budget-macros | cheapest set of foods

budget-macros is a Python library. budget-macros has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. However budget-macros build file is not available. You can download it from GitHub.

Script for picking the cheapest combination of foods given a set of macronutrient requirements and a database of foods with nutritional and pricing info. This is sort of a 'multidimensional unbounded knapsack problem' variant, in that items can be repeated indefinitely and there are several requirements to be met - not just one. This type of problem is NP-hard. budget-calc.py contains code for a lot of different implementations for the solution, but there are three implementations of note: top-down brute force, top-down dynamic programming, and bottom-up dynamic programming. For a relatively normal diet (<2500 calories) and a small set of foods (<8 foods), a top down brute force solution performs best. However, once you increase the requirements or the set of foods, the dynamic programming solutions start to outperform the brute force solution. I go into more detail in the performance section.