First, the software that runs this site is free. It is released under an MIT (X11) license. You can download the source code and the database, alter it, improve it or otherwise do whatever you like with it. If you'd like to help me improve nutridb.org, then feel free to send me patches or other improvements. If anyone is really interested, let me know and we can talk about giving you Subversion commit privileges. I'd like for nutridb.org to become a collaborative, community effort. This way the results of anyone's work will go to a central place where everyone can benefit. Feel free to contact me at nath@nkinka.de.

I began work on this database sometime around mid 2002. It started out of a strong interest in nutrition and a desire to explore PHP, which at the time was new to me. The initial idea came from an old friend of mine who had started a similar project but using Perl.

The present incarnation of this site bears little resemblance to the original. In 2003 I left for Belize to serve with the Peace Corps as an Information Technology volunteer, and after the Peace Corps I stayed in Central America for about another two years. So, the project pretty much went dormant for the better part of four years. However, when I returned to the States in February of 2007, I immediately picked the project back up. I practically rewrote the entire thing from the ground up, with the only real resemblance to the old one being the core logic.

When I wrote the original version of the utility I wasn't then aware of many other free web-based systems that were doing something similar. Now I see that there are a number of other sites that have a very complete set of tools.

This tool aims to be a free and open basis upon which to build a community based nutrition tool that is totally open to the public. Anyone can take the code that runs this site and make it better or extend it.