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The Four Best Apps for Checking Nutritional Information

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People who are on diets have it pretty tough. It can be tough to figure out the calorie content of a restaurant meal, and it can be frustrating to find food on store shelves that don’t contain any unhealthy ingredients. Dieters may be unaware of how many things contain refined sugar, and even when they know that there is one specific thing they want to avoid, they may not be able to recognize all of the forms that it comes in. Luckily, people who own a smartphone possess the best possible tool to help them avoid dietary pitfalls. With the right selection of apps, there’s no need to eat the wrong foods ever again.

1. Glucose Buddy

Not everyone is on a diet because they want to be. When eating the right balance of foods is necessary for day-to-day survival, a tool like Glucose Buddy is hugely beneficial. It allows diabetic patients to track their intake of glucose and carbohydrates, and since the app links to the Glucose Buddy website, people can chart how healthy their diets are on the whole. It’s something that no person with diabetes should be caught without.

2. Fooducate

It can be challenging to find nutritional information apps that don’t cater to some bias. Weight loss programs and corporate-sponsored apps can’t be trusted to provide users with the truth; they have every reason to give people inaccurate information and to promote things that aren’t strictly healthy. Fooducate was developed by dietitians and parents precisely because accurate information can be hard to find, and it’s an incredibly powerful app despite costing absolutely nothing. Users can scan the bar code on a product, and they’ll have a complete rundown of its sugar content, additives, whether it contains trans fats, and what alternatives exist on the market.

Munch 5-A-Day

It takes a lot of discipline to eat the right amount of fruits and veggies throughout the day, and a tool that can help chart consumption is invaluable to dieters who are just getting started. That’s what Munch 5-A-Day is designed to do, and it goes one step beyond that by gamifying the process of meeting daily goals. It offers a progress bar that increases as users consume servings of fruits and veggies, and once specific quotas are met, badges and mystery awards are given to the user. All in all, it’s not a corrupt system for fostering healthy habits.

4. Restaurant Nutrition

Unless someone lives in isolation, he’s going to eat at a restaurant sooner or later. This is one of the biggest hurdles that any nutrition-conscious person faces; restaurants don’t provide a comprehensive list of ingredients on their menus, and it’s often impossible to tell whether something is acceptable until it arrives at the table. Restaurant Nutrition aims to take the guesswork out of the equation. It isn’t completely up-to-date with some restaurant menus. Still, it’s an invaluable guide for learning the ropes of healthy restaurant dining, and it even provides tools that help users track their calories and keep tabs on other pertinent information.

The Slimming Power of Smartphones

There are lots of other apps that help with dieting, and even those who don’t need to lose any weight are well-served by having a small roster of nutrition apps. The thing that stops so many people dead in their tracks is that they don’t know where to begin when it comes to educating themselves about America’s food system. Smartphones have managed to take what is usually a difficult task, and they’ve turned it into a simple matter of entering data into the right apps. All in all, there’s never been a better time to adopt healthy habits.