Interactive Health is a series of interconnected forms, which will provide detailed personlized information about your body, your exercise, and your diet. The aim is to provide you with information to help your live longer and enjoy better health.

Section 1: Your Body

The central feature of Your Body is the Main Form. Fill it out, and it will give you a wealth of information about your body, such as:

Using a detailed worksheet attached to the Main Form, you can also calculate the effect on your weight of various possible exercise regimens.

There are other, shorter forms in Your Body, which include interesting articles on the history and use of each measurement. Perhaps the best explanation of our approach is to try a page: The Waist-to-Hip Ratio page is a good introduction, as the form only has a few entries and the page gives a lot of information about "apple" and "pear" body shapes.

Section 2: Nutrition

Our Nutrition section is the best consumer nutrition site on the internet, and we constantly improve it, adding nutrients and foods as our time allows. We currently store 64 nutrient values for almost 8,000 foods, grouped into 33 categories.*

Finding Foods that Contain a Specific Nutrient

The Search by Nutrient page is our most ambitious project. This powerful search engine will allow you to pick one of 62 listed nutrients and search to find foods that contain the least or most of that nutrient. You can limit the search to one or more specific categories (such as baby food or soup). Nutrient amounts can be absolute (how much nutrient per ounce of food) or relative (how much nutrient per calorie). For example, you could find:

(The next "nutrient" we plan to add is glycemic index. Although it is an attribute of a food, rather than a nutrient, it is a figure of major importance to many people.)

Finding the Nutritional Composition of a Food (Drink, Supplement, etc.)

If all you want is to find the nutritional information for a food -- including "foods" like martinis, baby formula, sports supplements, etc. -- you can get full nutrition information by using Search by Food Name page. From the result, you can click through to a Nutrition Facts page (see below).

Browse Categories of Food

You can also browse through a list of all foods in any of our food categories by using the Search by Food Category page. If you just want to see different kinds of bread, for example, searching the "Bread" category will list every bread in our database. Once again, you can click on any food to get a Nutrition Facts page.

Nutrition Facts and Individual Daily Amounts

Every food is linked to a "Nutrition Facts" page. For familiarity, this is presented in a format resembling the nutrition box on the side of a food package. Sample The initial amount of food is a consistent 100 grams, so that any two foods can be compared. Most entries also have one or two additional pages that give the values for nutrients based on a common serving size, such a 1 cup or 4 ounces. Nutrient amounts are given both as the absolute amount supplied by the food, and also a percentage of the approximate recommended daily amount of each nutrient supplied by the food (where reasonably accurate information is available).

Individualized "Nutrition Facts"

The default daily values are extremely general. You can tailor them to your personal characteristics by using the the Personal Nutrition Data form. By setting a small cookie on your computer, this will modify every Nutrition Facts page to reflect your individual characteristics, giving a much more useful "Daily DRI %" than the default created by the US Government. This feature is especially useful for women who are pregnant or nursing, or for small children, but it increases accuracy for anyone.

Section 3: Exercise

If you read a popular publication for advice on exercise and losing weight, you are probably reading hogwash. They usually distort -- sometimes by extreme amounts -- how much weight you can expect to lose from a specific exercise, and they almost never allow easy adjustment for individual differences. Our exercise/calorie calculators are backed by reference to a wide body of scientific research and correctly adjust to your individual characteristics.

Our primary exercise form — Calories Expended by Exercise — enables you to determine calories burned from any of 300 listed exercises and activities, as accurately as current research allows.

The form is also available in a "radio button" format, which lets you see every exercise available rather than using drop-down lists; there is a Metric version of this radio-button format.

The calories burned by one session of exercise has limited benefit. Much more important to your weight (and your physical conditioning) is your exercise pattern over time. We have developed an Exercise Worksheet to provide both totals and averages for up to six exercises per day over any period from one day to eight weeks. It can be formatted for print. For your convenience, it will automatically export results to the Main Form in the Your Body section, filling in the exercise blanks for you.

For a quicker rough assessment of your exercise regime (or to check out potential exercise regimes) -- or if you just want to browse through a list of possible exercises -- try the Exercise List. It is not as accurate but is easier to use. You can get a rough "value" for an exercise, then use the Popup Calculator to adjust it for duration and your weight. The page also includes several goal levels to help you determine how to meet minimum fitness standards.

Hints on Using the Site

• The site is easier and more fun to use if you set "javascript" to "on". About javascript.
• There are a couple of popups that are helpful. We suggest you set your browser controls to allow popups on this site and have them open in a new window. Popup Rant.
• Take a minute to read the pages rather than just diving into the forms. The general factual information may be as useful to you as the form results. Also there are peculiartieis to some forms -- the method of measuring your waist, for example, differs from form to form.
• We are very receptive to comment and criticism, whether nice or nasty, detailed or summary, on any aspect of this site: appearance, ease of use, formulas, facts, opnions, structure -- as long as it is made in good faith. The best place for comments is in the forum.
• The site is under continuous upgrade and modification, and we don't always manage to update this Index to reflect the changes. You'll just have to understand that this website is a public service with limited resources, and if we, say, add a nutrient to our Nutrition database, it may be a while before the change is reflected here.
• As of this moment, everything is working. Please understand that we may "break" one or more features while adding an improvement.

Articles & Miscellany

The only separate article on the site is Facts about Body Weight, a slapdash collection of facts, debunked myths, and advice about body weight. Scattered throughout the pages, however, are a number of shorter articles, some dealing with the subject matter of the form, some dealing with a related subject such as Cortisol or Dietary Fat. A number of these articles are little surprises that appear only on result pages.

USDA Abbreviations

This page is a popup/link on the Nutrition search pages. Because many of the foods use the abbreviation scheme of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we have provided a list of the abbreviations and the full word they represent. In the deeper levels of search (such as nutrition charts), however, our search engine will transpose most abbreviations into the full word.

Research

This page contains a totally haphazard selection of research articles available on the Internet. Staff can post or edit entries (or not) with no guidelines. Entries may or may not be accompanied by notes, depending on who made the entry. We really only made it publicly viewable because there's no reason not to; don't expect much.

Daily Health Report

We have in development a more general, traditional health news site -- "Daily Health Report" -- which is formally the parent url of this site: www.dhreport.com (also accessible as www.dailyhealthreport.com). You are welcome to look around (just navigate to www.dhreport.com), but the site is in development -- on the back burner while we work on Interactive Health -- and some pages may appear to be a useless mess. If you are not a web developer, you might be interested to know that dynamic web pages are unbelievably fragile; one keystroke might change a meaningless, even irritating jumble into a perfect webpage, and vice versa. In other cases, a page may need 20+ hours of work just to look decent.

Acknowledgements and Thank You's

*A thousand thanks to the United States Department of Agriculture, which provided the bulk of our nutrition database information (over 7,000 foods). This project would simply have been impossible without their help. Many thanks to Stephen Poley for the basic javascript used to create the automatic error messages in several of the forms.