Serving size for nutrient info

[wordsmith189]

Good morning,

Thank you for this package. For the nutrient information retrieved with get_nutrients(), where can I grab the serving size information?

Many thanks!!

[Nelson-Gon]

Hi @wordsmith189,

Thank you for reporting this issue. It seems the package interfaces a very early version of the FDC API or perhaps there was an error in defining the API's url.
I will fix this sometime soon but in the meantime, you can either PR and fix this by changing https://github.com/Nelson-Gon/rfdc/blob/7bfaadbbe9538ad26441058dff8cc8aed1ee2f85/R/MethodDefinitions.R#L46-#L48 or try to search for "amount" using the get_food_details method (this may also not work).

The link to the API should look like https://github.com/Nelson-Gon/pyfdc/blob/f0635d03ee89231d58cb70aad752be858312a74e/pyfdc/pyfdc.py#L29 instead.

Thank you

[Nelson-Gon]

Hi @wordsmith189, please let me know if this fixes this issue or if further help is needed.

Thanks,
Nelson

[wordsmith189]

Hi, thanks - no, it doesn't fix it.

• Using 'amount' as argument to get_food_details() returns NULL.
• I would try to PR but don't fully get how the API outputs.
• The get_nutrients() function returns data that is unparseable. The numbers don't make any sense as nutrition information. See example output that I'm attaching.

Many thanks again!

[Nelson-Gon]

Thanks for the feedback @wordsmith189,

Using the most recent commit, get_nutrients should return a data.frame that contains "amount" and what this means (see README). Could you fetch and see if this is what is needed?

I read the API [documentation](https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-spec/fdc_api.html#/FDC/get Foods Search) again but it's not clear what amount means. I assumed this is the RDA/serving.

If you need a more raw format, you can set target field to "foodNutrients" in get_food_details which will return a more detailed but raw output.

You can also PR to fix this by changing get_nutrients to work as per how you may have formatted the output from the call to get_food_details with "foodNutrients" as the target.

rfdc/R/MethodDefinitions.R

Line 115 in 06c9e1a

food_details <- get_food_details(object,target_field="foodNutrients")$foodNutrients

I still need to rewrite the get_nutrients code to specify formats (e.g. Abridged) though.

Happy to take a further look at this if it's still not what you need.

[wordsmith189]

OK I see in the README that there are now columns serving and serving_descr, which look like they will help with the understanding. So thank you for that!

However, I tried to get the latest version by installing with remotes::install_github("Nelson-Gon/rfdc"), but I am not getting the two new columns (yet?). My output is still identical to what I showed in the screenshot in my earlier response.

[Nelson-Gon]

Thanks, I will check to see what could be the issue with getting the latest commit to work as expected.

[Nelson-Gon]

@wordsmith189, Hi it seems I am unable to reproduce the non-install issue. Could you create a new issue specific for the install?
Thanks,
Nelson