We’re kicking off the summer with our latest update. Here’s what’s new:

1. Track Water Intake

Stay hydrated with the new water logging feature!

2. Pull Data from Apple HealthKit

You can now choose to pull exercise calories and weight data from Apple HealthKit to Track.

3. View Complete Nutrition Info in Your Basket

You can now click into foods in your Basket to view nutrition information for foods before you log them. Just click the grey info icon!

4. iOS Notification Widget

You can now keep a better eye on your daily calorie summary with the new iOS notification widget!

Other new features to get excited about:

• Weekend push reminders.
• Resolved bug impacting offline mode for Android.
• Refined ‘History’ search results.
• Additional bug fixes

What’s cookin’? We’re serving up the following features in our latest update:

1. Create + Share Recipes Faster Than Ever

You can now share the full list of ingredients for your recipes with friends.

2. Create Custom Foods

You can now create a custom food and manually enter the nutrition info.

3. Apple HealthKit Additions

Sync activity and weight data to HealthKit!

Other new features you may have missed:

• View totals for vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron for your foods and in your Daily Summary.
• See a nutrient summary for a closer look at your daily nutrition.
• We’ve improved our barcode and QR code scanning functions and made other bug fixes.

Check out the awesome features we just launched:

1. Meal Buckets

With the new daily view, your food log is categorized by meal or snack type.

+ Navigate between days more easily than ever with the interactive calendar in the Stats tab!

2. Review + Edit Your Recipes

Manage your recipes by selecting “My Recipes” from the side menu.

3. Push Reminders

Activate these notifications to help you stay on track on days you forget to update your food log!

If you liked our SMS reminders, then make sure you activate this new feature in Preferences!

Open the Track app now!

And as always, keep the feedback coming!
We’re all ears at: support@nutritionix.com

Natural Language for Foods

Accept freeform text like “for breakfast i had 2 eggs, bacon, glass of oj and coffee with milk” and our natural API takes care of the rest.  See API Docs.

Autocomplete

Have a single text input form for users to type in the foods they are eating, and our new /v2/instant endpoint takes care of the rest!  See API Docs.

Natural Language for Exercise (beta preview)

Soon it will be easier than ever to track exercises via natural language.  Try a sneak preview of our natural language for exercises endpoint, launching in late Q4 2016.

Read our V2.0 API Docs

However, with the high demand for this popular bakery item, we must ask: how healthy is the average bagel? How many calories are in that bagel from the local bagel shop? How much cream cheese is in the standard schmear?  Does ordering a bagel “scooped” — where part of the inner bread is “scooped” out to cut back on carbs and calories — really make a difference? We took the liberty to find out the answers to these questions for you.

First, we set out to determine how many calories bagels contain. According to the USDA, a standard medium bagel weighs about 105 grams and contains 277 calories. While this size may be the standard, is it the norm?

We weighed packaged bagels by Thomas’ along with bagels from a local grocery store bakery, Starbucks, Panera Bread, and a local bagel bakery to see how they compared. The Thomas’ bagel and the bagels from Starbucks and Panera Bread were pretty on par with a standard medium bagel and hovered around an estimated 260 calories. The bagel from the local grocery store bakery was a bit larger and contained an estimated 310 calories. The far and away largest of the bagel bunch was the bagel from our local bagel shop, clocking in at 180 grams and packing an estimated 475 calories. That’s nearly double the size (and calories) of the bagels from the other stores.

Now on to the cream cheese. The standard serving size for cream cheese is 1 ounce (about 2 tablespoons), which contains around 100 calories. But how much cream cheese are bagel shops actually spreading on that bagel? Starbucks and Panera Bread take the guesswork out of the equation by providing containers of cream cheese on the side. You’ll get 150 calories worth of cream cheese from Starbucks’ 1.5 oz packet and 200 calories worth from Panera Bread’s 2 oz container. Add that on to your 260-calorie bagel and you’re looking at around a 450-calorie breakfast. Not bad.

The local bagel shop was a completely different story. We were shocked to find that our local shop had slathered a whopping 5 ounces (over ½ a cup!) of cream cheese onto our bagel, adding nearly 500 calories to the already oversized bagel. The grand total? A gut busting 975 calories! Not a great way to start the day.

Bottom line: Expect around 400-500 calories in a typical bagel and schmear. If your local shop serves up bigger bagels or really piles on that cream cheese, be careful or you could walk out of there with a 1,000 calorie breakfast. If you want to save calories, follow some of our tips:

• Control the size of your schmear by asking for cream cheese on the side
• Split a bagel with a friend or save half for tomorrow
• Shave about 75 calories off your bagel by ordering it “scooped” or scooping some of the bread out yourself.
• If you are buying bagels from the grocery store, look for “mini” or “flat” bagels that hover around 100 calories each.

Story composed by Nutrition Intern, Zahra Nomni and edited by Manager of Data Quality, Paige Einstein, RD

Through the Track skill, users are able to ask Alexa for nutrition information for over 20K+ foods from the Nutritionix dataset. Use the prompt “ask FoodTracker” to ask Alexa about any of the eleven nutrients supported by the skill, including calories, fat, saturated fat, sodium, cholesterol, carbohydrates, fiber, sugar, protein, potassium, and phosphorous.

