MobiHealthNews started rounding up calorie counter and nutrition tracking apps as early as 2009, and as recently as last August, when Weight Watchers told its investors that free apps were probably eating away at its profit margin.
Most of the healthy eating apps MobiHealthNews has tracked have relied on manual entry, giving users a space to enter information about every meal, although exactly what information to track, what to do with the data, and how to streamline the entry process have been challenges different apps have dealt with in different ways. Some twists on that have emerged: apps that track food by having the user take a picture of it or apps that crowdsource analysis of meals. More recently, the world of food tracking has started to move from an app-only ecosystem to one with some hardware, like TellSpec and the allegedly forthcoming Airo.
Here are 27 apps and devices for food tracking that have either been around, been discontinued, or are coming soon.
Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal
Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker allows the user to enter a daily diet history from the over 3,000,000 items listed in the app’s database. The news feed shows which of the user’s connected friends are reaching their goals as well as how close the user is to his or her goals. For users who are tracking exercise along with diet, MyFitnessPal also integrates with a number of activity trackers including Endomondo Sports Tracker, EveryMove, RunKeeper, Runtastic, Rhythm Pulse Monitor, Striiv Smart Play Pedometer and Digifit.
Lose It, which is available on iOS devices, Android devices, and the web, has long been one of the most downloaded weight loss apps. It includes calorie tracking from a food database, as well as an interface for users to set goals and features to track their eating habits against those goals. Lose It has also recently begun to integrate with more activity trackers, including Nike+ Fuelband last year.
Tools within the Weight Watchers mobile app can only be accessed if the user has a Weight Watchers subscription. If the user has a subscription, they can track food, activity and weight, follow progress with the app's interactive chart, get tips for how to make healthy habits second nature based on location, and find workout ideas for any fitness level. In a recent survey that Weight Watchers conducted, Baylor College of Medicine found that even though Weight Watchers offer online and mobile tools, the biggest impact of the program exists within the meetings. Weight Watchers also recently introduced an app, Simple Start, that offers recipes for healthy eaters.
Azumio's Argus is built to be an intuitive, easy-to-use all day tracker. It tracks movement through a built-in passive tracking API, but it tracks food simplistically, using the phone's camera. Users just photograph food before they eat it and it shows up in Argus's visual timeline. Users can tag food with a food group, and the app has separate features to track coffee, soft drink and alcohol consumption. It's easy to use and might help someone get a general idea of how you're eating, but it doesn't track calories or specifics about the food.
SparkPeople Diet & Fitness Tracker
SparkPeople is a free online weight loss program and Diet & Fitness Tracker is its premiere app. It has a database of 2 million foods, a separate tracker for water, and fitness and exercise features. It automatically backs up users' nutrition logs online as well. Although SparkPeople is free, when MobiHealthNews spoke with the company last February (after a JMIR study validated the effectiveness of the website), COO Dave Heilmann said paid apps were a big part of the site’s business model.
TellSpec is one of the most novel and talked about approaches to food tracking in recent months. It raised nearly four times it's $100,000 goal on Indiegogo. The device is a three-part system which includes a scanner, cloud-based algorithm and companion app. The scanner utilizes a spectrometer to send information to the cloud. More specifically, the spectrometer sorts the photons in the food by wavelength and then counts them. The resulting information, which is sent to the cloud, is also sent to the companion app, which can apparently work out information about allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, and ingredients.
The rocky road of professed nutrition tracking bracelet Airo shows just how invested -- and how skeptical -- people are in the search for accurate passive nutrition tracking. Allegedly, Airo’s nutrition tracker uses wavelengths of light to look into the bloodstream to detect metabolites, which are released during and after the user’s meal. These metabolites will tell the tracker how many calories were consumed during the meal. However, after the tracker was met with widespread skepticism, the company halted pre-orders and refunded early backers.
Eat It Tweet It is an iOS app created to integrate with Twitter and offer users a portal to tweet exclusively about their diet. The app, created at New Mexico State University, includes preset hashtags categorized as behavior or food and a camera feature to take a picture of the meal. A study conducted on the app showed that young adults found it useful for tracking food consumption, though it didn't look at weight loss outcomes.
Most of these apps provide food tracking for people with smartphones, but TextCalories works for people with just a feature phone too. It's an entirely text-message based calorie tracker. The service had an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, but the service is still functioning. Users text what they are eating, what they weigh and how much they are exercising to TextCalories, and a program takes all the information and creates charts online for users to look at when they have time. It also lets users with camera phones send pictures of food to the blog.
Meal Snap aims to make food logging as easy as possible by building an app that's a lot like Instagram. Only instead of taking pictures of food and sharing them with friends, the user takes pictures of food and shares them with an algorithm that calculates what's in the food and how many calories it has. Then users can track what they ate -- and how many calories they consumed -- over time.
Instead of just offering the nutrition facts, Fooducate aims to explain what’s inside each food item, offer healthier alternatives, and grade the food with either an A, B, C, or D. The app lists pros and cons for different foods, offers a social network to share findings with your community and creates a healthy shopping list. Facts Fooducate points out include excessive sugar, trans fats, high fructose corn syrups, controversial food colorings, additives and preservatives.
