Nutrition Health Center

Diet Nutrition Software: Which Is Best?

By Terry Dunkle*

Using diet nutrition software requires a commitment to logging your foods and exercise every day, or at least nearly every day. If you don’t choose a program that is quick and easy, you won’t stick with it. And if it doesn’t give you a lot of helpful information, you won’t stick with it, either.

With these points in mind, let’s look at the five most important attributes of a great nutrition program.

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Database Quality

Choose diet nutrition software that covers at least 20,000 foods (the number in a modest supermarket) and at least 12 nutrients (the number on a standard food label). If you’re looking at online programs, avoid any that let users contribute foods to the database by entering facts from their labels -- these are usually loaded with errors and needless duplicates. Ask how recently and how often the database is updated.

The exercise database should comprise at least 500 activities, ranging from sports and leisure activities to household and occupational tasks.

Intuitiveness

Good diet nutrition software “thinks” the way you do. You’re trying to reach a goal weight on a target date. You want to know how many calories you can eat today and stay on target. How many calories are left in your budget right now? Which food will be most satisfying with the least calorie expenditure? And so on.

This basically calls for a diary approach, with a daily budget and a “bank” where uneaten calories are deposited at the end of the day so they can be eaten tomorrow. It also demands a food and exercise search function that doesn’t require you to “drill down” through categories to find what you want to log, but lets you search by their names -- and doesn’t mind when you misspell them.

Based on 20 years of research by DietPower, Inc., this calculator is accurate to 5 percent for most users. (It's not for people who are pregnant or have metabolic disorders. Always see a doctor before starting a diet.)

Birth Date

Sex

Tobacco user?

Height

Weight

Goal Weight

Target Date

Email Address

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?

ft. in.

lbs.

lbs. ?

- - ?

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Close Goal Weight
Your Goal Weight is the weight you want to achieve. (If it's a lot different from your current weight, you might want to set a goal that represents only the first step. Even a 10-percent weight loss will significantly improve your health.)
Close Target Date
Plan on losing no more than a pound or two per week.  Otherwise, you may eat too little for good nutrition and your weight loss may be temporary.
Close Lactating?
If you are breastfeeding, check this box and the calculator will add calories for producing milk.
Close Tobacco User?
Nicotine speeds your metabolism, making you burn calories faster. (That's why people who quit smoking gain weight.) Check this box if you average more than one cigarette, one-half pipeful, one-quarter of a cigar, or one dip of snuff or chewing tobacco per day.
Close Email Address
Once a month, DietPower will send you the most important nutrition news of the past 30 days, selected by national award-winning editors covering hundreds of medical journals. You can cancel this free, no-obligation service anytime with a single click. We produce it only to promote our weight-loss software. It won't put you on other mailing lists—We're Not That Kind of Company™.

Speed

Avoid any diet nutrition software that requires more than five to ten minutes a day to use. Test it first -- and if the company won’t give you a free trial, rule it out. Plenty of competitors do offer trials.

Intelligence

If you look hard enough, you might find diet nutrition software that learns you likes and dislikes, automatically adjusts your calorie budget to keep you tracking smoothly toward your goal, and even recommends foods you like that are best for your nutrition now. One of these is DietPower (advertised on this page). We know of no others, but if you discover one, please email webmaster@dietpower.com.

Support

Don’t buy diet nutrition software without carefully checking the company’s support policy. Unfortunately, many companies make it hard to get a human on the phone or even by email when you have a question -- they have a “take your money and run” attitude. In our experience, this is more common in the nutrition software industry than almost any other. Caveat emptor.

Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of DietPower, Inc.