What if there was a game where you guess the food from its nutrition facts?
Despite the current nonsense, I’ve always liked the nutrition facts lavel from the FDA. Every packaged food in the US has the same consistent label. And the USDA has a public database with the nutrition facts for almost every food.
I think that could be a fun game.
For my nurition fact guessing game, the first step is the draw the nutrition facts label.
I made a generator that takes the amount of each nutrient and draws the nutrition facts label, with the ingredients below it.
The FDA does have some rounding rules. Fat under 0.5g is “0g”, under 5g rounds to the nearest 0.5g, and above that to the nearest 1g. I guess that makes it easier to do quick calculations. It looks nicer too.
This is why Tic Tacs say 0 calories and 0g sugar, even though they’re almost entirely sugar. The serving size is one mint, which has under 0.5g of sugar and under 5 calories, so both round down to 0.
The game is playable! You get a label and four choices, and you pick the food. 10 rounds per game.
This is Easy, so It only shows calories, fat, carbs and protein, for everyday foods like fruits and cheese.
Try it at nutcall.misc.page.
Easy was too easy. Once you know an apple has no protein and cheese has a lot of fat, you get almost every round right.
So I made Medium. It shows the full label, and all four choices are from the same food group. That was way too hard. Can you guess this one?
So I added the ingredients to packaged foods. Now it’s hard, but you can still figure it out.
Now I’m thinking about how to make Hard hard enough, but not too hard. Maybe make the daily valule more relevant. I use the DV% to fish out “fake” sources of protein.