FNRI launches nutrition awareness website

Do you know how to compute your Body Mass Index? Is it a good idea to use brown rice when making seafood paella? What was the nutritional value of beef liver? These are questions that might cross your mind as you plan your family’s meals for the week, or as you peruse menu items in a new restaurant. You might try Googling the answers on your smartphone or your laptop, only to get a hundred million conflicting results. 

 

The next time you ponder these and other food-related musings, you might want to visit iFNRI (http://i.fnri.dost.gov.ph/). The Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) launched their new website on February 23, at the Crowne Plaza Galleria. FNRI is a research and development institute under part of the Department of Science and Technology. 

 

iFNRI launch

 

FNRI Director Mario Capanzana gave the opening remarks at the website launch. He talked about the rise of health technology, and the increase of mobile apps and software geared towards healthy living. “The health and fitness mobile and online industry are growing at an astonishing rate. Almost everyone uses the Internet and owns a smart phone. The use of mobile devices is growing at a rate of 115% each year. And the use of health and fitness mobile apps grew by 62% in the first half of 2014. This number is even bigger in 2015. These are good figures. Health-based technology is now almost everywhere.” 

 

Capanzana cited this is a good reason for the FNRI to take its online presence seriously. “If you do not create a presence online, you are practically cutting your organization off from potential clients, and in the long run, your organization may cease to exist.” 

 

DOST Assistant Secretary and Program Manager for Countryside Development Urdujah A. Tejada read a message from Secretary Mario G. Montejo, outlining the agency’s various initiatives and commending FNRI for its online efforts. “Nutrition should not be left behind in all these [technological] development. Though we have so many blogs and online resources on nutrition, one problem we are facing is the accuracy of the information on these sites.” Tejada cited iFNRI as a valuable source of correct food and nutrition information for all Filipinos. She said, “We need to reach out to all sectors… by creating and providing avenues that will bridge the gap between the better informed and the less informed. iFNRI provides us with a timely option to keep up with the rapidly changing times.” 

 

Tejada and Capanzana launched iFNRI by swiping their hands across the projected screens to reveal the new website. The hosts then invited the audience to register on the site, and led them through its different sections and services. After the tour of the website, the audience was encouraged to browse the website, test its services and review its databases. 

 

Menu Eval Plus

 

Are you looking for ways to make healthy versions of your favorite recipes? Or you might be wondering about the nutritional value of your family recipe for adobo. Check out Menu Eval Plus, under iFNRI Services. 

 

The Lutong FNRI Library features recipes using healthy, easily accessible ingredients. Many of the recipes featured are classic Filipino viands like Bicol Express and ginataang kalabasa, but there are also recipes for other palates and other parts of the meal, like brown rice mochi and herbed chicken breast. All the recipes feature locally sourced ingredients, and provide a detailed listing of their nutrient evaluations. For households on a budget, each recipe page also features a calculator, to easily compute the cost of ingredients. 

 

The Menu Evaluation and Recipe Evaluation tools help users assess their own recipes, helping them “speed up calculation of estimated energy and nutrient content and percentage contribution of recipes and menus or meals. It allows the user to calculate food cost and quantify recipes.”

 

HELP Online

 

Healthy Eating and Lifestyle Program (HELP) Online is “a web-based resource hub of up-to-date nutrition and wellness solutions that aims to promote positive lifestyle changes to the public.” 

 

Most users will probably head straight for the Fast Assessment and Screening Tools (FAST), which features “calculators and guides useful in the assessment of nutritional risks and status of individuals. Enter the required information to calculate and evaluate an individual's current health and nutritional condition.” Available tools compute and assess your body mass index, desirable body weight, energy requirement, waist circumference, waist-hip ratio and waist-height ratio. Once you enter your information, such as age, height, and body measurements, the site informs you of the corresponding health risks.

 

Components of iFNRI

 

iFNRI’s contents are divided into different components. iAssess contains various evaluation and analysis tools, including Menu Eval Plus and HELP online. Another part of iAssess is eNutrition, which “seeks to improve the nutritional status of Filipino population by providing electronically accessible information on food consumption, nutrition and health status, and other essential indicators that will be useful for policy-making, monitoring, evaluation, planning, and development of nutrition-related programs.” (http://enutrition.fnri.dost.gov.ph/) 

 

iServe focuses on “improving FNRI’s frontline services,” providing information on laboratory processes and the Philippine Food Composition Tables (http://i.fnri.dost.gov.ph/fct/library).

 

iLearn caters to website visitors without nutrition backgrounds. Components of iLearn are under development in partnership with private companies: NutritionSchool with Nestle, Healthy Filipino Recipes App with the Unilab Foundation, and the SALT calculator with Unilever.

 

iPromote features interactive materials about food technologies and products, and includes information and FNRI’s technology transfer activities. iBusiness is intended for suppliers and partners, linking “internal and external data processing systems more efficiently and flexibly.” One service available through this component is Service Laboratory-Integrated Online System (SL-IOS), “a web-based solution for management of information that improves FNRI'S frontline services to its stakeholders.” 

 

iFNRI is now live, and may be visited at http://i.fnri.dost.gov.ph/.  — TJD, GMA News