User-generated recipe portals like Cookpad are extremely popular in recent years. But for people with certain health problems or eating restrictions, such recipes may not be so usable. To help provide information to these people, Medical Recipe is a new kind of recipe portal that focuses on health treatment recipes.

The target for this new (Japanese language) recipe site are people dealing with some affliction, looking to manage their health by making dietary adjustments. For example, there are recipes available for people fighting or recovering from stomach cancer, bowel cancer, or those going through radiation therapy or undergoing drug treatment. Medical Recipe provides the necessary diet menus for such patients, lending a helping hand to families of the patient.

In addition to food recipes, there is other useful content about how to manage your diet, basic primers about different diseases, and even calorie charts for menus at restaurants. Your favorite recipes can be saved for later reference, and there is a social network feature too. Medical Recipe plans to expand its reach by adding recipes for adult disease such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and dyslipidemia.

Considering that its users are likely to be of an older age, the portal can be viewed on both feature phones and smartphones for a monthly fee of 147 yen (or about $1.50).

On a related note, Sapporo Beer (which we mentioned in a recent post) is working to release the world’s first online community for people suffering from gout. In Japan, about 16 million people suffer from high uric acid in the blood, and of those about one million are gout patients. Although the community is built as a promotion for its zero-purine beer, with an aging population, we can expect to see more initiatives like these in the coming future.