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The Challenge:  A key problem in developing Life Ahead Diet was that of obtaining a program that was sufficiently accurate, that developed diet user's needs, that still was easy to use.  Diet questionnaires used in research studies of diet could involve several questions about each of more than a hundred different foods.  Completing such questionnaires requires far more time than most people will commit.  And these questionnaires still include inadequate numbers of foods.  The diet programs found that are easy to use valued only one or a very few nutrients in a diet. The few programs found that permit individuals to enter actual daily foods and compute comprehensive numbers of nutrient values usually included Dept of Agriculture food libraries of thousands of foods.  These programs are far too difficult and time consuming to be used by most health-interested persons.  And the programs using these massive food libraries still do not provide for most food recipes used in homes or restaurants, for adding up results from successive diets, or for entering either daily or weekly diets.  People simply have not had a computer program that was both practically simple to use and could produce the results needed for a useful diet valuation. 

Diet books and most diet advice still operate in a now ancient non-computer world that requires the tedious looking up of and adding of calories and carbo and perhaps one or two other things from each food in each diet.  Or the specific use of the author's recommended diets that most will not accept for very long. The books tell us about all the things we should eat and not eat.  But they do not show how we can integrate these many different foods into our practical diets, or what adding or subtracting these foods in will really do for us.  There must be a better way. This is a very complex problem.  It can only be done properly  via computer.  A computer program that is both easy to use and that manages a diet adequately becomes a MUST.

The Life Ahead Diet Library and Program:  A first challenge in Life Ahead was to develop a food library that included a vast majority of what people eat that was both adequate and as SMALL as possible. The more foods that must be searched through, the more tedious and slower becomes the program in producing a result.  The Life Ahead diet now includes 320 selected basic foods that probably contribute nearly all the nutrient content of US diets today.  Values of calories and of each of the 23 needed nutrients in each food is included in the library.  Foods rarely used and condiments and seasonings that contribute little to the population calorie and nutrient base are omitted. Except for a few popular fast foods, combinations from recipes are omitted as they can number in the millions. But the program can reproduce most diet recipes by adding up their content of foods, and certain items as flour and egg whites and yokes are included to assist this. The cumulative nutrient content of a portion from these recipes can be added by name to the program, and entered as a single simple item entry.  Some key health foods and supplements as soy products, protein bar and flaxseed oil are included.  Finally, the Add Food option can include up to 50 additional food or supplement items.  A URL to a Dept of Agriculture website provides access to a largest available body of information on foods now extant.  This option can supply all the nutrient values for most new foods added to the diet library.

Foods are displayed alphabetically within groups from 11 food group tabs.  Most foods can be located in a few seconds of time either via this method or with help of entering some initial letters of a food name in the Search option. With a bit of experience most people should be able to enter a daily diet in five minutes or less. Daily diets usually cannot provide the range and amount of nutrients needed over the longer term.  But a diet for a full week that can be entered optionally can provide this. It is best to enter a weekly diet from a journal of meal by meal entries.  But some people can enter an approximate and useful usual weekly diet from memory.

The author will appreciate program users' ideas about foods now omitted that should be included, or suggestions of any kind that can improve the present diet entry program.

Life Ahead's Diet Nutrient Values starting with Version #2.09 were mostly obtained from the Dept of Agriculture Web site http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/   This important data base can be downloaded on an individual's computer.

Nutrient values of foods taken from various sources or from individual food samples can vary appreciably.  Where appropriate, average values of two or three samples of a given food were used.  No other source found could duplicate the breadth of information provided in this source.  Values of transfats were rarely included in this data base (more are now being added) and thus these values were obtained from a variety of sources.  The values of glycemic index needed for the Glycemic Load were derived from the "International Tables of Glycemic Index" provided from an Australian source.  The value of Omega-3 fats used in Life Ahead is derived from amounts of DHAEPA and linolenic acid and expressed as equivalent amounts of DHAEPA.

The Information on Diet that Life Ahead Provides:  Even before any diet entry is made, Life Ahead can quickly display a comprehensive listing of nutrient values of each of its 320 included food and other items. This option alone replaces the alternative need for time consuming and tedious searching for this information from tables of values, or from the internet. 

The entry of a diet into Life Ahead also provides near instantly the result from an enormous body of information that could require weeks of time to obtain via conventional methods, and some that is not available elsewhere.  First are the diet calories and food carbohydrate compositions of the diet that in turn provide an estimate of probable weight loss or gain.  Second are the 23 nutrient values of fat types, vitamins and minerals that can have major effects on promoting or slowing progress of major life-limiting diseases. Convenient values sometimes used as grams of fat and carbo and nutrients as % of calories also are displayed. Third is the ability to sort either a diet or the diet library to learn which foods contribute most toward calorie of nutrient targets for health. This would be impractically difficult to do without a computer program.

Life Ahead can help monitor a person's diet for weight loss. The regular entering of a daily diet will guide a user about diet needs to keep weight going down, or to keep it from going up.

Most important is the ability of Life Ahead to forecast the health the Well-Days value of and included diet for specific populations of individuals that have almost any combination of known health risks and habits.  This forecast is accompanied by a clear definition of what needs to be done further to accomplish better long range health and life.   No alternative method for accomplishing this is now known.