses from labels. As with the workspace file, everyone can have as many recipe files as they want and each can hold many recipes. ‹ Workspace ‹ New recipe file and select a name and location. This simply creates the file and opens it. ‹ View ‹ Recipes ‹ New recipe. Find the required codes to make a cauliflower cheese. Use the same instructions you used with the bran flakes; this will test whether you can apply what you learned previously. Try also looking for foods using the Find Foods menu.
|
|
Wt |
|
Cheese, Cheddar, average |
100 |
|
Cauliflower, raw |
700 |
|
Water, distilled |
100 |
|
Salt |
2 |
|
Margarine, soft, polyunsaturated |
25 |
|
Wheat flour, white, plain |
25 |
|
Whole milk, pasteurised, average |
250 |
When the recipe is complete, you have to save it in the file before you can use it. ‹ View ‹ Recipes ‹ Save recipe and you will get a new screen. When recipes are cooked, some water and nutrients are lost. This depends on the cooking method which is listed on the right; select it and see what nutrients will be lost. You could also type in full instructions how to make this recipe, but you don’t have them now so ignore this box, and then click the ‘Confirm’ button. Simply type ‘Cauliflower cheese with polyunsaturated margarine’ into the top box and click the ‘Confirm’ button. This places the recipe in the file. ‹ View ‹ Recipes ‹ Use recipe will then transfer the nutritional analysis of the recipe from the recipe file to the workspace and give it a code of 0001; you should find this entered in the command box, ready for you to use by pressing the return key. Do this and enter 100 for the weight. You should now have bran flakes and cauliflower cheese in breakfast.
If you have a product label and want to enter that food into a diary, this can be put into your workspace. ‹ Workspace ‹ Add local food and you get a screen with blank spaces for each nutrient to fill in. It takes some time to fill all the boxes for a single food, so in this case you could put in some imaginary figures, name the food (anything you like) and click the confirm button. As with the recipe, you will now find a code entered in the command box, so you can just use the new food. If you want to use it at a later stage, or if you want to reuse a food that you entered in a previous meal, you can search through the workspace. You will find a select box below the command box, which you can change to say ‘Local foods’. You can put a word or part of a word and press return, you should then find the food you want and click it; the code should appear in the command box, so press return and enter a weight to use the food.
Each fat you use for frying has a different fatty acid composition, but for most foods the food tables give you data on only a couple of different fats. ‹ View ‹ Fried foods and find Lemon sole goujons. Click on different fats and notice the effect on the saturated fatty acids (SFA) and the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids. Each time you will find the name of the fat appended to the food name, but you have to edit this. Some foods are greatly affected by what they are fried in and others are not. Some foods lose fat on frying and are little affected by the type of oil they are fried in. As for other screens, you will find the ‘Confirm’ button is needed before you can actually use this new fried food. A food code will appear and you can simply use the fried food in the meal.
Analyse a 7-day diary if you kept one or try to remember typical days for this exercise. ‹ Workspace ‹ Edit personal data and click the correct age and sex group for you and enter the rest of your personal data; click ‘Confirm’ to save the data. Delete all the foods you have entered into the breakfast and enter what you really ate on day 1 breakfast using the instructions already given; remember to check that you are looking for foods in the whole UK database. Use the arrow button to move to the next meal and enter the first day’s data, meal by meal. While still in day 1, probably evening meal or snack, ‹ View ‹ Activity diary and enter your data for day 1. You will find rows of 1s on the right of the screen, with hours indicated next to them. Click on the first one of the day that is different to 1 and key in numbers from the diary. You will need to click the ‘Confirm’ button when the data is complete for day 1.
Use the arrow button to move to day 2, breakfast and keep entering foods then activity data until the seventh day is finished. The next thing to do is choose the type of tables we want ‹ Settings ‹ Setup analysis tables and choose ‘Default type 2’, then click the ‘Confirm’ button. In order to get output from WinDiets for your diet, you need to choose ‹ Analysis ‹ Up to a week ‹ Comprehensive and WinDiets will take some time producing the tables of data. ‹ Output ‹ Copy analysis and open ‘Word’. Paste the analysis into ‘Word’. ‹ Analysis ‹ Activity and again copy and paste. ‘Word’ is unfortunately not clever enough to understand the graph you get each day in WinDiets, so simply select everything in the activity output except the final table and the line stating your energy requirement and delete it from the document. Add your name at the top of the data and print the document.
Start WinDiets and create a new workspace. Enter the following codes and weights directly into WinDiets :
Day 1--Breakfast
11503 40
12316 100
17485 18
11475 60
19139 30
Day 1--Morning snack
17089 30
17175 330
Day 1--Lunch
13423 100
19069 180
Day 1--Evening meal
19346 275
13140 60
12422 110
In default the DRV is set to M19-50 and you do not need to change it for this exercise, but you need to know how to change it for the future: ‹ Workspace ‹ Edit person data. You can see how the day’s diet compares to the DRVs for selected nutrients (not the meal or the week) on the right of the screen. This may help you making adjustments as you go along in trying to improve a diet. It would be good to get the diet close to the proportions of energy recommended; these depend on the patient or subject group; you should study the book on Dietary Reference Values to understand this better. Further help will be obtained by: ‹ Analysis ‹ Up to a week ‹ Report; this will first remind you that there are no activities. In the later exercises you will have an activity diary so this reminder will not appear.
A more detailed analysis like the one shown here can be obtained by first setting the type of table by ‹ Settings ‹ Setup analysis tables ‹ Default type 2 ‹ Confirm and then: ‹ Analysis ‹ Day ‹ Per DRV. Clearly we do not need to obtain the DRV of each nutrient each day, but for this exercise, we will look at the totals compared to the DRVs and try to improve this day’s intake, assuming all days of this diet would be similar.
Firstly we note that this is a very ‘unhealthy’ diet, being high in saturated fatty acids and particularly low in vitamin C and non-starch polysaccharide (NSP).
Now ‹ Settings ‹ Advanced find and set nutrient 1 to SFA and then the confirm button. ‹ Settings ‹ Order and this should put a tick next to this menu item. ‹ Analysis ‹ Up to a week ‹ Nutrient. This shows what food contributes most to the SFA intake: cheesecake. You can do this for a week’s bad diet as well to give you a starting point. You can think about cheesecake later if you wish (you may like it too much to get rid of it!), but for now, work on the breakfast. ‹ Analysis ‹ Meal or recipe ‹ Colour analysis. Notice that it seems that the butter is high in saturated fatty acids (SF is blue in the graphic produced). Find a spread that contains less saturated fatty acids; ‹ Find foods ‹ Milk and milk products ‹ Fats and oils (there are more spreads in ‹ Find foods ‹ Fats and oils ‹ Spreading fats when you need them) to find an alternative; see how high butter is and choose Low fat spread; put in the same weight as there was of butter and look at the colour graphics to see the difference before you actually delete the butter. If you forget how much butter there is when asked for a weight, put any number and then edit the weight when you can see it in the same meal as already contains the butter. Delete the butter. This will however remove some energy from the diet so you would need to take that into account when revising a diet; alternatively use polyunsaturated margarine which has the same energy but much less saturated fatty acids.
