by Geof Newton
[The Evaluations] [The Timings]
A few
months back (March/April
2003), we went over some nutrition fundamentals in preparation for a survey we
were conducting on nutrition tracking software. I was looking for a program
which would track my daily caloric intake, break it down into percentages of
fat, carbohydrate, protein, and significant vitamins and minerals, log critical
physical measurements, and calculate daily expenditures. My wife was looking for
something which would assist with weight loss and which only needed to track
weight, calories in, and calories out. It wasn’t too difficult to find programs
of this genre but like all computer software, it’s almost impossible to find one
program which will do all the things you want it to do. We looked at 40 programs
and short reviews of each program will be available on the club website by
mid-November. In this column, we’ll just concentrate on the highlights.
Nutrition programs can be categorized into a few key
areas. There are menu planners designed for commercial kitchens, caterers, food
processing plants and other professional menu designers. We chose to bypass
those in our evaluations since they were outside our requirements.
There are professional level profiling packages
designed for use by dieticians, medical professionals, personal trainers, and
coaches. While these are extremely complete and full-featured programs, the
functionality will overwhelm most casual users and they tend to provide a
snapshot of a patient’s eating habits rather than a historical log. With prices
ranging from $500 to $2000 and up, the tag will scare away most of the
non-professionals. EHSA’s Food Processor (http://www.esharesearch.com/)
is a good representative of this category with a complete database of foods and
a thorough nutrient breakdown including a full amino acid analysis.
Nutrition software for the rest of us typically ranges
in price from $15 to $150 depending on the features that you’re looking for and
the number of people you want to track data for. Several of the programs can be
ordered with either an individual license or a home license, intended for
tracking the nutritional history of an entire family. Within this consumer
level, we can categorize further. Some packages have been built around specific
diet programs such as the Zone represented by programs such as Zone Balance (http://www.zonebalance.com/)
and Zone Runner (http://www.zoneware.com/).
These are simplistic programs which don’t track your intake or expenditure but
simply score your meal against the 40-30-30 ratio of the Zone diet.
Slightly more sophisticated programs such as Weight By
Date (http://www.provariant.com/products/wbd_overview.htm)
will score your day’s meals based on WeightWatcher’s Points® or against a ratio
which you provide. Performance Diet (http://www.healthkeeper.com/),
part of the Health Keeper family of products, uses a unique system of color
coded “Nutricode” bars which integrate nicely with their paper diary. As you
fill in the bars, you can monitor your CPF ratios over the course of the day and
get immediate feedback on your progress.
The next level of program adds an exercise module. Some
of these packages such as Diet Master (http://www.lifestyletech.com/)
and Diet Power (http://www.dietpower.com/)
provide the exercise module almost as an afterthought. They seem to miss the
point that daily calorie expenditure is as important as daily intake. Others
such as CrossTrainer (http://www.crosstrainer.ca/),
SportTrac (http://www.sportrac.com/),
Protrack 2002 (http://www.dakotafit.com/),
and Fuel (http://www.logiform.ca/) are
focused on an active athlete’s needs. Each of these programs sports a unique
feature or two. CrossTrainer provides the capability for logging and tracking
workout psychology which can then be analysed against your nutrient and calorie
history. ProTrack 2002 caters to weightlifting and cardiovascular exercise. Fuel
features a menu planner tailored to your race schedule. You provide favorite and
not so favorite food categories and Fuel will build a menu leading up to your
race, for the day of the race, and for 2-4 days of recovery. While it lacks some
of the logging functionality we were looking for, the menu planning capability
would make it an intriguing option for coaches. SportTrac would have received
high marks had it still been available. It was sold to
Road Runner Sports a little over
a year ago and RRS integrated it into its RunMaster line of software which they
have since discontinued. If you happen to find a copy at a yardsale or on e-Bay,
take a look.
For the technical gadget geek, several of the middle-
to high-end programs in the consumer category are adding Palm integration. These
programs represented by Balance Log (http://www.healthetech.com/)
allow you to record your daily exercise and meals on a Palm or similar device
and then synchronize with your PC for analysis.
The last category we’d like to mention is the on-line nutrition analysis and
logging programs. These are represented by sites such as WeightWatchers (http://www.weightwatchers.com/),
FitDay’s WebFit (http://www.fitday.com/),
and Nutrawatch (http://www.nutrawatch.com/).
We recommend against these services for a few reasons. Unless you have a fast
connection to the internet, they can be slow and it will take quite a while to
enter a day’s worth of information. The services typically store data for only
30 to 60 days making long term logging and profiling impossible. Privacy of your
data is also a concern since you’re posting sensitive medical data and eating
habits on a potentially public system. The FitDay service even includes a
disclaimer as part of their agreement indicating that they reserve the right to
use your personal information and diet data to send you targeted advertisements.
However, for those who need the extra motivation of posting daily exercise and
meals in a public forum and who might benefit from the stories and assistance of
a community, one of these sites might just be for you.
Now for the Editor’s Choice Awards. There were a few
programs which continued to hover at the top as we continued our evaluations.
