What to Look for in Food Software

Food software is a powerful tool for fitness and health professionals. It’s also an investment. When you purchase food software you want to be sure it will do everything you need—and make your work as easy as possible. Here’s what to look for to make sure you get the results you need:

1.       A powerful database. All food software starts with an underlying nutrition database. This is where the software draws information from, such as the calories per serving of mashed potatoes, or the total amount of amino acids in a particular brand of smoked salmon. If this database is limited, it cripples the entire software and makes it less useful for any application—from fitness planning to making recipes. A good nutrition database will not only be large, it will include fine grain detail such as “one large tomato” versus “one small tomato,” or the carbs in Lay’s potato chips versus Ruffles potato chips. It keeps guesswork to a minimum and makes it as easy as possible to look up and enter ingredients. It should also allow you to enter your own custom entries and save them.

2.       Recipe support. Recipes are one of the biggest uses of food software. People use the software to support their recipes in many different ways, and the software should be designed with this in mind. For example, if you have a recipe and want to find out its nutritional content, most food software will let you do that. But what about playing with a recipe to see if you can improve its nutritional content—does the software make this hard, or easy? Alternately, what if you want to see the yield of a recipe, and scale it up or down? Or if you want to estimate the ingredient price a given recipe carries? This is all functionality that surprisingly few food software programs support. Look for one that will truly help you with your recipe work.

3.       Exercises. Fitness is another major use of food software, and fitness has two components: diet, and exercise. That means that the best food software programs contain not only nutritional information, but exercise information. How many calories do you burn with 20 minutes of low intensity cycling? How about 30 minutes of jogging? How does this change with gender, weight or age? When food software includes this kind of information, it allows you to assemble entire fitness programs, or evaluate the strong and weak points of a client’s current fitness practices.

4.       A track record. When you purchase food software, you want to know that you will get ongoing support. You should be able to expect that more ingredients and other data will be added to it as time goes on, and that the software itself is being continually revisited and improved. The best assurance of this is that the software has a long track record. Some of the best food software out there has been in use for decades, and has been continuously revised and expanded with time. 

What else do you look for in food software?

Are GMOs Safe?

A growing debate has been raging across the U.S. and across the world over the question of whether Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are both safe and more productive for our society.  On one side of the argument are people saying the GMO seeds for growing crops, like corn, protect them from pests and allow farmers to spray weed killer that destroys weeds but not the crops.  They also say this is the answer to solving world hunger issues.  However, those on the other side claim these crops are harmful to human health and put all of us at risk because every farmer's crop has the same exact plant which means a disease that crops up could destroy the entire country's harvest of corn cause massive food problems.

As it stands now, Japan, Australia and the entire European Union are just some of the countries which have banned GMOs.  The United States, however, still allows these crops to be grown and used in food products here.  The studies performed on these crops to determine whether they pose a threat to human health have so far come back negative.  It should be noted though, that all of the studies saying there are no negative side effects were conducted by the same companies which manufacture these seeds.  An accurate food database that tracks what each food produced using these GMOs is both necessary and should be published on the container so that customers can be wary.

While many people for GMOs claim it is a good option for farmers the results on the ground are showing quite a few problems with this claim.  First it is proving far from affordable, especially for small to medium sized farms.  The seeds for these GMOs are costly and due to current laws farmers aren't allowed to keeps seeds from the first crop and use them for future planting.  They have to buy new seeds each year.  The farmers then have to buy pesticides and weed killer products the crops are immune to which are also produced by the GMO companies.

After several years of implementation, the farmers who have taken up this model are discovering both insects and weeds resistant to the chemicals being sprayed and which can keep eating the crops.  Therefore, their crops are still suffering damage despite spending large amounts of money on specialized seeds and chemicals.  The purpose of these crops is to make them capable of surviving droughts and other extreme weather conditions, but so far they haven't been shown to be capable of this.  Furthermore, after the introduction of GMOs in 1996, the jump in chronic illnesses leapt from 7% to 13% in 9 years along with suddenly rising number of food allergies, disorders, digestive problems and others.  While insufficient research exists to prove the two are related, the correlation is disturbingly similar.  Educate yourself on GMOs and make the right decision.