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?
