USDA Nutrient Database

The USDA nutrition database is a great source of nutrition information. However, the data formatting options (plain text ASCII files or MS-Access) leave a little to be desired.

This is a simple gem to import the database into your ruby application.

Even after importing this data, keeping it up to date and adding/maintaining additional logic such as full text search, weight conversion, etc is a pain. As an alternative I have put together a small RESTful web service to do this for you. You can find the docs at http://docs.usdanutrientservice.apiary.io/

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'usda-nutrient-database'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install usda-nutrient-database

If you're using rails then copy the migrations across:

rake usda_nutrient_database_engine:install:migrations

UsdaNutrientDatabase.configure do |config|
  config.batch_size = 20000 # import batch size, if using activerecord-import
  config.perform_logging = true # default false
  config.logger = Rails.logger # default Logger.new(STDOUT)
  config.usda_version = 'sr25' # default sr28
end

If you are running MySQL => 5.6 or PostgreSQL => 9.5 then you're in luck, you can use UPSERT (insert or update) to speed up imports x30. To do this you're going to need to install activerecord-import

require 'activerecord-import/base'
ActiveRecord::Import.require_adapter('postgresql')

# You may want to disable logging during this process to avoid dumping huge SQL
# strings in to your logs
ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new('/dev/null')

Now run the rake task which will import everything in around 2 minutes.

rake usda:import

Import the latest data with the import task:

rake usda:import

This is going to take a while. 60+ minutes on my 2.66 GHz i7 macbook pro. You ca also import individual tables using the other import tasks. To see the available tasks:

rake -T usda

Use the models to query and profit:

UsdaNutrientDatabase::FoodGroup
UsdaNutrientDatabase::Food
UsdaNutrientDatabase::Nutrient
UsdaNutrientDatabase::FoodsNutrient
UsdaNutrientDatabase::Weight
UsdaNutrientDatabase::SourceCode

If you find a bug then add it to the issues here on github. Ideally with a pull request to fix it, or at least with a failing test. When you report a bug, number 1 rule is: don't be a dick.

Any feature requests/ideas can also go in the issues list.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Many thanks to the following contributers:

• @benfalk

This gem follows Semantic Versioning