For years, I’ve used diet as my main health management tool, but the only way I’ve had to gauge how well or poorly I’ve done has been to monitor my own weight, energy levels, and such, and to take advantage of information about blood pressure, cholesterol, iron levels, and such that I get from any blood work my doctors have ordered. Most times, however, its a matter of keeping my ears open for tips on healthy foods, reading, and mucking about with recipes and ingredients to see what trial and error teach me.

Remarkably, its worked well enough for me that I’ve not only been able to avoid having to take medications by correcting imbalances this way, but I’ve also been able to help my BF reduce the medications he’s on and to lose weight. Since this process is so subjective, though, I’ve often wished there were a way to get the same sort of nutritional breakdown of my recipes that one sees on commercially prepared foods, which would better help me to ‘tweak’ my recipes for both  ‘taste’ and ‘purpose’.

Then, my massage therapist blew my little mind by telling me that ‘there’s an app for that’ and, as soon as I had a few minutes to play with, I went looking online.

So far, the best I’ve been able to find has been eaTracker.ca, a site that’s been developed by the Dietitians of Canada (DC) – the ‘national professional association for dietitians’ – to ‘help consumers better understand their eating and activity choices’.

Some of the most attractive features of the site are its simple interface and clear navigation, as well as the lack of need to give a great deal of personal information or to connect it to devices and services I don’t want it connecting to. I also found that, while other sites limited the number of ingredients they’d allow users to input, this site allowed a seemingly limitless number of ‘includes’. While other sites seem to focus mainly on weight loss and caloric content, this site’s recipe analysis provided a much broader range of information to be produced and recorded.

For example, when I entered the information about a borscht I made last weekend, it gave me the ingredient list…

a beefy borscht recipe ingredients

… the ability to add ‘instructions’ (although in this case I used it to add ingredients that weren’t available in the database)…

beefy borscht instructions/add-ins

… and a breakdown of nutritional values…

beefy borscht analysis

Unfortunately, I did find the recipe analyzer interface a little ‘clunky’, the database is limited in the measurement and ingredient options it offers, and it would be nice to have a way to enter ‘notes’ about each recipe (as well as ‘instructions’) but, generally speaking, it was pretty ‘dummy proof’ and gave informative output.

Of course, it’ll take some ‘playing with’ to see how useful it is in the long run, but the important point is that I now have a functional tool that’ll help me judge which ingredients to use for which benefits, and to better understand the affect diet is having on my health.

By the way, if anyone knows of a ‘better’ tool, I’d love to hear about it, and I’m curious about how useful others find the ‘apps’ for mobile phones to be : )