Now make use of the ratio method. Use advanced settings and set nutrient 1 to SFA and nutrient 2 to Energy; type in the factor 3700 (37 kJ/g and 100 to make it %). Click the confirm button. Type milk in the box and press return. Within the results which should appear you should find:
|
3.34 |
Skimmed milk, pasteurised average |
|
20.3 |
Semiskimmed milk, pasteurised, average |
|
33.49 |
Whole milk, pasteurised, average |
Clearly it is best to have a low % energy from saturated fatty acids. The skimmed milk looks best, but this is now a time to demonstrate the preview method. For this, you have to restore the normal method of finding foods; ‹ Settings ‹ Advanced find and select no nutrient for both where it says SFA and Energy; then confirm this change. Then find the ‘Set find’ menu on the screen and set it to SFA. This is for the normal find routine, rather than the advanced one. Find milk again and see the same foods in the list. Click each of the 3 milks in turn and look at the table on the right. Note that the fat is much lower in skimmed milk, but so is the vitamin A; there is very little difference between them for calcium. Although there is no problem with vitamin A in this diet and so we could select the skimmed milk, actually we do not think that the subject would be prepared to consume milk with so little cream so we select the semi-skimmed milk as a compromise. When you have clicked the semi-skimmed milk, its code will appear and you can enter it into the diet and then delete the whole milk.
In order to learn more about the program that is useful to designing and altering diets, please note that some information is given about portion weights of foods when appropriate along with the nutritional profiles in the preview. Also please have a look at ‹ View ‹ Visualise Portions. Also to get ideas about ‘healthy eating’ messages you can use in improving a bad diet ‹ Help ‹ Notes and internet and choose Healthy eating from the menu on that screen. This provides you with a list of what can be done to ‘unhealthy’ diets to improve them.
Join a group of 5-6 people who are at a similar stage in the practical. Problem based learning is where you are presented with a problem as a group and learn from each other by trying to solve it. How you organise the work depends on the group. Before the end of the practical, be prepared as a group to project your solution onto the main screen for discussion with the rest of the class. Stay in the same workspace and open from the workspace menu the diet file on the CD: badstephen.di8
and the activity diary: badstephen.act
It is only one day and your task is to improve it to make it ‘healthier’. No further instructions are given as all the methods have been demonstrated already; however you are urged to discover the age, sex and activity levels of the subject and match the diet to these. Each group will present this to the rest of the class; save the workspace file after making the changes onto a pen drive for presentation to the class[6].
The idea of the work required here is that you should use the procedures demonstrated in the practical to decide how a given diet could be improved. Use the file on the CD: badsheila.wd8
as a basis on which to build the report. Copy this to your own area of the computer before trying to open it in WinDiets. You are recommended to look at the details of the person that may be important in considering the diet using ‹ File ‹ Edit person data. Analyse what is wrong with the diet then ‹ File ‹ Find person. You should see the same diet again for Sheila (improve). You can flip between the two diets.
Start your report with your name at the top and explain what you think of the diet itself and the major features you notice in the distribution of nutrients between the average meals. Use the activity diary results in this analysis. Now make recommendations for improvements to the diet. Look at each day separately and see if it can be improved. Do not try to make each day’s diet according to the DRVs, since that is impractical. Do not try to cut down micronutrients to the DRVs. Remember that the DRV given for these nutrients is actually the RNI, which is enough for almost everyone; it is not the EAR, nor the LRNI. For energy, however, it is the EAR. For fat, saturated fatty acids and non-milk extrinsic sugars, it is based on the % energy recommended for that amount of energy. Since you have an activity diary, you can use the energy requirements for the person as the basis of the calculations (as is done in the report given by WinDiets). You must indicate in the report the changes you suggest and the reasons for making them. Consider the minimum number of messages you would give to the client that would achieve an improvement; do not alter the diet so radically that it would be unacceptable to the individual. Look at the grading scheme for further guidance.
The dietary output will be given as Appendix 1. ‹ Analysis ‹ Up to a week ‹ Comprehensive. Cut out from the analysis the totals for each day and the analyses per food for the whole week. Appendix 1 should therefore contain the tables including data on the weight of each food in each meal, the total/activity adjusted DRV for the week, and the distribution of nutrients between average meals. Word is not able to paste the graph that shows the distribution of activities during each day, so only the analysis of activity for the week (final small table) should be included in Appendix 1. Note that appendices come at the end of the report (i.e. are appended).
Appendix 2 will contain the analysis of the diet you recommend in the same format with the same details as Appendix 1, but does not need to repeat the activity table.
The whole report will be contained in a single Word document; you must insert page numbers from the menu to run throughout the document[7].
Most of the tables of analytical output can be output in three different ways. You can tell if this is possible by the fact that they are grey unless they are enabled and change colour on activation. Output to word processing programs is encouraged because this allows you to make sure that tables are not split between pages; use the 'Copy' menu for this. You can also save files as web pages or print them directly. For some screens, you can save the whole page as a working web page including all the programming instructions. If you want to insert a copy of the macronutrient graph into another file such as a Word document, it is possible to copy the picture and select the part you want. At the same time press the Alt key and the Print Scrn key to copy the picture of WinDiets to the clipboard. Start a program such as Paint, which is supplied with Windows, use the mouse to select the graphic and you can copy and paste it into the document as shown in the footnote[8].
When you copy an analysis, it goes to the clipboard. This can then be pasted into any appropriate program. This is recommended since printing from WinDiets does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets, but this is not true if you copy to a word processing program.
You can save analyses to a web file in HTML. This type of file can be opened in many word processing programs. This is better than printing from WinDiets, which does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets, but this is not true if you copy to a word processing program. The web files can be read by browsers to look like they do in WinDiets, so it is possible to put the analysis on a website or email it to someone to view in a browser.
Printing from WinDiets does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets. You will find this menu takes you to the Print Preview screen of Internet Explorer so you can see if the background colours will print and where pages will break. Confirm you intention using the Print button on this screen.
There is a password box on the toolbar for you to enter the current password. In default it is JOHNAD. If you change it, you must keep a record of this as it can not be restored obviously to the default again.
If you choose to download the dietetic product file, this will replace the file on your computer with one from the WinDiets website. Clearly you need to be connected to the internet. This service is not guaranteed to continue and the website might change so you may have trouble in future with this process. The next menu item therefore gives you the power to update the database yourself or you could contact the university to see if there is another way to update the database. The screen has a select box with companies listed and when you click one, the products are listed in the centre box. Click one of these and its nutrients and classifications appear as numbers and ticks, respectively. You can see on the right options for what you want to do; select one, make the required alterations and click the 'Confirm' button. For further help contact the university.
