A Computerized approach to dietary analysis.

Adequate nutrition in world health and community medicine has been and will continue to be a subject of great humanitarian concern. Malnutrition has been known to occur in hospitals with complications varying from interference with wound healing to an increased susceptibility to infection. In particular, dialysis patients require a regulated diet to maintain a balance between adequate nutritional intake and the build up of excessive waste products. Often the fact that some means of dietary evaluation is not available may contribute to unchecked or unregulated nutritional care in the hospital. A system to analyze a patient's daily intake for nutritional constituents was developed at the Department of Medical Biophysics and Computing. This system incorporates a nineteen hundred item food data base through numeric or alphabetic input. Storage of the item numbers and their corresponding amount in the patient's computer record provides the capability to review a daily intake for quality as well as quantity via video display or had copy print out. Thus, the effects of dietitians' recommendations, supplemental vitamins or proprietary feedings products may be ascertained. Using this dietary analysis system, a nine month study was conducted with the Dialysis Training Center of the University of Utah Medical Center to quantify the marginal nutritional intake of their patients. Many of them complained of ill tasting food or food lacking in taste and thus their dietary intake became inadequate. Supplemental zinc sulfate had been shown to alleviate the symptoms of abnormal taste and was used with a placebo in a double blind cross over fashion. In this application, over three hundred individual diets were analyzed for nutritional content using the dietary analysis system. The results of the group which stated on the placebo suggest that the amount of protein ingested increased, relative to the total caloric intake. However, the group which started on the zinc did not demonstrate this trend. Also, in both groups, no improvement in taste acuity occurred as the results of zinc supplementation.