Tech n Gadgets Blog: iPhone Appidemic: Good Food-Bad Food

Friday, November 12, 2010

iPhone Appidemic: Good Food-Bad Food

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, iDevice Apps, Features, Appidemic

In a world where time is money and eating is more an annoyance than an experience, it can be impossible to count calories and keep track of exercise, calories burned, your fitness goals. But to use the clich�, there’s an app for that. Good Food-Bad Food (GFBF) is listed as a food advisor and calorie tracker, and it delivers a compelling fitness- and food-tracking experience.

What is it?

GFBF is the perfect app for the nutrition-conscious but time-constrained. With a few simple taps, you can easily access the nutrition value of common brand name grocery store items or menu items at thousands of restaurants. Feel like soup, but not sure which is healthier? The app lets you select and compare the relative merits of Campbell’s and Progresso, with either simple A-F letter grades or actual breakout nutrition charts comparing up to four items:

In addition to calorie counting, the app provides hundreds of calorie burning activities with their related rate of burn—everything from gardening, aerobics and dance, to more esoteric activities like making the bed, playing cards, and having sex (both foreplay and the actual act).

How does it work?

At first launch, GFBF provides a daily consumption and burn dashboard (how much fat, carb, and protein vs. how many calories burned), and large buttons to Compare Foods, Add Food (that you have eaten), and Add Activity. If you are debating what to order in a restaurant or what food to buy in the grocery store, the Compare Foods button lets you select up to four and generate a compare/contrast bar graph. Add Food lets you select what you are eating and enter the associated nutrition value in your daily log. In this case, a bagel with a light schmear of Nutella:

Assuming you need to burn off some of the extra calories from your chocolatey breakfast, a simple tap of the Add Activity button will let you select the activities performed and log the calories burned. It is even possible to keep track of body measurements and graph your progress over time. In this case, cleaning up the dishes burned a meager 42 calories (no task too big or small):

One of GFBF’s greatest strengths, apart from the expansive database of food items, is the the flexibility to count your food values to reflect actual consumption. Assuming you cannot finish the burrito you ordered, you can choose the portion size when adding the food to your daily log, and the nutrition info is automatically updated to reflect that portion size:

Is it contagious?

You had better believe it, because this app is indispensable to anyone concerned about fitness but short on the time it can take to be serious. With the ability to enter freeform calories burned and nutrition value or to select from a plethora of existing options, it is incredibly simple to keep track of your weight loss goals or nutrition intake. Compared to the cost of hiring a full time dietician and trainer, $1.99 is a steal (though the app won’t shout at you if you slack off during that last rep on the weight machine).

iPhone 3G users should be aware that the searches on this app can run a bit slowly, so do not create roadblocks in the market by analyzing every food item on the fly. Also, the grading scale feels a bit odd…when a classic Cinnabon gets a B and has “Very low sodium”, and “Low cholesterol” listed as pluses, it feels a bit disingenuous. A small sample of nutrition info in the app was compared against a store’s online nutrition info posting, and it was mostly accurate (usually +/- one gram, five calories, etc.).