Redefine nutrient means that you can replace data in the main database with extra nutrients not normally there in default. There is extra data mainly for amino acids (in US database), but it is not normally presented in WinDiets. Make sure that you have not set a nutrient for advanced find before starting this menu item. There are instructions on the screen and you will be able to put data available for these extra nutrients in a location that you can use in WinDiets. There are some empty slots and you can replace those you do not need after the 30th in the list; others can not be replaced. If you want to alter data in WinDiets for a nutrient already presented in the program, i.e. not an extra hidden nutrient, this can be done. In this case from the Settings menu go to Advanced find and set a single nutrient that you want to alter. When you then use the Redefine menu, all the foods in the two databases will appear on the sceeen with a box containing the current value, which you can change. When the value is currently not analysed, the box is empty, but if you have a value, enter it in the box. Any value changed will have a warning 'C' next to it in tables of output to indicate that it has been changed from the database supplied.
The 'Local to global' menu item simply transfers nutritional analyses from the workspace to the global area so that all users have access to them or you yourself could access them when using a different workspace. If the same name is found in the global environment then it is not replaced. You can not delete foods from either the local or global environments; just do not use them if you later find a problem with them. Codes for global foods are over 20000 and can be found by setting the filter on the toolbar. When supplied the program has no global foods. You can download the latest database of global food tables from the WinDiets website; this may grow in size, but is not guaranteed. The next menu item allows you to transfer all foods at once if you have created a new food table but there will be no checking on duplicate foods. It may also give access to other global food tables if you have the data loaded and these can be loaded into the global area.
This help file is the main means of aiding your use of WinDiets. It is arranged by the order of the menu items and colour coded so that all white background text refers to the Standard version, green to Professional and above and blue only to the Research version. You can use the F1 key and dynamic help when puzzled about a screen. There is a key word index to help you. A brief video shows you the operation of the main features of the Standard version. You can find some notes and links to nutrition on the internet. Abbreviations are also explained in this menu.
This menu item starts the help file at the contents page so you can see all the menus in the program in the order they appear on the screen and choose the most appropriate help topic.
Whatever screen you are on in WinDiets, either use this menu or the F1 key and you will get help appropriate to that screen.
This shows the key words that have been entered into the help file. Sometimes there are several topics for a key word.
There are videos showing the main features of WinDiets.
WinDiets provides some simple notes about nutrition that are not referenced. Links to nutrition-related pages on the internet are also available. There were carefully selected but are not guaranteed. There is no intention to withdraw this service at any time, but it is not guaranteed to continue throughout the lifetime of this program.
The names of nutrients have been shortened for tabulation and explained here. For each nutrient, you can link directly to the notes that explain something about it. There are also abbreviations used for warnings that appear in tables.
The Research version contains all of the features in the Professional version and a Research menu. The main features of the Research menu are related to multiple subject processing. This type of data is likely to be generated by surveys of many people whose diets have been added to a workspace. The spreadsheet menu analyses these and places the data into a grid that can be copied to a spreadsheet or statistical analysis program. The most powerful research feature is the capacity to create a database including the nutritional analyses of foods consumed by the subjects. This can be used to show the main providers of nutrients which may help in constructing a questionnaire and also you can make up queries that provide instant feedback on the information you want to answer your research hypotheses.
This command is divided into three types. All will analyse the nutrients specified in the Set-up analysis tables in the Settings menu and place data into a grid which can be copied from the Output menu and pasted into a spreadsheet or statistical analysis program. WinDiets does not attempt to mimic what these specialised programs can do, so it merely facilitates their use by providing data in the right format for them. The most information is supplied 'By meal' which may take some time to analyse a lot of subjects. 'By day' and 'By diet' may take a little less time but supply less information in the grid.
The workspace is a database used to store subject's data. You may decide to store males in one and females in another, for example. At the end however you want to get information out of this data. The limiting factor is that your data is in a workspace and the nutrient analysis of the foods is under the control of WinDiets. You can only do calculations that have been programmed into WinDiets. However, using the create database instruction, you can make a new database containing both sets of information[9]. The nutrients can also include those that are provided in the program but not visible during normal use. The set-up analysis tables in the Settings menu will be used to decide what nutrients to use, but a list of others will also be provided. You can select as many of these as you like but remember that the total time taken to create the database depends on the number of nutrients you ask for, so it is sensible to ask for only those you really need. The database you create is completely separate from the workspace, so the workspace remains for you to use to add more subjects or create the database again. Click the 'Confirm' button to start the processing.
Do not confuse this with a workspace or a recipe file, both of which are databases too. This database means the one you created using the menu above this one. You must open it after creating it before you can get information from it. Since it is an Access database and has a .mdb extension, you can open it in Access and make queries using the wizards there; this may be advantageous since it is easier for beginners to use that program.
This will list the amount of nutrient supplied by all the food groups in your database, separately for each subject. The nutrient must first be set using advanced find in the Settings menu. This can take a very long time if you have a lot of subjects. The key for each abbreviation of food groups is given in the help for query.
This will list the amount of nutrient supplied by all the diets in your database. The nutrient must first be set using advanced find in the Settings menu. This can be useful to help you design a food frequency questionnaires since it shows the main suppliers of the nutrient you are interested in and may give you clues about what questions need asking in the FFQ.
The database created above can be queried using the SQL language. It can also be opened in Access, in which case you can use wizards to help you make queries. In WinDiets, 20 queries are supplied, but they do assume that you included the particular nutrients in them in the database, so they may not work if you haven't. Simply click the query on the right and its text will be entered in the box, then click the 'Confirm' button to run the query and save or copy the output. Return to the query screen using the 'Confirm' button again to run another one. The help file provides a further explanation and a list of the abbreviations used to classify foods in the UK dataset.
Food frequency questionnaires may be useful when you want to analyse many diets and there is insufficient resources to monitor their diet directly. There are two approaches you could take to producing a questionnaire. You could simply enter into the workspace foods that represent those you want to include in the questionnaire. For example you might choose a bread to represent that question, though you need to recognise that breads differ in nutritional composition. This may not be important if you do not have any research interest in dietary fibre. Taking this approach, you might enter up to 100 foods, create a database and then design the questionnaire. The other approach is to do a study of a sample of subjects' diets that they weigh[10]. Then create a database including these diets. In this case you may find that there are several types of bread consumed by people in the study. You can create a composite analysis of bread and take into account all portion weights of bread in designing the question on breads. The 'Design questions' screen puts a list of all foods consumed on the left and boxes for questions on the right. Move between boxes (100 questions) using the arrow buttons at the top of the boxes and enter the question that will appear in the questionnaire in the empty box at the top. Select what foods belong to that question from the list on the left, click one in turn and click the arrow button in the centre of the screen. If you regret your decision, you can click a food on the right and send it back to the list on the left. This process is bound to take some time. You may use the 'Foods in order' menu to help you. Click the 'Confirm' button when the task is complete.
