November 5, 2012
By Lauren Fowler, B.S.
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Smartphone use has grown tremendously over the past few years.
Now, over half of American cell phone users have a smartphone. Along with the
convenience of maps, e-mail and search engines, smartphones offer hundreds of
free and paid "apps" for nutrition, fitness and overall health.
Below are seven of the best in these categories. They're free
and ranked as tops by people who use them for:
- Nutrition information
- Calorie counting
- Blood-sugar tracking
- Healthy cooking ideas
- Fitness
Nutrition Tracking Apps
For: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows phone,
iPad
How it works: Enter basic information, such as your age,
height, weight and activity level to determine your calorie needs. Set a goal to
lose, maintain or gain weight. Log your foods and exercise to meet your
goal.
Pros:
- Sets goals for specific nutrients like trans fats
- Has over 2 million foods in the database, including whole foods, packaged foods and restaurant foods
- Allows you to enter your favorite recipes to easily track their calories
- Motivates you with visual graphs to show weight loss
For: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, iPad
How it works: Enter basic information to determine
calorie needs. Log your foods or exercise to track your calories and
nutrition.
Pros:
- Logs foods by voice for ease
- Over 220,000 foods and restaurant meals in the database
- Barcode scanner allows you to look up nutrition facts labels and food grades
- Diet analysis shows a graph with your percentage of calories from carbohydrates, fat and protein
Extras: Premium version ($9.99 per month) offers
consultations with a registered dietitian
Diabetes App
For: iPhone
How it works: Log your blood sugar levels to track and
control diabetes.
Pros:
- Set target blood sugar ranges
- Log blood sugars unlimited times during the day
- Graph blood sugars over time, and export them into a file to save or print
- Add notes to the blood sugars to write what you ate before a value or just to note if the blood sugar was too low, normal or too high
Grocery Shopping and Healthy Cooking Apps
For: iPhone, Android
How it works: Scan barcodes or search products at the
grocery store or at home and receive an instant grade (A through F).
Pros:
- Interprets the nutrition facts label for you
- Assigns a grade based on specific food categories (cereal, yogurts, snacks, etc.), ingredients, processing and other factors
- Shows you "things to know," such as products that are high in fiber, good sources of a vitamin or high in sugar
- Offers alternative choices with higher grades to look for at the store
Extra: Two other apps available for the iPhone include
Allergy and Gluten Free Scanner by Fooducate ($4.99) and Diabetes Nutrition by
Fooducate (free)
For: iPhone, iPad
How it works: Search for healthy recipes.
Pros:
- Enter three ingredients you have on hand, and it searches recipes with those ingredients.
- Search by category: budget; kid-friendly; quick and easy; special diets (gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan or vegetarian, high fiber, low-fat); course ( breakfast, lunch,dinner, appetizer); name; keywords
- Automatically create a grocery list after finding a recipe
- Add recipe favorites to use in the future
- Find a Whole Foods store near you
Fitness
Cost: Free if you meet your fitness pact
For: iPhone(Android coming soon)
How it works: Make a fitness "pact" to exercise 1 to 7
days per week. Earn money if you keep your pact, but you pay if you miss your
pact
Pros:
- Use the app to sign in to the gym, or use RunKeeper app for GPS tracking to get credit for walking, running, or biking.
- Offers motivation to exercise by offering money as a reward
- Change your pact to more or fewer days, or stop the pact whenever you would like
- Get paid $0.50 to $1 for each day you keep your commitment
Things to Know: You need to enter a credit card, which
will be charged if you do not keep your pact.
For: iPhone, Android
How it works: Tracks your exercise by using a GPS
system
Pros:
- Track your walking, running and biking
- View distance, time and pace
- See progress over time by tracking your longest distance or fastest pace
- Get motivation through audio coaching or training plans
- Share your workouts with friends on Facebook or Twitter.
- Works with Gympact to earn money for your workouts
Lauren Fowler graduated from the University of Vermont with
a Bachelor of Science in Dietetics, Nutrition, & Food Science. She is
currently completing her dietetic internship at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
She plans to become a registered dietitian.
