Nutrition Health Center

Nutritional Software

By Terry Dunkle*

Since 1988, when my company began developing DietPower nutritional software, dozens of other brands have appeared. Most are poorly made, inaccurate, and difficult to learn and use, however. Here are five questions to ask when evaluating such programs:

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Does it have a large food database?

The best nutritional software will have a database of at last 20,000 foods. Make sure this is the actual food count, however; some brands inflate this by counting duplicate foods under different names -- “frankfurter” and “hot dog,” for example.

Is the database accurate?

Ask whether the software uses the latest USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, and how often the database is updated. Steer clear of online nutritional software that lets users contribute foods to the database themselves. These are notoriously inaccurate, because they put you at the mercy of everyone else’s typographical errors.

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™.

Can you expand the database yourself?

The best programs will let you add foods to the database by entering nutrition facts from labels. This is important if you want to add your favorite brand of a food instead of relying on generic nutrition facts.

Is the software easy to use?

You should be able to analyze the nutritional makeup of a day’s meals with a total time expenditure of five to ten minutes. If your nutritional software takes longer than this, look elsewhere.

Does it offer a free trial?

Nutritional software that can’t be test-driven before purchase is usually inferior to other brands. So is nutritional software that doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee.

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