Each question can have one of three types available. Most would naturally be the first one, which is the default, but some foods may be eaten so frequently that you want the second one (per day) and occasionally subjects may think in amounts so you can use the last one, but this is not really FFQ data. Click the 'Confirm' button when the task is complete.
The 'Portions and nutrients' menu item calculates the appropriate portion weights and average nutrient analyses for each question, so no screen appears. The following screens can not be seen until you have processed the data in this way.
There are now two possibilities. Firstly you can enter data for the people who already did the weighed intake and who have now completed your FFQ. This lets you then calibrate the FFQ. The idea behind this is that people may misperceive how often they consume certain foods, but you know this, since they have weighed them. WinDiets can calculate a factor that makes the FFQ give the same answers as the weighed intake. This may have advantages, but many people know recognise that the weighed intake method itself has problems of validity due to under-reporting by some subjects. You do not need to calibrate the FFQ before use since the factor by default is 1 and the program will still operate without this process. When you have entered data for subjects, with or without calibration, you can get an analysis.
The other option for your FFQ is to produce it as a web program. You can put this on the internet and invite participants to use it. They could save the output in a file and email it to you. They could print the output and send it to you. They could use it simply to educate themselves about their diet. You could also email the web questionnaire as a file to subjects.
This is a cut-down version of the program sold in the UK. It is designed to remove all traces of cultural expectations about timing and naming of meals in the UK. When you select foods, the background colour reflects the amount of nutrient as in the other versions of WinDiets; these do use the UK dietary reference values, but otherwise this is unavailable in the Global version. Many screens in WinDiets normally include features related to the UK data and are useful in education, but this version is designed to enable dietary analysis and research elsewhere and so there is a long list of screens that are not available: easy screen, dieting assistant, visualise portions (UK style foods), quiz, fried foods (based on those in UK dataset), face interpreting the diet, various interactive educational screens that can normally be saved for use on the Internet, analysis by week, and all graphs. The videos show how to use the UK versions in case you wish to upgrade to have the extra facilities. Many of the videos do cover aspects that you can learn to use this version though parts of them are not relevant.
Before the program runs, you will be asked a question about file storage. Windows does not allow a program to alter data in the area where programs are stored, but does allow you to open and read the files. If you only intend to use the program exactly as provided then you do not need to alter the data in the main databases and at the first question you can just choose the default. In this case you will not be able to use any of the Password-controlled functions. It is unlikely you will wish to do this for WinDiets Global since you would not be able to use food tables from any country apart from the USA. In the more likely case that you want to add data from at least one country, answer 2 to the question posed at the start of the program and show where to store the files. Although you will name only one file ‘windiets.wdn’ at this stage, two other files will also be copied. There are instructions on the screen at this point and even if you type the file name wrongly, the correct one will be copied and named as required by WinDiets. It is advisable to create a folder to store this data. If you subsequently delete any of these files, WinDiets will not be able to recover the altered data. After altering the data, you are advised to backup these files. Since each user can have copies of these files, you can make changes without affecting anyone else, but you may wish to change the password so that only you are able to open your own files. After making the copies, you should not attempt to copy them again when running WinDiets subsequently, so answer 3 and show the program where you stored windiets.wdn. If you need to, you can have more than one copy of these files as long as they are stored in different folders.
A few functions are available without opening a workspace, but most require that you open one first. You may create a new one at the first time you use WinDiets and continue using that single workspace, adding to its data as you go along. You may however decide that you want to have a different workspace for each diet. Users can have unlimited number of diets in the workspace. You may however decide to have workspaces for different types of clients since it may become excessively complicated if you have too many diets in a workspace. The Combine workspaces menu will add the data from the workspace you name to the one currently open in WinDiets. Settings will remain as in the current workspace. This is designed to facilitate research when several people can enter data in different workspaces knowing that they can be combined at the end into a single one for analysis.
WinDiets Global uses what is in other versions a special option, namely the custom workspace. Start a new one from the Workspace, Custom, New custom workspace menu. This starts at a time of 09.00 on day 1. The purpose of using this type of workspace for the Global version is that different cultures expect meals with different names at times of the day different to the UK idea of breakfast, etc. The time 09.00 is not a necessary time for you to enter data, but the screen has to start somewhere. If time is not important to you and you just want to enter a whole day’s intake, ignore the time and enter the data. If time is important and you want to enter each meal at the correct time then enter the time (24 hour clock: 0800 for 8 o'clock and 2315 for 11:15 pm, for example). Then click the 'Set new day/meal' button to activate the new meal. The custom menu also has submenu items that let you list the days that have already been entered for that person in case you want to review or edit them. Similarly you may have forgotten the times entered so when you have selected the day, from the same menu, you can find the mealtimes during that day.
There is a box at the top left of the toolbar in which you can enter either codes of foods or words and parts of words you expect in the title of the foods. USA codes are prefaced with a minus sign. Do not be too specific when searching for a word in case the word is spelled differently or words are placed in a title the other way round, e.g. chocolate, milk instead of milk chocolate. After entry press the return key. You can also use the ‘Find foods’ and ‘Find US foods’ menus to look through the food tables.
When foods are found on the screen, click one and its code will be entered for you. Press return and the food will be found, focus will shift to the other text box on the toolbar as shown by green colour. Enter a weight and press return. You may enter ounces if you put a tick by that option on the screen. Take care this is not ticked by mistake as it will create a large error if you intended to enter grams. Each time you click on a food in the list found, not only is its code entered but you can see the relative amount of several nutrients compared to UK DRVs on the right of the screen. This is one of the few places in WinDiets Global where any use is made of the UK data, but it should be useful in any country to show the relative differences in nutrient content between foods.
Note that a red colour means that no information about the nutrient is available in the food tables. The data given on the food will have red colours for some nutrients that are not commonly given in other food tables, but are needed in the UK to compare to DRVs. Because WinDiets Global is based on the other versions, the same nutrients will still appear with the red colour. NMES is non-milk extrinsic sugars and NSP is non-starch polysaccharide and both of these are not found in the US food tables. Niacin may be given in some food tables as nicotinic acid and in others the contribution of tryptophan is included. In the UK dataset, niacin does include tryptophan, but in others that do not do this then there will be a red colour. However you can still find nicotinic acid in the full analysis even though niacin is red on the first screen. A similar problem sometimes occurs for vitamin A since in the UK this includes the contribution from carotene, but when it does not then the colour is red, but the data available on retinol and carotene are provided in the full analysis so the red colour can be ignored.
Above this data there may be information about portion weights. The full name of the food is given here so you can check if it is correct.
