Guest Post by Diamond
For a long time, understanding nutrition has seemed entirely “out of reach” to the lay person. To get good information one had to sift through endless, complex and sometimes conflicting data or visit one of the few doctors actually trained in nutrition.
Yet this is finally starting to change. Thanks to technology and scientific advances, it is becoming much easier to enter and comprehend the world of nutrition.
Additionally, the demand for experienced professionals has grown so much that we’ve seen a major growth in specialists—from nutritional coaches and personal trainers to registered dieticians—many of which are considerably more accessible thanks to the internet.
There are also numerous reliable sources dotting the net either in the form of apps or reputable websites. Alongside these sources are some exceptionally cool gadgets to help even the playing field for the lay person.
Useful Apps
It shouldn’t surprise you there are numerous nutrition-related apps available to be used as tools for both professionals and amateurs alike. As far as shared tools go, the most useful is likely the mobile food journal.
MyFitnessPal, like its competitors, lets you make daily log entries to record what you eat, when you eat and how many calories you consume. They make calculations simpler by providing a premade database of several million foods for you to choose from.
The value of these apps is twofold. You can track what you’re eating no matter where you go, and you can share the information with health practitioners for feedback. For nutritionists and dieticians, getting accurate information from patients is actually surprisingly difficult with traditional food journals, whereas digital versions make the process smooth and simple.
Of course, you should be cognizant of who has access to your personal logs; be sure you’re on a secured connection if you’re uploading information to the net, or use a VPN to encrypt your connection to ensure safety and privacy.
Besides calorie counting, you can also monitor vitamin and mineral consumption with other apps, such as Nutrition Journal for iPhone. It helps you track which vitamins you’re lacking so that you can plan meals or determine which supplements you might need.
Aside of calorie counting, you can also track vitamin and mineral consumption with other apps such as Nutrition Journal for iPhone. This helps keep track of which vitamins you’re lacking and what you still need to eat or supplement with for maximum effect.
Nutritional Gadgets
When most people think of food-related gadgets, the first items that come to mind are kitchen appliances. But the latest entries into the world of nutritional gadgets aren’t spiralizers, food processors or fancy knives but rather things much smaller and much higher tech.
The SCio pocket scanner and the Tellspec scanner are tools used to determine a food’s ingredients and nutritional properties to help differentiate between foods that claim to be good and foods that actually are. They use molecular scanners to figure out how many calories, nutrients and other key elements are in a given food item and work with companion apps that are linked to large food databases to determine which food you’re looking at and what’s in it.
Reputable Sites
While there are many websites around the net that purport to offer good nutritional advice, only a select few are truly reliable. The best ones focus purely on listing what type of nutrients can be found in each type of food without showing a special bias to one particular group, as is often the case with paleo, vegan or gluten free diet pages.
Two resources that have proven valuable time and time again are whfoods.com and nutritiondata.self.com. Whereas whfoods focuses on providing more in-depth information about the foods you look up, nutritiondata supplies raw numbers identifying the range of different nutrients in different types of food.
Perhaps the best part of these online resources is their ability to update based on new information. For instance, there is a lot of new research about taste receptors and their effect on other parts of the body that could have a big impact on nutrition. Waiting for information like this to be published could take years, while it is available online almost immediately.
Tomorrow’s Nutrition
As you can see, there are plenty of ways that technology is making the world of nutrition more accessible to the general population. New advances are also making it easier than ever for providers to advocate healthy dietary choices. All of this means good nutrition habits are, thankfully, becoming easier and easier to develop and maintain.
About the Author: Diamond is a technology specialist and health enthusiast. Her time online is spent largely blogging about different areas of health and internet security. When she’s not working, she enjoys preparing new foods from the seemingly endless list of recipes on the net.