  Studies with the primary aim of addressing eating disorders focus on
assessing the nutrient content of food items with an exclusive focus on caloric
intake. There are two primary impediments that can be noted in these studies.
The first of these relates to the fact that caloric intake of each food item is
calculated from an existing database. The second concerns the scientific
significance of caloric intake used as the single measure of nutrient content.
By requiring an existing database, researchers are forced to find some source
of a comprehensive set of food items as well as their respective nutrients.
This search alone is a difficult task, and if completed often leads to the
requirement of a paid API service. These services are expensive and
non-customizable, taking away funding that could be aimed at other parts of the
study only to give an unwieldy database that can not be modified or contributed
to. In this work, we introduce a new rendition of the USDA's food database that
includes both foods found in grocery stores and those found in restaurants or
fast food places. At the moment, we have accumulated roughly 1.5 million food
entries consisting of approximately 18,000 brands and 100 restaurants in the
United States. These foods also have an abundance of nutrient data associated
with them, from the caloric amount to saturated fat levels. The data is stored
in MySQL format and is spread among five major tables. We have also procured
images for theses foods entries when available, and have included all of our
data and program scripts in an open source repository.