There is a password box on the toolbar for you to enter the current password. In default it is JOHNAD. If you change it, you must keep a record of this as it can not be restored obviously to the default again.
This menu needs to be explained before many of the others so that you set up the right nutrients and databases for your circumstances. The nutrients chosen for WinDiets are firstly those in the UK DRVs, the first 21 are these and then other nutrients come in no special order, but some are needed for calculations for example water is needed to calculate recipes and some are needed to calculate for food labels. There are some empty columns in the database ready for other nutrients and there may be nutrients that are provided that you do not need for your work. Some nutrient analyses are available in WinDiets that can be brought into either empty columns or to replace other columns. This data can otherwise not be seen. The US database for example provides data on amino acids. Redefine nutrient means that you can replace data in the main database with extra nutrients not normally there in default. There is extra data mainly for amino acids (in US database), but it is not normally presented in WinDiets. Make sure that you have not set a nutrient for advanced find before starting this menu item. There are instructions on the screen and you will be able to put data available for these extra nutrients in a location that you can use in WinDiets. There are some empty slots and you can replace those you do not need after the 30th in the list; others can not be replaced. If you want to alter data in WinDiets for a nutrient already presented in the program, i.e. not an extra hidden nutrient, this can be done. In this case from the Settings menu go to Advanced find and set a single nutrient that you want to alter. When you then use the Redefine menu, all the foods in the two databases will appear on the sceeen with a box containing the current value, which you can change. When the value is currently not analysed, the box is empty, but if you have a value, enter it in the box. Any value changed will have a warning 'C' next to it in tables of output to indicate that it has been changed from the database supplied.
In addition to the facility to add nutrients, you can add foods. It is best to do this after adding any nutrients so that there is space for the data on those nutrients. You can store some analyses in the workspace file itself using the Add menu in Workspace menu; these are called ‘Local’ foods. Analysis is normally added according to the amount of nutrients per 100g, but if you have a supplement, you might want to enter the amounts multiplied by 100 so that you can add one supplement (e.g. multivitamin pill) as 1 as if it was 1g. You can not use these in recipes but you can use them in meals. The 'Local to global' menu item simply transfers nutritional analyses from the workspace to the global area so that all users have access to them or you yourself could access them when using a different workspace. If the same name is found in the global environment then it is not replaced. You can not delete foods from either the local or global environments; just do not use them if you later find a problem with them. Codes for global foods are over 20000 and can be found by setting the filter on the toolbar. When supplied the program has no global foods. You can download the latest database of global food tables from the WinDiets website; this may grow in size, but is not guaranteed. Clearly you need to be connected to the internet. This service is not guaranteed to continue and the website might change so you may have trouble in future with this process. Customers having problems downloading the file should ask for help.
If you have access to a food table that is not supplied with WinDiets, then enter the foods as local into a workspace and then use the next menu item to transfer all local foods at once. The menu item may also give access to other global food tables if you have downloaded the data as above and these can be loaded into the global area.
There is another way to store food data, but this is used for dietetic products. This database is supplied with WinDiets Global, but some of these will not be available in other countries and you should check the analyses, which are not guaranteed. If you choose to download the dietetic product file, this will replace the file on your computer with one from the WinDiets website. Clearly you need to be connected to the internet. This service is not guaranteed to continue and the website might change so you may have trouble in future with this process. The next menu item therefore gives you the power to update the database yourself or you could contact the university to see if there is another way to update the database. The screen has a select box with companies listed and when you click one, the products are listed in the centre box. Click one of these and its nutrients and classifications appear as numbers and ticks, respectively. You can see on the right options for what you want to do; select one, make the required alterations and click the 'Confirm' button. For further help contact the university.
The default method of finding foods will present you with a list that match the search criteria in a coloured box. Each food will have a background colour that tells you what proportion of a day's DRV is provided by 100g of that food. The default setting is to show this for energy so you can see which foods provide more energy by the intensity of colour, but you can change this on the toolbar to another nutrient.
This screen contains instructions to help you. The idea of advanced find is when you want to choose foods for a diet rather than simply analyse a diet that has been eaten. You may want to find foods high or low in a particular nutrient. In this case simply select nutrient 1. Decide if you want these presented in the normal order they come in or in order of the nutrient using the Order menu. If you are interested in how much of a food you would need to provide a certain amount of nutrient, this is called an exchange. In this case fill in the amount of nutrient you want. Ratios can sometimes be useful ways to differentiate between foods. for example the % energy from fat could be useful or the potassium to sodium ratio. In the first case you need to put fat in nutrient 1 and energy in nutrient 2. When calculating this you would have to multiply the fat by 37 to get the kJ and by 100 to turn it to a %, hence the factor is 3700. For the second case, the factor would be 1 if the ratio required is g/g. Use the normal methods to find the foods, but when shown they will be listed with the information you requested. When you click a food, the complete nutritional analysis will be shown underneath it. For users of the Research version, this will also indicate any extra nutrients that are available for production of a database. Remember that for the instructions to take effect you must click the 'Confirm' button.
Sometimes you might want to find foods that are high in fibre and low in fat, for example. You could do this separately with advanced find, but not at the same time. This menu allows you to set limits, upper and lower, for the nutrient analyses for one or more nutrient. You should also indicate that you want WinDiets to include these parameters in searches by putting a tick next to the nutrient. When doing a normal search, a * will be placed by any foods that comply with the restrictions set. You must switch off any nutrients in the advanced find screen for this to take effect as these have priority in deciding which method of food presentation is chosen by the program. In order for the instructions to take effect, remember to click the 'Confirm' button.
The food box can be made visible, in which case it covers up the password box and the face. The food box is the equivalent of the clipboard in other Windows programs; it is a temporary place to store foods and their weights. This memory is lost when you exit the program. You may want to use it when you know that someone has consumed a food many times and you do not want to look for it each time. This might happen for milk in tea, for example. You can copy the food by clicking on the edit button next to the food when it is listed in the meal. Instead of entering a new weight, simply enter # and the food and weight will be transferred to the food box. Any time you can enter that food and weight into another meal by simply clicking on the food in the food box.
Before this menu item can be used, you must open a workspace and then a recipe file from the Workspace menu. If you have recipes already in the file, you can find one to use. At any time you can get a listing of the food components of the recipe (do not attempt to use 'List meal' for this as you will leave the recipe tasks). You can create a new recipe and whether you have found and altered an old recipe or made a new one, you need to save it before you can use it or make a label. You can not include local foods in a recipe (i.e. those saved in the workspace). To remove a recipe from the file, find it, delete all the ingredients and choose 'Save recipe'.
If you have opened a recipe file that contains recipes, this menu will list them. Click the one you want to use it.
When you are working on a recipe and have selected some other screen you can return to work on the recipe with this menu item.
