Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, FatSecret... which are the best and worst calorie-counting nutrition apps?
- FatSecret, Noom Coach, Samsung Health, Lose It! and MyFitnessPal compared with standards used by British dietitians and nutritionists – and all have pros and cons
Downloading a nutrition app is easy, but finding one that accurately reports calories is tougher.
For those people interested in losing weight or healthy eating, choosing from among the thousands of health and fitness apps can seem daunting – particularly when there is little evidence to suggest certain apps are more trustworthy than others.
However, a group of researchers has made the selection process a lot easier. A new study evaluates the accuracy of five of the most popular nutrition apps: Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, FatSecret, Noom Coach, and Lose It!.
The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, compared all five nutritional databases against professional standards used by dietitians and nutritionists in Britain.
Weight loss is a lot more than just writing things down. It’s really about changing your behaviour.
Apps with nutritional data that closely matched the British standards were deemed the most accurate.
The five apps mostly provided satisfactory estimates of calories and saturated fat, but a few failed to accurately represent sodium, protein, and micronutrients such as calcium and Vitamin C.
The study found a clear winner – and a clear loser – but each of the five apps had its pros and cons.
Check out the findings.
Lose It!
Lose It! ranks among the top 10 health and fitness apps on iTunes, but the study found it to be the least accurate.