High tech help to improve healthy nutritional choices
I consider myself a well-informed consumer. I scrutinize food labels at the grocery store and try to make healthy choices when I visit restaurants. Yet, the fact remains: nutrition labels can be incredibly difficult to decipher and restaurants often make it tough to know the amount of fat, sodium and calories hiding within a platter of fajitas or plate of fettuccini.
Fortunately, a couple of free iPhone apps take a bite out of the confusion. Fooducate, which has more than 200,000 items in its product database, essentially puts a nutritionist in hand when you’re at the grocery store. Restaurant Nutrition gives you the scoop on more than 115 restaurants and 19,000 menu items. Both apps are simple to use and remarkably informative. In fact, I find myself firing up these high-tech tools several times each week.
Here’s how they work: Fooducate lets you use the iPhone’s built-in camera to scan a product’s barcode. The app then displays a grade (A through F) along with the number of calories per serving and how it compares to similar products in its category. If a product receives a bad grade (due to excessive sugar or sweetener, sodium, trans fats, additives, preservatives, food colorings or other factors), you can view suggested alternatives. In addition, Fooducate provides data about how highly processed a product is and whether it’s a good choice for dieters.
Restaurant Nutrition lets you view menus from leading restaurants and fast food chains and glean details about calories, fat, calories from fat, saturated fat, trans fat, dietary fiber, carbs, sugars and protein. It also provides information about whether the item contains milk, soy or wheat. You can click to add items you’ve consumed and track what you’re eating on an ongoing basis. It’s also simple to create meal plans based on daily calories; view the ratio of carbs, protein and fat you’re swallowing; and identify menu items that might trigger allergies.
These applications aren’t perfect. Both are constantly adding food items or restaurants in order to fill gaps. But, having used both of them for a few months, I find myself regularly scanning packages at the store and studying dishes before ordering at restaurants. I’m no longer surprised by the fact that the nutritional information I view is often rather surprising.
CONNECT THE DOTS
For more information about food labels and a more advanced type of scoring system for food, learn about the NuVal Scale. You can read more about NuVal and how some grocery chains are adopting it by reading here. If you’re interested in knowing more about foods and labeling, check out the Fooducate blog. For help with weight loss, also check out the free My Diet Diary mobile app.
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