Nutrition Health Center

The Best Free Food Calorie Counter

By Terry Dunkle*

Even the best free food calorie counter is a far cry from some of those you can buy for $20 to $30. Here’s what I recommend you base your decision on:

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Overall Structure

A calorie counter should work pretty much as a diary does. (This is the basis of DietPower, my company’s product.) It lets you record each meal you’ve eaten or plan to eat. It tallies the calories in those meals. It compares your tally with your calorie budget. And it deposits any uneaten calories in a “bank” from which you can draw calories tomorrow, for extra eating. Steer clear of calorie counters that don’t do all of this automatically. Otherwise, they’re not much better than keeping your own tally with pencil and paper.

Big Choice of Foods

The average supermarket has 30,000 items on its shelves. Hence, a free food calorie counter should cover at least 20,000 -- without fudging the number by listing duplicates under different names. It should also report values of at least the 13 nutrients (besides calories) found on food labels. Better yet, it should cover 20 or 30 nutrients. And finally, it should tell you when the nutrient data was last updated. If the data are more than three years old, that’s a bad sign.

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™.

Good Choice of Exercises

While logging your meals, you should also be able to log exercise to earn extra calories. A free food calorie counter should have at least 500 exercises in its database. These should range from leisure and sporting activities to household and occupational tasks. They should also include your body weight and the speed or intensity of the exercise when calculating the number of calories you burn.

Intelligence

If you look carefully, you can find a free food calorie counter that’s a lot smarter than most others. DietPower, for example, is the only one that guarantees reaching your goal weight on your target date by continually adjusting your calorie budget to your metabolism. It does many other intelligent things, as well. So do a few (very few) competitors.

Company Integrity

Stay away from companies that don’t offer a free trial, a money-back guarantee, or free, prompt technical support by phone and email. My company has always put significant resources into these, because we know how important they are to our products’ users.

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