Effortless Food Tracking

By enabling the Track skill, you can now use Alexa to add the foods you eat right to your Nutritionix food log. To use the Track skill, just go into the Alexa app, enable the skill, link it to your Nutritionix account, and tell Alexa what you ate for effortless food tracking:

“Our mission is to make it easier for people to understand what they eat. Through the launch of our Amazon Alexa skill, we are excited to enable millions of Amazon Alexa users to better understand and keep track of the foods they eat every day,” said Matt Silverman, Director of Product, Nutritionix.

Even if you don’t own an Alexa-enabled device, you can still track your food using the Track app. Developed by a team of registered dietitians and engineers, Track’s natural language technology makes it the easiest and fastest way to track what you eat to help you meet your calorie goals. Just speak or type freely into the Track app, and Track does the rest of the work for you!

Nutritionix Track also has plans to support syncing your food logs to major fitness trackers, with Fitbit currently being supported.

Multitasking Your Way to Better Health

The Track skill also brings more opportunity for Alexa to take on a larger role in the kitchen. Now you can get a broader set of nutrition facts for ingredients you’re working with or adding a meal to your food log, all without having to pause during meal prep!

“We’re thrilled to work with Nutritionix to launch the Nutritionix Alexa skill, providing an even larger nutrition and food database to our customers,” said Rob Pulciani, Director of Amazon Alexa. “The Nutritionix skill is a great example of how Alexa can make multitasking easier for customers. It’s more convenient to track your daily food and nutrition when you can use your voice. Alexa now has more nutritional data, so Alexa customers are better equipped than ever tackle their health and fitness goals—just using their voice.”

Effortlessly start tracking your food today by enabling the new Alexa skill here or search the Alexa app for “Track by Nutritionix”.  To make it even easier, don’t forget to download the Nutritionix app as the perfect companion to your Alexa skill: www.nutritionix.com/app.

Smart Search Results

The search results on Nutritionix.com now let you simultaneously browse results from our database of 600K+ foods, and specific calculations of common foods like “1lb cheeseburger“, “2 cups mashed potatoes,” or even “100g cheddar cheese.”

Our supported measures include cup, oz, tbsp, tsp, g, lb, shot, and much more!

Developers: Natural Language API

We are now accepting signups to the wait list for the Nutritionix natural language API.  Our API empowers developers to include our state-of-the-art natural language parsing capability in any mobile device or internet of things (ioT) applications.

Want to get an idea of what our natural language API can do?  Try out our natural demo page.

Sign up to the natural API waitlist, or read more on our existing Nutrition API.

Developers: Automatic detection of food consumption time in Natural API

Our natural API can even detect the time and day a food was consumed.  Try this example query: “yesterday for breakfast i had 2 eggs, 2 slices bacon a glass of orange juice and coffee with milk”

Sign up to the natural API waitlist, or read more on our existing Nutrition API.

Dietary Guidelines: What’s New, and What’s Not

The guidelines are comprised of nutrition and health recommendations based on evidence-based scientific data. According to the USDA, the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines focus more on overall eating patterns such as consuming a variable, nutrient-dense diet filled with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins, and less on specific nutrients. However, they do provide specific guidelines on three dietary components: salt, sugar, and fat.

The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines recommendations for salt and saturated fat have remained the same as the 2010 edition: less than 2,300 mg per day of sodium (salt), and less than 10% of your total calories per day from saturated fat. For a 2,000 calorie diet, that means no more than 20 grams of saturated fat per day.

So What About Sugar?

This edition of the Dietary Guidelines added something new—specific recommendations for added sugar. The new recommendation is to limit intake of added sugar (any sugar that is not naturally occurring from milk or fruit) to less than 10% of your total caloric intake.  On a 2,000 calories per day diet, that means no more than 50 grams of added sugar. That’s about what you would get in one 16 fl oz bottle of soda.

Take Control of Your Health!

With the recent release of the Dietary Guidelines, now is the time to take control of your health, and Nutritionix is here to help. We have free tools easily accessible from your smartphone or computer that will allow you to keep track of the foods you eat, calculate your caloric intake, and even look at what others are eating by following @Nutritionix on Twitter.

For more information and a full report on the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans,  visit http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/

With this new integration, millions of consumers now have instantaneous access to restaurant nutrition information through Google Search on desktop and mobile devices.

Additionally, you can tap on any of the menu items within the Knowledge Graph to see a full nutrition fact panel for that item.

To learn more about Google’s Knowledge graph, check out this blog post.

Restaurant and Food Brand Owners

If you are a restaurant or food brand representative and want to get more information about keeping your information up-to-date with Nutritionix, please contact us at enterprise@nutritionix.com.

About Nutritionix

Nutritionix is home to the largest verified nutrition database in the world, with over 500,000 food items including:

• 370K Grocery Items with UPCs/GTINs from the US and Canada
• 100K Restaurant items from 600+ US restaurant chains
• 10K common food dishes maintained by our dietitian team

Nutritionix provides nutrition data to many of the top health and fitness apps.  For more information about integration with Nutritionix data, please check out the Nutritionix API.