Review: Restaurant Nutrition

Overview The iPhone is the perfect all-in-one phone, music and media tool, and now, it's added a new dimension: on-the-go dieter's best friend.

For some people, dieting is easy. Go to a nutritionist, get a detailed daily meal guide, tote around a detailed food calorie chart. For those of us living on planet Earth, however, it's more likely that we'll be grabbing fast food on the go, wondering just what we're putting in our bodies as we enjoy its fried goodness. That's where Restaurant Nutrition, the number one health and fitness iPhone app, comes in.

Functionality

Enter Restaurant Nutrition and register your name. If you and your doctor use ThePHRNetwork.com to track your dieting progress, the program can sync up with the many features the website offers. Since most of you do not have that kind of high tech service, lucky for you the app can function as a standalone program. As such, you're most likely to click Standalone. Now, allow the iPhone to determine your current location. Then, wait for a detailed list of fast food chains, and get ready to find out what exactly you're eating when you order that Double Bacon Whopper at Burger King or Breaded Clam dish from Long John Silver's. As of now, there are 22 restaurants with full data available, though the list frequently expands. To check for updates, click on the Settings button in top right corner, and then update Menu Data. In the settings screen, you can also add a user, or switch users, which is useful if you have more than one person tracking what they eat. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. So say you want to eat at Wendy's, but don't know where the nearest one is. Next to the Wendy's button in the main screen, click on Map. Using your location, Restaurant Manager will use the Google Maps application to show you the closest bunch of Wendy's relative to where you are. Once you get there, the "fun" really starts.

Say you want that Classic Double with Cheese, fries and a Frosty. Click into Wendy's select the appropriate menu (in this case, burgers, fries and shakes) and see what they have in them. It'll give you a listing of caloric, fat, sodium and other content, just like a nutritional label on the side of a box.

If you're down with what they're showing you, make the order, and then scroll down to the bottom of each item screen and click "I ate this today". If you want to update what you ate another day, you can do that, as well.

Hungry again? Just pick a new restaurant, lather, rinse and repeat. At the end of the day, you can see your total nutritional (or, most likely in this scenario, non-nutritional) intake.

If you know where you want to eat, but don't know what is in your calorie range, have no fear. Restaurant Nutrition can help. Simply choose a restaurant and write in the range of calories you want, and they'll pull up a satisfactory meal for you.

Review

Very useful for those on the go, and fast food aficionados, it will make you think twice before you put that huge Whopper in your mouth, or at the very least know just what exactly you're putting into your body on a daily basis. In that way, it is certain to aid dieters, whether it helps them lose weight or not. Unfortunately, unless you eat fast food for every meal, this tool isn't a total help. What would be tremendous, but unfortunately this app lacks, is a guide to the nutritional value of everyday, home-cooked food, like fruit and pasta and meat. Most people on a diet will be concentrating on those things more, anyways. And while home-cooked food doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of "restaurant", it would sure be a welcomed addition to the program. It is also unfortunately does not have the online integration for most people. It would be super helpful to have all the tools the website offers, and for serious dieters, makes a world of difference. Hopefully that becomes public, but until it does, the application is not nearly as useful as it could be.

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