In 2012, Nutrivise created an app, called Here&Now, which it described as “a nutritionist in your pocket” for Bay area residents. Here&Now had several features beyond a standard calorie counter app. It allowed the user to input biometric data, health goals, and location, and the app would recommend local and chain restaurants. It could also tell the user how healthy a dish is, both in general and for the user, personally. The app was pulled from the app store when Nutrivise was acquired by Jawbone last year, but the future could see some of those features coming out in connection with the Jawbone UP.
Jawbone has so far acquired two nutrition and food-tracking related app makers, Nutrivise and Massive Health, maker of The Eatery. The Eatery also had the phone's camera as the input mechanism, but rather than calculating the nutritional value with an algorithm, it crowdsourced the food rating. A community of users would rate each food as "Fit or Fat," turning food tracking into a social enterprise.
SuperTracker is the USDA tool for food, weight, and physical activity tracking, but it doesn't include a mobile component. It is linked to the USDA's ChooseMyPlate.gov education initiative. SuperTracker includes nutrition information for over 8,000 foods and a side-by-side comparison tool for evaluating them.
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has developed an app that allows cooks to enter a recipe and intended number of servings. The app will then calculate the estimated calories per serving. You can ask CalCutter to convert your recipe into a healthier dish by suggesting changes that could lower the calories. Recipes can be saved and emailed.
Microsoft added its own food tracker for its devices when it launched Bing Health and Fitness last year as part of its Windows 8.1 preview. The diet tracker application can identify foods, provide calorie counts and nutrition facts and show how much exercise is needed to burn off the calories. The nutrition tracker has more 200,000 foods cataloged and offers weekly or monthly reports with self customized nutrition goals.
GoMeals is notable not just for what it can do but for who's behind it. Sanofi Aventis is a major pharma company, and its nutrition tracker has recently expanded to include blood glucose logging as well. It tracks about 40,000 different foods and provides detailed nutrition information on each -- not just calories.
Similarly, Premera Blue Cross is representing payors on the list. It just recently launched Serve It Up!, a nutrition-focused online platform and app created in partnership with social platform maker Wellness Layers and nutrition guidance program Guiding Stars. Serve It Up! is not a calorie counter, instead it's an app to offer nutritious suggestions to users who are grocery shopping or cooking.
MyNetDiary Calorie Counter Pro
This food tracking app from MyNetDiary boasts a catalogue of 500,000 foods — 200,000 added by the company with the other 300,000 uploaded by users. It has an autocomplete search function and remembers foods that the user searches frequently. In addition to food tracking, the app has capabilities for tracking weight and exercise. It also has an online community supported by a registered dietitian. To input food, the app offers a barcode scanner, food database, internet search access and water tracking.
Livestrong's MyPlate Calorie Tracker
Livestrong’s Calorie Tracker (which has both a paid and free version) helps users track diet, weight loss and fitness goals by watching calories and exercise. Categories listed in the app include breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, exercise and water. Entering exercise subtracts the amount of calories from the daily total. The app also displays daily fat, carbohydrate and protein intake. It also has goal setting and reminder tools.
Diet and Weight Loss Tracker by Calorie Count
Diet and Weight Loss Tracker, an iOS and Android app, offers food-logging by voice. It also has offline functionality and a barcode scanner that helps the user accurately add his or her daily consumption to the app. This app also offers daily blog articles featuring success stories and stories on effective dieting methods. Users can visit Calorie Count's website to see more detailed nutritional analyses.
From finding nutritional information for food to easily keeping track of meals, exercise and weight, Calorie Counter's angle is a offering simple process and simple results. It also has a journal to record progress, ideas for recipes and meals and a diet calendar to look back at calories consumed and burned, as well as a bar code scanner to speed up entry.
Tap & Track is one of the oldest calorie trackers in the app store. It has a database of 500,000 foods, with their accuracy verified by nutritionists. Tap & Track boasts that its log is accessible offline, for those without reliable data access. It also has exercise and weight tracking features, budgeting and goal setting features, and tracks a variety of nutrients.
CRON-O-Meter is primarily an online tracker for diet and exercise, but includes a mobile app for logging on the go. The app includes a database of more than 10,000 foods and the app tracks over 60 nutrients for each one. Users can also create custom foods and recipes for their own account.
This app features a personalized weight loss plan that offers a color-coded food logging system, exercise tracker, daily food and exercise tasks, programmable reminders and educational articles. The app also integrates with Facebook and Twitter, but doesn’t cite any other integration features. Noom just recently raised $4.1 million. Noom was formerly known as WorkSmart Labs, and it's calorie counting app was called Calorific.
Nutrition Menu is built to log food both at home and at restaurants. It has 49,000 restaurant menu items in the United States and Canada and 51,000 entries for foods. The app also has features for water and exercise, and can aggregate the data into pie charts and status bars.
My Food Diary has a database of 80,000 foods, but the app really prides itself in the analysis of the data after it's collected. The app can tell you if it notices you haven't been getting enough calcium. Or it can it tell you how much weight you lost today, and how many days of dieting you would need if you lost that much every day.
My Diet Diary Calorie Counter by Medhelp
My Diet Diary tracks food in calories and nutrients and exercise. The app lets users view progress reports, customize weight goals and access a recipe calculator. It also offers a built-in BMI, the ability to set weight goals, view hourly weight charts and personalize the app with an avatar. The app also syncs the data to online health community Medhelp, which could be useful for people tracking their diet for reasons other than general fitness.
