I've been doing contract work with a bunch of people who are on a health kick. The foot in this case is Body for Life. I've offered to be the control group for them, although I haven't been very dilligent in keeping a record of my caloric intake or even weight. Well, I haven't even been thinking about it very much actually.

This morning I had a mint chocolate chip ice cream bar and some cornbread muffins with lots of butter for breakfast. Then I just ate a bunch of brisket and white bread for lunch. I drink about 6-8 cans of soda a day. I weigh around 165-170lbs.

But I just thought of something truly evil. What if you could keep track of all your nutritional diet information automatically? Suppose you could download all of your recipts from check/credit card purchases and have them automatically categorized and analyzed to find the food items? Then what if you could cross-index this data set with a nutrition database to find the critical stats for each food item purchased to create a series of nutritional intake levels over time?

The system wouldn't be perfect, of course. You'd have to be able to edit the purchase records for items that you did not eat, or did not eat entirely. And you'd have to be able to enter items that weren't credit/check purchases too. But I think those wouldn't be the bulk of them.

So, the necessary nutritional database is publicly available: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/SR15/sr15.html

I know Quicken/MS Money allows you to download bank statements but those aren't broken up into recipt line items or product codes as would be necessary.

Assuming such a system could be built, you could enter in your desired intake levels for various nutritional stats. The system, which I will call BOT-e-for-life, could then look at your actual intake levels and recommend food items from the database that would fit your needs.  Think of something like Moodstats for the UI.

I just hope HMO's don't figure out how to do this first.