Best and Worst Nutrition Sites: Part Four

By Marcie Barnes

(This post is part of an assignment for the class I am taking, Global Impact of New Communication Technologies at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I will be posting the best and worst websites I find on nutritional information related to my research project, as described here http://feedingblackmail.blogspot.com/2007/09/cheap-food-or-expensive-organic-is.html.)

Today's Best

USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference

I have been using this very extensive database for years, since my pregnancy when I was obsessive about getting lots of good nutrition. I recently found out that this is the same resource used by the Department of Food Science at North Carolina State University - and therefore probably a lot of other higher education institutions around the country (and world.) This is a very large database which finely details the nutritional content of virtually any food, to include some brand name products and processed foods. I have never seen this site down, it has always been very responsive, and I trust that the data is accurate.

Today's Worst

MedJournal Watch Blog

All I can tell about this Blog's author is that he is a "free-lance medical writer." I was kind of hoping to give him a break because English is his second language, or something :/ I have been following this blog via an RSS feed for the past week, and there have been two headlines that I quite frankly did not understand at all: "Yet pregnant women target of weight loss hysteria" and "Painstaking characters less struck by Alzheimer's" - huh? After reading the articles themselves I was able to ascertain what he was trying to convey - but overall, confusion! I do like the overall content of the blog though.