I switched from MyFitnessPal to Cronometer for tracking the calories in the food I eat. It’s a good food diary. Need more time using it but I plan to write a happy review on my main blog. A key advantage in Cronometer is its data is accurate. Some technical notes on details of that:
They use carefully vetted data sources. Most food trackers advertise “14 million foods!” but 13.9M of those are wrong or incomplete data. Cronometer has a core database of 30,000 foods from reliable sources. Most of my entries are coming from the NCCDB, a commercial database with an academic connection. Cronometer also has a broader set of data from commercial sources and the user community but these are clearly labelled as less accurate.
A related advantage is Cronometer has pretty good search ranking. When I type “milk” the top 2 results are “whole milk” and “2% milk”, both from the NCCDB. Good authoritative data. I’m finding mostly generics there too, not brand names which are just unnecessary extra choices for staple items.
Cronometer also shows data confidence scores on its summary statistics like how many calories or how much Vitamin C you ate for the day. Most of my scores are 100% or 90%. It’s a pretty broad accuracy number, mostly they’re just accounting for incomplete entries in the database. But it’s a thoughtful touch.
OTOH they also show calories to a ridiculous level of precision. It tells me the 1 tablespoon of butter I put on my toast had 101.72 calories in it, as if I measured that tablespoon to 5 significant digits and butter never varied. It’s weird they don’t just round to the nearest integer. Most of the UI is very good, this is a rare mistake.
Nelson's log 