About Dietplan7

Dietplan7 is the successor to Dietplan5 (1991) and Dietplan6 (2003). It is a user-friendly computer program for the nutrition analysis of recipe, meals, menus and personal weighed-intake food diaries. It runs on a PC under 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows XP to Windows 10. Dietplan7 will also run on any Apple Mac computer under OS X from version 10.6, Snow Leopard to 10.12, Sierra.

 The software is constantly kept up to date via updates that can either be installed from within Dietplan itself or downloaded and installed from the Support page here on this site.

There are two versions of the software: Dietplan7 Professional and  Dietplan7 Personal They are identical in the nutritional analysis tasks they can perform, but each is intended for a different type of user.

Dietplan7 Professional is the version for use in an organisation or department where more than one person may be using the software and each user can be given specific privileges by an appointed administrator. Depending on the type and number of licences purchased, it can be run as a self-contained program on one or more desktop or laptop computers, or it can be installed onto a network server where the data can be accessed and shared simultaneously by users on different workstations.

The Dietplan7 Personal version is for use by one person. It can be one of two models: Installed, where the software is loaded onto one specific computer and runs on that machine alone, or Portable where the software is supplied pre-installed on a flash drive that can be simply plugged into the USB port of any host computer, either Windows or Mac, and run without any explicit installation. All work is saved on the drive, so you can simply unplug it and carry it with you, then continue exactly where you left off when you use it again either on the same, or any other computer.

There is no defined minimum hardware configuration for running Dietplan7. In practice, any PC running Windows XP or later, or a Mac running OS X will have more than enough capacity to run Dietplan.

Dietplan7 can handle food tables from multiple sources and data from any source can be included in any recipe, menu or personal food diary without restriction. The Dietplan7 database is pre-installed with the full set of UK food tables - all the foods and nutrients from the 7th Edition of McCance and Widdowson’s The Composition of foods plus the revised Composition of Foods Integrated Data Set.

Nutrient data is available from a number of other sources. At the current release they are contained in two database files, which are available both on the Dietplan7 installation CD and on line. One file contains product data from UK suppliers, the other contains other national food tables. Respectively, these tables and their data-source codes are:

UK supplier product tables

ABT Abbott Nutrition *

BKS Brakes *

DBN Danone Baby Nutrition

FRS Fresenius Kabi Ltd *

MJN Mead Johnson Nutrition *

NCC Nutricia Advanced Medical Nutrition *

NES Nestlé Health Science *

PSC Pepsico International *

SAF South Asian cooked foods

TVF Tillery Valley Foods *

Other national food tables

FLV USDA Flavonoid data *

IFL USDA Isoflavone data

IRL Irish Food Composition Database

N10 Australia/New Zealand NUTTAB 2010

USD U.S.Dept of Agriculture SR 27 2014 *

* Updated in Dietplan7 

These food and product tables can be selectively imported into the live database from within Dietplan itself.

Main features:

  • The software supports multiple sets of  food tables so other national food tables can be used as well as, or instead of, the UK data. Users can add an unlimited number of their own foods into the food database.
     
  • The Dietplan database also includes DRV, Dietary Reference Values (COMA, 1991 and SACN 2011), RDA, Recommended Daily Allowances (EU Council directive 2008/100/EC) and the numerically identical NRV, Nutrient Reference Values which replace them (EU Regulation 1169/2011), Food Portion Sizes (MAFF 3rd Edition, 2002) and Nutritional Standards and Requirements for School Food (HMSO, 2007).
     
  • For recipes, Dietplan follows the Food Standards Agency (2013) Guide to creating a front of pack (FoP) nutrition label for pre-packed products sold through retail outlets. It also produces labelling information calculated from nutritional values that comply with EU Regulation 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers. The Department of Health / Food Standards Agency Nutrient Profiling Model (2004 - 2011) is also supported. Weight loss or gain through cooking as well as estimated vitamin losses (McCance & Widdowson 7th Ed.) can also be entered. Once saved, recipes can also be treated like any other food in the database and used in any other recipe, menu or assessment.
     
  • Nutrient values are calculated as soon as a food or ingredient is added, making it easy to observe the effects of adding or subtracting any  item. The food tables can also be searched, for high or low values of a specified nutrient.
     
  • The subjects of personal dietary assessments can have their details recorded, and an unlimited number of assessments can be saved for each individual. The personal details are used in the computation of the individual’s Dietary Reference Values, Body Mass Index,  etc. 
     
  • Dietplan Professional (only) can be operated in a completely open manner with no restrictions on the user or an appointed system administrator can control access and specify the rights and privileges of individual, registered users. The settings and preferences selected by registered users are saved between sessions and are unaffected by the selections made by others.
     
  • Results can be presented in the form of printed reports which can be a mixture of tabulated and free-form text and high-resolution graphics.
     
  • The component parts of each report are fully user-selectable as are the nutrients to be reported and their order of presentation.
     
  • Reports are produced in Portable Document Format (PDF). They can be previewed on-screen before being printed or saved in a file. Saved files can subsequently be recalled into Dietplan for review and/or (re)printing or can be viewed and printed using Adobe Reader, either stand-alone or from inside a web-browser. Reports can also be saved in Open/Libre Office (.odt) format. Libre Office and Open Office are free software packages that are very similar to pre-2007 editions of Microsoft Office. So, if reports are saved in this format, you can use Open/Libre Office to load and customise them in the same way as any other word-processor document. They can also save documents in Microsoft Office (.doc) format and more recent versions of Microsoft Office (2007 SP2 onward) can read .odt format documents directly.
     
  • In addition to being included in reports, high-resolution colour graphics can be selected and viewed onscreen. You can choose to view histograms, pie charts or bar-graphs for a range of different data, both individual and aggregated. Graphs can be printed in monochrome or full colour, depending on your printer. They can also be saved in standard, portable network graphics (PNG) format files that can be imported into desktop publishing and other image processing software.
     
  • A foods / nutrients matrix can be viewed on screen as a scrolling spreadsheet-style display. This can also be printed out  or exported in a standard-format file to a spreadsheet package, such as Excel, Quattro or Supercalc, or to a statistics package like SPSS or Minitab.
     
  • There is a general purpose data import module that can be configured to import and store ingredient, recipe and menu data from a variety of sources such as the catering software packages Manna (Oracle UK Ltd) and Menumark (Datasym UK Ltd).
     
  • Dietplan is fully documented in its accompanying User Guide and on-line help is also available at every point in the program.

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