With NutriAdmin, you can create a food diary (which is trated by NutriAdmin as a questionnaire), and send it to your clients so that they fill it in. By default, NutriAdmin provides you with a simple food diary you can email to clients, but you can also customize it and/or create your own.
If you don't have a food diary setup yet, you can click here to learn how to create a new questionnaire. You can also check this article out where it is explained how to send questionnaires (or food diaries) to your clients.
Once you have a food diary or log filled in by a client, you will receive an email notification from NutriAdmin. At this point, you will be able to enter your client's food data into a meal plan in NutriAdmin to conduct a nutritional analysis of your client's diet. Below is an example of a food diary filled in by an example client:
You can also analyze your client's eating habits if you have a food diary in paper or in any other separate document.
To analyze your client's food diary, you can follow these steps:
Step 1: Click on Meal Plans.
Step 2: Click on New meal plan.
Step 3: Select your client from the drop-down menu, and select the number of days in your food diary. Then, click on Create Meal Plan from Scratch.
You will be presented with an empty meal plan that you can fill in with your client's data. You can click on the tab with your client's name (Example client in the screenshot below) to see all recorded data for this particular client in the system.
If you scroll down the client's data summary, you will find your client's filled in food diary. You can use it as a reference to populate the different meals in the meal plan.
Step 4: Click on the different plus symbols in the plan to fill in the different foods in your client's diary.
Step 5: Once you complete the meal plan, you can click on the Macronutrients and Micronutrients tabs to obtain the nutritional analysis of the diet.
In the macronutrients tab, you will see a breakdown by macronutrient, by meal of the day, and by day. You will also see total calories per day and meal here.
The micronutrients tab will show a breakdown of the different micronutrients in the diet, as well as the Dietary Reference Intake percentage for each micronutrient. This DRI is calculated as a function of the Life stage group of your client (e.g. an elderly man has different requirements than an infant).
The macronutrient and micronutrient reports can be used to assist you in identifying nutrient imbalances in your client's diets.
Do not forget to click on Save Meal Plan on the top-right corner of the screen to save your progress so that you can review your plan later. You can also download your meal plan as a PDF for your reference or to hand in to your client.
Finally, it is not possible to get the nutrient breakdown from the raw data entered by a client automatically in food diaries at the moment. Although this could be an interesting feature to have in the future, automatically processing data entered by a client can lead to inaccurate or wrong results, which could be very dangerous for clients/patients will food sensitivities or medical conditions.
Disclaimer: NutriAdmin provides users with tools, like the one described in this article, to do nutritional assesments more efficiently, to save data for later use, and to present results in a convenient manner. However, the software cannot diagnose medical conditions or produce nutritional advice. This is the domain of a certified and trained professional.