12 July 2010

Announcing Wagmu 2.0!


Wagmu 2.0 is now online! Save your health, save your wealth, and save the world!

Wagmu is a powerful food planning system, designed to help you get 100% of your nutritional requirements while saving you money. Wagmu food plans naturally tend to use less meat, sugar, and processed foods, so your menu will be better for the environment, too.

We've just released a new version. The most exciting new feature is Wagmu Suggest. Wagmu Suggest will save you money and improve your diet. After logging your foods for a day, you'll probably see that you were short of some nutrients, and had too much of others. Click the pumpkin on the toolbar, and Wagmu Suggest adjusts your food quantities to get a better nutrient score.

Often, even with Suggest's power, the foods you've selected can't make a good food plan. So Suggest loads the Wagmu Suggest Dropdown, right on the existing food dropdown. The Wagmu Suggest Dropdown recommends foods which improve your nutrients and lower your costs. Pick a food you like, and click Suggest again. You can control how Wagmu Suggest behaves with radio buttons, such as to prevent Suggest from giving you too much broccoli, or not enough chocolate. I've found Wagmu Suggest to be a lot of fun, and I like creating food plans which are both nutritious and inexpensive.

We've added thousands of new foods, from the U.S. government's FNDDS database. Better still, Wagmu 2.0 knows about the cost of food in approximate U.S. dollars. While not perfect, no other diet website shows costs at all. (In Wagmu 3.0, we hope to let you customize your food costs, and Wagmu 3.0 will also have exercise planning and grocery lists.) Wagmu Suggest tries to help you lower the cost of your diet, while also improving your nutrient profile.

Wagmu 2.0 has search features. You can search for recipes, rate them, and see their cost. Even cooler, the new Food Plan Search lets you find entire food plans, and sort them. You can sort by Pumpkin Rating (everybody's rating of how good that plan is), by cost, and by % nutrients scaled to your own custom nutritional requirements. You can then copy those food plans to your own calendar, and edit them as you wish.

We've been playing with the website for a couple years now, moving slowly. The technical problem is to have you select one food at a time from a restricted set of 15,000, and that seems to require a somewhat complicated interface. Please be patient in getting started. We have posted some help pages, with more on the way. I'd be grateful for feedback. Just click on the Wagmu comment link.

I still haven't worked out a business model for this website, despite having spent a lot of money on it. I don't want ads, because the relevant ads are food and health related, and the point of the website is to short-circuit that marketing! Eventually, Wagmu will probably require a subscription, but until then, enjoy the powerful advice for free.

1 comment:

Jo Jordan said...

Just in case you missed this

http://www.appsforhealthykids.com/resources