Every now and then we come across people who are health conscious and tend to keep an eye on the food that goes in their bodies. With growing awareness and the craze for lean bodies, technology has also set its tune accordingly by coming to the rescue and helping us keep a check on the food we eat.
Apart from the fact that most of us like to be all slim and trim, health has also become a prime objective of our dieting plans. People prefer health over taste now and are increasingly making healthy choices when it comes to food.
This new age contribution towards healthy eating is made by none other than our closest friend: Google. The search engine company has come up with a unique and innovative idea.
This idea, though simple enough, has great usefulness that helps people understand what goes in their food as the search engine now provides an extensive breakdown of the nutritional information that makes up every food.
Calculate Your Food’s Nutritional Value
This new feature instantly allows you to calculate the amount of carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, fats and other nutrients in any particular food you are searching. Google has also listed the size of the serving in order to make this information more comprehensive.
At the moment Google has included a total of 1,000 items in this search list but it has made clear that this list would keep growing and would also be introduced in other languages for the ease of access for all the people around the world.
Pictorial References
This new feature shows the picture of your searched food along with a brief description and all the nutritional facts too. They have made it even more accessible by explaining the breakdown of calories and helping you design your own daily diet with the right nutrients.
Serving Size
The information about the nutritional value can be selected as mount per 100g or one NLEA serving or other classifications which can be selected by you as per choice. Along with this it also enables you to look into various kinds of the same food for instance if you are searching for popcorns this feature would enable you to select among air popped, microwave popped or oil popped popcorns.
Everything off the Counter
For each kind of popcorn a separate set of nutritional facts would appear. Likewise if you are searching for a certain fruit or vegetable it would facilitate you to select the particular kind of the one you are searching for.
The major usefulness of this feature lies in the fact that most of us don’t know about the nutritional value of the foods that we are consuming. We don’t bother to know about the nutrient which our food provides either because we are not interested, or we are too lazy to read all bulk of information.
This feature is easy to search and easy to use too. All the information is classified in such a way that one can easily understand the facts written. It might seem to be cumbersome for us to go through the stacks of information but the new feature introduced by Google might have changed your perspective. Go give it a try!
Other Technologies
Bite-Counter: The wrist-worn device makes use of this pattern, tracking wrist motion to count bites and estimate calories. It provides real-time feedback on the amount consumed and stores a long-term log. This allows for easy portion control, sustained self-monitoring and feedback during eating instead of only at the end of day.
Kickstarter: The Canadian company TellSpec recently launched campaign on this device for a hand-held consumer device that can analyze the chemical composition of any food in less than 20 seconds, thanks to laser spectroscopy, nanophotonics, and a unique algorithm.
HAPIfork: Eating too fast leads to poor digestion and easily makes you lose track of the amounts eaten. Slowing down your eating speed is HAPIfork’s goal. This device by HappyLabs, an electronic fork, tracks your eating habits and alerts you, with the help of indicator lights, when you’re eating too fast. The fork also measures the overall eating time per meal, the amount of ‘fork servings’ taken per minute and intervals between ‘fork servings’.