
You can also manually enter nutrition information. However, in our tests, the app failed to identify some store-bought chips. The app lets you scan food bar codes with your phone, and use autofill to pull in the nutritional information. This screenshot shows the diary page in Yazio's app Calorie Counter (Image credit: Taylor Kubota for Live Science) Or, if they know it's what they want, they can simply swipe right to add it to the diary, which is a nice simplification for those who want fast tracking. When they think they've found the food they want, they can click on it to see more information. To add a food to the diary, users can search the database. This app has a clean diary function and a searchable database of foods. įor those who want just a bit more detail in tracking their nutrients, Calorie Counter by Yazio (free iOS (opens in new tab), Android) is our pick. Another menu offers simple daily and weekly summaries of your progress in all of the areas you can track, and nutrition estimates that (again, roughly) calculate the amount of calories, fats, proteins, carbs and alcohol in your food. The app also includes options for manually tracking your sleep time, the number of steps you take and your body weight - as well as your goals for each of those - but that feature is nothing special. Note that users can manually input the grams of carbohydrates, fat and proteins in a meal, but the app will also estimate these numbers automatically, from the few basic details about the meal that the user provides.Įntering a snack into the MealLogger app (Image credit: Taylor Kubota for Live Science) Users can also give a (very) rough breakdown of the type of food they ate, by saying how many portions of a food group it represents. Taking a picture of food is simple, and users can label each photo as a meal, an exercise or a status. Users can create or join groups, and posts run on a live feed with options to favorite, like, comment and share them (via Facebook, text, email, Twitter and other options). The home page of MealLogger looks like a stripped-down version of Instagram, although users can create pictureless posts as well. The trade-off is that this app lacks the personalized recommendations that the answers to those intrusive questions make possible. Unlike other apps that start with pages of semi-invasive questions - such as the user's height, weight and age - MealLogger asks only for your name, your email and a password. The first striking advantage of this app is that it's quick to set up. Our pick for the best visual food diary is MealLogger (free iOS (opens in new tab), Android).

(Image credit: Taylor Kubota for Live Science) The meal entry screen in the MealLogger app.
