Apparatus and computer-implemented method for nutrient-based selection of ingestible products

The present invention provides a computer-implemented method of selecting an ingestible product or combination of ingestible products for a diet, comprising the steps of accessing a purchase list representing the diet's composition of ingestible products over a period of time in terms of product IDs; accessing a nutritional information database to obtain, for each product ID on the purchase list, a nutritional profile representing the amount of each of a plurality of nutrients in the product corresponding to the product ID; combining the purchase list with the nutritional profile for each product ID on the purchase list to obtain a nutritional purchase list, representing the diet's composition of ingestible products over the period of time in terms of the amount of each of the plurality of nutrients; generating a nutrition gap chart representing, for each of the plurality of nutrients, the difference between the nutritional purchase list and a nutritional composition target of the diet for the same period of time; performing a mathematical analysis on data represented by the nutrition gap chart to obtain, for one or more chosen nutrients from among the plurality of nutrients, a required balance profile in dependence upon the size of the difference or relative sizes of the differences; and selecting from an ingestible product database an ingestible product or combination of ingestible products having a nutritional balance profile representing the amount of the one or more chosen nutrients that matches the required balance profile to within a predetermined error margin, and an apparatus for doing the same.