I would like to design a program that can either be viewed on a website or downloaded to a computer. The program would ask the user to input some information like their height, weight, age, BMI, and some other relevant questions, and then there would be results including which vitamins and minerals they need, how many, how frequently, which foods include the nutrients and how many are included per serving. then i would like them to be able to select ingredients from the list of foods supplied and then display a list of recipes they can make with the selected ingredients, as well as a display of the nutrient totals given from the ingredients.

If anybody is interested, I would appreciate help developing the program, as I haven't made any programs before. However, any advice or references to free software to help with developing such a program would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I've used the Form Builder to make an application for my work. I only use it to make the front end or GUI but write all my own custom php scripts to handle the back end. What you asking can be done but would take a substantial amount of back end scripts. As far as downloading to a pc I don't see the need with the availability online and that would be a separate application to keep track of.

Agreed. There is really no way for someone to just 'help' you develop a program such as you describe. You're asking for custom software development and as Eric indicated - in the 'web world' it would be any number of web pages with forms to gather input from, one or more databases for data storage, retrieval, parsing, and recombination for all of the said requirements you laid out, along with all of the scripts (programming) required to do all of those processes and apply said formulas to then spit out to the user requested data.
Although it might sound trivial, what you are asking for is a very detailed and exhaustive process that would require someone to train you during the process which would only slow development down substantially and increase costs.

We all started as a blank slate at some point however, and if you would like to learn how to do these things I would strongly urge you to just go to any of the several 'howto' free tutorial sites out there on how to learn PHP and MySQL, HTML and javascript, Java and whatever else might interest you.
That's how I learned everything I know now. Tutorials, books, and lots of trial and error. 20+ years worth and I'm still learning every day. Love it!
Believe me, the world will never have enough coders / programmers / developers / designers.

Take Care,
John

And to also point out the obvious, this is a site about web design, not program development so truly you should be on some programming websites asking these questions rather than here. You may get a much better response that way.