When you have opened a recipe file, you can start a new recipe with this menu item. Then use the find routines to add foods to the recipe as if it was a meal. You can not include local foods in a recipe (i.e. those saved in the workspace).
Use this menu item when you have created a new recipe. There will appear a screen with a space for the name of the food and below it a larger box for you to write the cooking instructions if you wish. A list also appears on the right of the screen with some dishes named. It is hoped that your recipe will be similar to one of these and when you click it you will see the nutrient losses associated with it from the food tables. You can amend these if you wish before clicking the 'Confirm' button to save the recipe. Once it has been saved then you can use the recipe, make a food label or recipe book. To remove a recipe from the file, find it, delete all the ingredients and choose 'Save recipe'. Altering the name of the recipe will cause WinDiets to add it as a new recipe. It is important to understand that the recipe is stored in the recipe file rather than the workspace and includes information about cooking losses. In versions higher than the Standard, there are two extra menu items related to saving that are explained here. After saving a recipe or finding it again from the recipe file you can alter it and test these alterations to see if they improve the nutritional content of the recipe. When you are satisfied that you have an improved recipe, you can resave it. This does not alter the cooking losses or name of the recipe and the contents of the earlier version of the recipe will be lost; if you want to keep this, you need to use the Save menu and give it a new name and enter cooking losses. Note that a workspace can not contain two recipes of the same name so if you click the Use recipe menu and then alter the recipe, you can not resave and click the Use recipe menu again since the recipe will have the same name. Hence only click the Use recipe menu when you have made any alterations to a recipe and are finally satisfied with it for use in a diet.
When you have found a recipe from the file or created and saved a new one then you can use it in a meal. This menu item causes you to leave recipe processing and return to the meal you were working on before. The code number assigned to the recipe is entered in the top right hand box so if you want to use it simply press the return key, enter a weight and press return again and it will be entered in the meal.
When you have selected a recipe from a file or saved a new one, you can create a food label for it. You may use this for educational purposes[11] and with the Professional and Research versions you can save the screen as a program from the Output menu. The calculations for this label are different to those for normal analyses. Protein must be calculated by multiplying the nitrogen content by 6.25 rather than using the protein analyses in the food tables which use different factors for each food. In order to show the carbohydrate content on the label, the amounts have to be multiplied by different factors for each carbohydrate. The reason for this is that the law requires the weight of carbohydrate, not the weight of component monosaccharides that are given in the food tables. WinDiets therefore finds the amounts of glucose, galactose and fructose and subtracts them from the total sugars. The rest are calculated as disaccharides, which have lost a water molecule on formation and hence weigh less than the monosaccharides. Starch requires another factor and any small remaining carbohydrate is treated as oligosaccharide with its own factor. These factors can be found in the food tables. If you redefine one of the nutrients required for the food label, the menu item will not be visible.
The screen looks rather complicated and needs some explanation. On the left is a column of nutrients that are allowed on the label. In default we have ticks against the big four: energy, protein, carbohydrate and fat. At the bottom are other lipid components, but if you want to include any of them, you also have to include saturates which appear in the big eight. You will see this happen automatically and you can return to the big four if you wish with an option at the top of the screen. You will then see a portion weight, which you should enter. Now if the item serves one portion you can put a tick in that box and the item weight will be completed the same as the item weight. If this is greater than 100g, you are allowed to use that weight to calculate what proportion of RDAs are provided rather than using 100g of the food. The program will take this into account when you click the 'Validate' button in working out whether at least 15% of the RDA is supplied by the food (portion greater than 100g or 100g weight itself). For any nutrients that are then allowed on the label, an empty box will appear next to the nutrient and you can decide if you want it on the label. Any nutrients not supplied in great enough quantities by the food will not be allowed to appear on the label. If you decide to have a micronutrient in the label, the big eight will also automatically be selected.
There is also a large box containing the list of ingredients of the recipe in order of amount. You should edit this to make it look more like an ingredient list on a label. When all these tasks are complete, click 'Make Label' and one should appear on the right of the screen. You can not print or save this screen as it contains a program and is not attractive due to the input areas on the left. Therefore WinDiets gives you the option of clicking the 'Confirm' button on the toolbar to copy this label to an empty screen that you can copy, print and save. Please do not do this until you have finished work on the label screen as you will not be able to return to it. When you have made a food label from a recipe from the View Recipes menu, you can save it as a web file that can be used to illustrate the principles of nutrition labelling of foods. Prior to saving, it would be best not to click the 'Make Label' button since the label you create will appear in the web page. After creation of the web page, it can be put on the Internet or sent by email.
Once you have created and saved a recipe or found one in your recipe file, you can output the ingredient list with weights in grams, the instructions for cooking and the analysis per 100g in tables setup according to the settings menu. You are given the option of additionally having a table of analysis per serving/portion. If you change the weight from 100g, two tables will be produced. The analysis takes into account cooking losses you set when saving the recipe. The analysis for non-milk extrinsic sugars (NMES) may differ from the normal one. It is assumed the recipe is to be cooked; if this is not the case, you will need to remember that this assumption has been made and adjust the figure yourself. When food is cooked, it is assume that plant cell walls are broken and all sugar becomes extrinsic, i.e. not within cells, and hence cariogenic. In raw fruit, for example, sugars are not counted as NMES on the basis that they may not be as cariogenic, but on cooking this is not true. Since lactose should be excluded from the value of NMES, this is subtracted from the total sugars to calculate the NMES in the analysis given by this menu item. This page can be copied to a word processor to build up a collection in a recipe book.
Wherever you are in the program, you can return to a list of your meal with this menu.
Dietetic products are produced by several manufacturers and are continually changing. Periodically they are checked and the database is updated[12]. This can be downloaded by the password holder or you can edit the database yourself. Using the database provided or the updated one, this menu item gives access to the information in it. There are instructions on the screen to help you, but the main thing to note here is that there are two ways to find a product. You can either enter a word or part of a word in the box at the top left, or you can use a combination of classifications for the product you want. For example you will know if you need a tube feed and whether it is to be prescribable for a dialysis patient, for example. If products appear in the list below, click one and the information will appear on the right of the screen. This will list all the ways in which the product has been classified as well as the nutritional composition, if it has been entered into the database. There will be a 'More' button that will try to access the company website where the information was found in the first place. You can check that it is still correct. If the company has changed the web address or deleted the product, you will not find the page. Maybe there is a new database file or you could alert the author to this problem. You can also search the internet for the file and alter the database yourself using the Password menu. When you want to use a product that has nutritional analysis in the database, click the 'Confirm' button and it will be entered into the workspace. A code assigned to it will appear in the top left box of the toolbox. If you want to use it in the meal, press the return key, enter a weight and press the return key again.