What set them apart was their ease of use and attention to the needs of both the
athlete and the casual user looking to shed a few pounds. For the serious
athlete, we’d pick CrossTrainer. While data entry could be easier and it doesn’t
track resting heart rate (??), this Canadian company is quick to provide fixes
and updates and are supported by a very active user community. This program
should only get better over the next few releases and scores 5 1/2 spikes out of
6. For overall use, we’d like to recommend LifeForm (http://www.lifeform.com/)
which is incredibly easy and quick to learn, simple to maintain daily data in,
and provides all the features and functions we’re looking for. In addition, it
has the capacity for tracking a myriad of medical statistics like cholestrol,
heart rate, and blood pressure. But it suffers from one serious flaw; it’s no
longer supported. Created by an ex-WordPerfect VP and a few co-workers, they are
not planning any upgrades or bugfixes “due to lack of resources.” While that
might be acceptable if they made LifeForm available free of charge, they
continue to charge $54 for a program which is out of date and becoming more so
every day. LifeForm rates a 2 1/2 spikes.
Our runner-up’s are Food Smart (http://www.food-smart.com/)
and Kathleen’s Diet Planner (http://www.betterbyte.red-deer.com/kdiet.htm).
Kathleen’s Diet Planner features a complete SR-15 food database supplemented
with the CF2001 (Canadian) database and their own entries for a total of 25,407
individual items. It includes comprehensive reporting and charting of all major
nutrients, amino acids, vitamins and minerals, a nice looking uncluttered user
interface and an easy meal entry in spreadsheet format. It suffers from a
sluggish search and provides food entries in 100g format forcing the user to
calculate just how many grams were in that serving of cheesecake. KDP receives 5
1/2 spikes. On the technology bleeding edge, Food Smart is built using Seagate
Crystal Reports, Microsoft SQL Server, and XML. There is a lot of potential in
this product but it runs slowly on older systems, uses an older food database
(SR-14) and doesn’t provide some of the long term tracking tools we need. For
now we give it 4 spikes but look for future enhancements to come quickly and
rapidly boost this program into a leader.
Our 6 spike winner for this review and Editor’s Choice:
Nutribase (http://www.nutribase.com/) by
Arizona based CyberSoft. Nutribase comes in a few different flavors; Clinical,
Personal Plus, Personal, Junior, and EZ; each offering slightly modified
functionality and a different interface but driven by the same database and
logical engine. For $69.95 for Personal Plus, you get a complete food database
with 23,636 individual items, fully customizable target CPF ratios, an extremely
powerful graphing and reporting module, and a quick and thorough analysis of
meals. Nutribase is also backed by a solid support staff and is constantly being
updated and upgraded. Integration of the new SR-17 database is currently
underway and they recently announced an enhanced meal planning module in the
latest release. The Personal Plus version supports up to 10 family members and
is extremely feature rich but that additional functionality comes at a moderate
performance cost. Food and exercise lookup and entry can be slowed by the
multi-window display and the extensive database. Nutribase EZ ($39.99) offers
much of the same functionality in a trimmer interface but supports only one
user. One advantage of the EZ edition is its “Favorites” feature. Once a food
item is entered and added to a meal it populates a “Favorites” tab reducing food
item lookup from a Type, Lookup, Select, and Add procedure to a 1-click process.
This is based on the premise that 90% of the food items that we consume are the
same week after week. You can save entire meals and recall them for entry in a
new day when those meals are served again. You can also enter your own recipes
or food items which may not be included in the database. CyberSoft was kind
enough to provide a full featured unlocked version of their programs at no cost
for evaluation and was prompt in responding to questions regarding operation of
the software. They are the only company to provide links to all of their major
competitors for evaluation purposes. Although their programs are not as robust
at exercise tracking as some of the athlete specific packages mentioned above
(in other words, I wouldn’t throw out my Excel based running log for this
program), the overall completeness of their nutrition analysis and meal tracking
still give CyberSoft the Editor’s Choice.
From the weird and unusual: French Diet (http://www.diondine.com/)
sports an original interface that can be challenging to navigate for those used
to the Microsoft view of the cyber-world. It also features a full color
graphical representation of your current body profile and has pictures
associated with many of the food items in the database. Subliminal Diet Food
Blaster (http://www.buildingyourself.com/diet.htm)
is too silly not to mention. While you shoot falling junk food with your
broccoli cannon, subliminal dieting messages are flashed on the screen. I can
just feel those pounds melting away!
So what did we choose? Seeking the motivation from
making dietary habits and weight progress public, my wife opted to try the
WeightWatchers on-line service. I’d still like to use LifeForm but have a hard
time giving a company money for a product that they no longer support. I may
finally give in and purchase a copy of Nutribase Personal Plus but we’ve found
that if it’s not easy and quick or if you’re not extremely motivated to track
your detailed eating habits, you just won’t spend the time entering your meals
into the program. Just like our training, if you don’t invest the time into it,
you won’t reap any of the benefits. But we’ve also found that an analysis of
just a few days worth of your eating habits may be quite eye-opening and incent
you to adjust your menus.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of some
of the nutrition software available and the differing functionality available
across the genre. The details of each program we looked at and how it rated are
posted in the accompanying tables on the CCAC
website (http://www.capecodathleticclub.org/).
We’ve also included data entry timings from
some of our favorites so you can estimate how much time you’ll spend in front of
the computer each day.
Until next time, keep those fingers and mice clicking.
Cheers … webrunr@capecodathleticclub.org
Columns represent the opinions of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of the club.