The day is divided into 15-minute sections and has hundreds of activities to choose from. In order to use this screen, take the mouse down below the line of green bars and type a word or part of a work of an activity in the green box below and press the return key. Matching activities should appear in the list below. You can have nothing in the box and press the return key, in which case all the activities will appear for you to review. Click an activity and the mouse is charged. It will not look any different, but if you pass it gently and carefully over the green bars in the centre of the screen, the height of bars will change to reflect the extent of energy required for this activity. The system used is call the MET and is commonly used and derived from Ainsworth BE, Haskell WL, Whitt MC, Irwin ML, Swartz AM, Strath SJ, O'Brien WL, Bassett DR, Schmitz KH, Emplaincourt PO, Jacobs DR & Leon AS (2000) Compendium of Physical Activities: an update of activity codes and MET intensities. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 32 (9), S498-S516. When the mouse is charged and you want to remove the charge, click the 'Cancel Choice' button. Be careful with the charged mouse as if you take it carelessly over the bars to go to the toolbar, you will change one of the bars. It is best to discharge it first and then go to the toolbar or skirt around the side. Any bar you alter by accident can of course be reset after finding the appropriate activity. The data is not recorded until you click the 'Confirm' button on the toolbar.
Some of the analyses provide tables of nutrients in the order specified by this setting. The default is to have 6 tables starting with macronutrients, then vitamins and finally minerals and trace elements. This may be excessive to your needs or you may want to include some extra nutrients using the Password menu. If you wanted to have a single table, click the option next to the first row of nutrients and go through the drop-down menus across the first row choosing the nutrients you want. This may seem like a long task, but it will be remembered for this workspace so it only needs to be done once, unless you want to keep changing this setting. If you want to return to the default setting, click the 'Default type 1' button. Default type 2 is for 3 tables in which the nutrients are those with DRVs set and this helps in the layout of the table where you want to use the DRVs. When finished, remember to click the 'Confirm' button on the toolbar.
This is the main way to calculate nutritional composition of diets and recipes as well as activity diaries.
This gives you the nutrient analysis for each food separately in tables. There may be letters in front of some of the data; these are warnings and are explained in the Help Nutrients and abbreviations menu. At the bottom of each table, the total is calculated for each nutrient.
This provides only the total nutrient analysis, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
This provides only the total nutrient analysis, but also calculates the percent energy from macronutrients. For certain nutrients, the amount of moles is also given and for sodium, the equivalent amount of salt.
You can set a different amount to compare diets to using the Settings menu; this is referred to as the RDA in WinDiets and using this menu will let you compare your data to these values. WinDiets uses the UK DRVs for comparison of diets, but these might change within the currency of the program or you may want to compare diets to those of some other country. Since these have frequently been called RDAs, that term is used here, although they may have other names now. Select the RDA you have added using the Workspace menu using the Choose RDA menu item in the Settings menu. The RDA function can be used to analyse school meals in the UK, for example the required data for England is given in the workspace. This data will not be useful for users of the Global version so please simply add new RDAs from the Workspace menu and ignore the ones provided.
This analysis will provide the totals for each day in the diet according to the table setup requested in the Settings menu.
This provides a tabular output, showing for each hour the energy requirement according to the activity level (MET) multiplied by the body weight. the energy intake during that hour is also provided. Since people do not each every hour, many of these figures are zero. Starting at the beginning of the period, the balance of intake and output of energy is zero, probably becoming negative until breakfast may help to bring it back towards zero again. At the end of the day, and certainly after a long period, this will show how energy balance may have drifted to indicate probable weight loss or gain. However, it must be emphasised that the energy expenditure is only an approximation and the food tables are not accurate enough either to indicate precise energy balance. This should be take only to indicate gross inequalities between intake and output and show the pattern of this during a day.
Most of the tables of analytical output can be output in three different ways. You can tell if this is possible by the fact that they are grey unless they are enabled and change colour on activation. Output to word processing programs is encouraged because this allows you to make sure that tables are not split between pages; use the 'Copy' menu for this. You can also save files as web pages or print them directly. For some screens, you can save the whole page as a working web page including all the programming instructions.
When you copy an analysis, it goes to the clipboard. This can then be pasted into any appropriate program. This is recommended since printing from WinDiets does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets, but this is not true if you copy to a word processing program.
You can save analyses to a web file in HTML. This type of file can be opened in many word processing programs. This is better than printing from WinDiets, which does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets, but this is not true if you copy to a word processing program. The web files can be read by browsers to look like they do in WinDiets, so it is possible to put the analysis on a website or email it to someone to view in a browser.
Printing from WinDiets does not give you control over where tables are broken between pages. Also you need to change the settings in Internet Explorer to print the colours from analyses as explained on the opening screen of WinDiets. You will find this menu takes you to the Print Preview screen of Internet Explorer so you can see if the background colours will print and where pages will break. Confirm you intention using the Print button on this screen.
This help file is the main means of aiding your use of WinDiets. It is arranged by the order of the menu items and colour coded so that all white background text refers to the Standard version, green to Professional and above and blue only to the Research version. You should refer to this manual to know what is available in the Global version. You can use the F1 key and dynamic help when puzzled about a screen. There is a key word index to help you. A brief video shows you the operation of the main features of the Standard version. You can find some notes and links to nutrition on the internet. Abbreviations are also explained in this menu.
This menu item starts the help file at the contents page so you can see all the menus in the program in the order they appear on the screen and choose the most appropriate help topic.
Whatever screen you are on in WinDiets, either use this menu or the F1 key and you will get help appropriate to that screen.
This shows the key words that have been entered into the help file. Sometimes there are several topics for a key word.
There are videos showing the main features of WinDiets.
WinDiets provides some simple notes about nutrition that are not referenced. Links to nutrition-related pages on the internet are also available. There were carefully selected but are not guaranteed. There is no intention to withdraw this service at any time, but it is not guaranteed to continue throughout the lifetime of this program.
The names of nutrients have been shortened for tabulation and explained here. For each nutrient, you can link directly to the notes that explain something about it. There are also abbreviations used for warnings that appear in tables.
The main features of the Research menu are related to multiple subject processing. This type of data is likely to be generated by surveys of many people whose diets have been added to a workspace. The spreadsheet menu analyses these and places the data into a grid that can be copied to a spreadsheet or statistical analysis program. The most powerful research feature is the capacity to create a database including the nutritional analyses of foods consumed by the subjects. This can be used to show the main providers of nutrients which may help in constructing a questionnaire and also you can make up queries that provide instant feedback on the information you want to answer your research hypotheses.
This command is divided into three types. All will analyse the nutrients specified in the Set-up analysis tables in the Settings menu and place data into a grid which can be copied from the Output menu and pasted into a spreadsheet or statistical analysis program. WinDiets does not attempt to mimic what these specialised programs can do, so it merely facilitates their use by providing data in the right format for them. The most information is supplied 'By meal' which may take some time to analyse a lot of subjects. 'By day' and 'By diet' may take a little less time but supply less information in the grid.
The workspace is a database used to store subject's data. You may decide to store males in one and females in another, for example. At the end however you want to get information out of this data. The limiting factor is that your data is in a workspace and the nutrient analysis of the foods is under the control of WinDiets. You can only do calculations that have been programmed into WinDiets. However, using the create database instruction, you can make a new database containing both sets of information[13]. The nutrients can also include those that are provided in the program but not visible during normal use. The set-up analysis tables in the Settings menu will be used to decide what nutrients to use, but a list of others will also be provided. You can select as many of these as you like but remember that the total time taken to create the database depends on the number of nutrients you ask for, so it is sensible to ask for only those you really need. The database you create is completely separate from the workspace, so the workspace remains for you to use to add more subjects or create the database again. Click the 'Confirm' button to start the processing.
Do not confuse this with a workspace or a recipe file, both of which are databases too. This database means the one you created using the menu above this one. You must open it after creating it before you can get information from it. Since it is an Access database and has a .mdb extension, you can open it in Access and make queries using the wizards there; this may be advantageous since it is easier for beginners to use that program.
This will list the amount of nutrient supplied by all the food groups in your database, separately for each subject. The nutrient must first be set using advanced find in the Settings menu. This can take a very long time if you have a lot of subjects. The key for each abbreviation of food groups is given in the help for query.
This will list the amount of nutrient supplied by all the diets in your database. The nutrient must first be set using advanced find in the Settings menu. This can be useful to help you design a food frequency questionnaires since it shows the main suppliers of the nutrient you are interested in and may give you clues about what questions need asking in the FFQ.
The database created above can be queried using the SQL language. It can also be opened in Access, in which case you can use wizards to help you make queries. In WinDiets, 20 queries are supplied, but they do assume that you included the particular nutrients in them in the database, so they may not work if you haven't. Simply click the query on the right and its text will be entered in the box, then click the 'Confirm' button to run the query and save or copy the output. Return to the query screen using the 'Confirm' button again to run another one. The help file provides a further explanation and a list of the abbreviations used to classify foods in the UK dataset.
Food frequency questionnaires may be useful when you want to analyse many diets and there is insufficient resources to monitor their diet directly. There are two approaches you could take to producing a questionnaire. You could simply enter into the workspace foods that represent those you want to include in the questionnaire. For example you might choose a bread to represent that question, though you need to recognise that breads differ in nutritional composition. This may not be important if you do not have any research interest in dietary fibre. Taking this approach, you might enter up to 100 foods, create a database and then design the questionnaire. The other approach is to do a study of a sample of subjects' diets that they weigh[14]. Then create a database including these diets. In this case you may find that there are several types of bread consumed by people in the study. You can create a composite analysis of bread and take into account all portion weights of bread in designing the question on breads. The 'Design questions' screen puts a list of all foods consumed on the left and boxes for questions on the right. Move between boxes (100 questions) using the arrow buttons at the top of the boxes and enter the question that will appear in the questionnaire in the empty box at the top. Select what foods belong to that question from the list on the left, click one in turn and click the arrow button in the centre of the screen. If you regret your decision, you can click a food on the right and send it back to the list on the left. This process is bound to take some time. You may use the 'Foods in order' menu to help you. Click the 'Confirm' button when the task is complete.
Each question can have one of three types available. Most would naturally be the first one, which is the default, but some foods may be eaten so frequently that you want the second one (per day) and occasionally subjects may think in amounts so you can use the last one, but this is not really FFQ data. Click the 'Confirm' button when the task is complete.
The 'Portions and nutrients' menu item calculates the appropriate portion weights and average nutrient analyses for each question, so no screen appears. The following screens can not be seen until you have processed the data in this way.
There are now two possibilities. Firstly you can enter data for the people who already did the weighed intake and who have now completed your FFQ. This lets you then calibrate the FFQ. The idea behind this is that people may misperceive how often they consume certain foods, but you know this, since they have weighed them. WinDiets can calculate a factor that makes the FFQ give the same answers as the weighed intake. This may have advantages, but many people know recognise that the weighed intake method itself has problems of validity due to under-reporting by some subjects. You do not need to calibrate the FFQ before use since the factor by default is 1 and the program will still operate without this process. When you have entered data for subjects, with or without calibration, you can get an analysis.
The other option for your FFQ is to produce it as a web program. You can put this on the internet and invite participants to use it. They could save the output in a file and email it to you. They could print the output and send it to you. They could use it simply to educate themselves about their diet. You could also email the web questionnaire as a file to subjects.
[1] Wise A (2000) Computerised simulation of a nutritional food label- is it CAD? Journal of Design and Technology Education 5, 245-247.
[2] Wise A (1994) Relational database for dietary products. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics 7, 135-139.
[3] Wise, A & Cowie, E (2005) Activity diary program to enhance teaching of energy balance. Proceedings of the Science Learning and Teaching Conference 2005, 27-28 June 2005, University of Warwick, pp. 176-177.
[4] Wise, A (2006) Enhancement of a dietary analysis program to facilitate education. In Current Developments in Technology Assisted Education (2006) [A Méndez-Vilas, A Solano Martin, J Mesa González and JA Mesa González, editors], pp. 816-820. Badajoz, Spain: Formatex.
Wise, A (2008) Developments in nutritional programming illustrated by WinDiets. BNF Nutrition Bulletin 33, 55-57.
[5] Wise A (2002) Web-based program to teach food composition. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 61, 54A.
This is my attempt. Energy provision is sufficient, there could be more fat reduction but another day might be easier to do this; one can not expect to alter each day to match ‘healthy’ diet. The provision of non-starch polysaccharide is 121% of the dietary reference value. Saturates reduced by altering frying fat. Some fruits and vegetables added for energy and to improve diet.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
NUTRIENT |
|
Amt |
Req |
%Req |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Energ |
kJ |
13745 |
13948 |
99 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Fat |
g |
151.5 |
131.6 |
115 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
SFA |
g |
45.2 |
41.4 |
109 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
NMES |
g |
108.8 |
96.1 |
113 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[7] It is possible to make changes using just 8 messages for the diet so you will be most successful if you could draw a graph like this:
[9] Wise A (1999) Appropriate uses for spreadsheets, databases and statistical software for the analysis of dietary data. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 50, 111-115.
[10] Wise A & Birrell NM (2002) Design and analysis of food frequency questionnaires- review and novel method. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 53, 273-279.
[11] Wise A (2000) Computerised simulation of a nutritional food label- is it CAD? Journal of Design and Technology Education 5, 245-247.
[12] Wise A (1994) Relational database for dietary products. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics 7, 135-139.
[13] Wise A (1999) Appropriate uses for spreadsheets, databases and statistical software for the analysis of dietary data. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 50, 111-115.
[14] Wise A & Birrell NM (2002) Design and analysis of food frequency questionnaires- review and novel method. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 53, 273-279.