The FDA released a 395 page document listing all of the regulations for menu labeling.  The Nutritionix Expert Nutrition Policy Team has spent the last 36 hours studying the document to create the most extensive summary of the regulations.

If you have specific questions on how the regulations will affect your concept, please submit your question in the form below and one of our Nutrition Policy Experts will reach out with a personalized response.

Date to Comply and Enforcement

• Must comply by December 1st, 2015
• Enforcement rules have not yet been established however the FDA ensures that they will be set prior to the date of compliance.

Who Must Comply?

• Restaurants and Similar Retail Food Establishments that are part of a chain with 20 or more locations, doing business under the same name, and offering substantially the same menu items
  • Those not covered under this description can register with the FDA every other year to become subject to these regulations
• Bakeries
• Cafeterias
• Coffee Shops
• Convenience Stores
• Delicatessens
• Food Service Facilities within Entertainment Venues, such as:
  • Amusement Parks
  • Bowling Alleys
  • Movie Theaters
• Food Service Vendors, such as
  • Ice Cream Shops
  • Mall Cookie Counters
• Food Take-Out & Delivery
• Grocery Stores
• Retail Confectionery Stores
• Superstores
• Quick Service Restaurants
• Full Service Restaurants

Defining Menu/Menu Board

• Menu or Menu Board: “Primary writing of the restaurant or similar retail food establishment from which a customer makes an order selection, including, but not limited to, breakfast, lunch and dinner menus, dessert menus, beverage menus, children’s menu’s, other specialty menus, electronic menus and menus on the Internet.“
• Menu mailed as a flyer to a customer’s home could be considered “primary writing” from which the customer will make an order selection

How to Format the Calories

• Calories must be listed adjacent to the name/price of the associated standard menu item
• Rounding
  • Calories declared to the nearest 5-calorie increment up to 50, and 10-calorie increment above 50
  • Amount <5 calories can be expressed at 0
• Word choice
  • The word “Calories” or “Cal” must appear at the top of a column or next to each calorie amount
• Color/font
  • When displaying “Calories” or “Cal” above calories in a column
    • Font can be no smaller than the name of the item or price, whichever is smaller
    • The color and the font must be the same or at least as conspicuous as the standard menu item name and have the same contrasting background
  • When displaying “Calories” or “Cal” next to each calorie amount
    • Font must be the same size as the number of calories
    • The color must be the same and have the same contrasting background as the number of calories

Required Statements

• All menus and menu boards must include the Succinct Calorie Intake Statement & Availability Statement
• Succinct Calorie Intake Statement: “2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice, but calorie needs vary”
  • To appear at the bottom of each menu page immediately above availability statement
  • In font no smaller than smallest calorie declaration and in a color as conspicuous as the calorie declaration
• Availability Statement: “Additional nutrition information available upon request.”
  • To appear at bottom of first page with menu items and on every menu page
  • In font no smaller than smallest calorie declaration and in a color as conspicuous as the calorie declaration

Complete Nutrition Available On-Site

• Must be available in written form on the premises of the restaurant to provide to customer upon request
• Flexibility to use different types of media – flyers, posters, booklets, kiosks, computer
  • An example of how to display information on-site:

Required Written Nutrients

• Complete written nutrition information must be available on the premises of each location and provided to customers upon request
• Nutrient required includes:
  • Total Calories
  • Fat Calories
  • Total Fat
  • Saturated Fat
  • Trans Fat
  • Cholesterol
  • Sodium
  • Total Carbohydrate
  • Dietary Fiber
  • Sugars
  • Protein
• Vitamins and minerals are optional
• When changes to recipes are made, nutrition information must be updated prior to launch onsite
• Information must be provided for each variable menu item (see definition below) separately

Where To Get Nutrition Information

• Nutrient Databases
• Laboratory Analytical Testing
• Cookbooks
• Be able to provide FDA with substantiating nutrient values upon request
• Must have employee sign document verifying that all nutrition information is correct

Variable Items, Combos & Toppings

• Variable Menu Item definition – “A standard menu item that comes in different flavors, varieties, or combinations, and is listed as a single menu item.”
• Flavors
  • Calories must be listed separately for items that come in different flavors (e.g., different flavors of ice cream, soft drinks, donuts, dips, chicken grilled or fried)
  • If all flavors are not listed on menu such as “soft drinks” the calories must be listed with a slash if 2 flavors (e.g., “200/250″) or a range if more than 2 flavors (e.g., “100-350″)
  • If the variety is only for a particular part of a menu item (for example: sandwich with a choice between multiple cheeses) calories can be displayed with a slash for 2 options and range for more than 2 options
• Combos
  • Do not have to declare calories separately when mixing and matching standard menu items for a special price (e.g., pick 2) if standard menu items are already on menu
  • If only 2 options are available for an item (e.g., sandwich with fries or with fruit) provide calories for both options with forward slash between
  • If combination meal offers increased/decreased sizes, must declare meal options’ calories with a slash for two options and range for more
• Toppings
  • If toppings can be added to a menu item, the calories for the basic preparation of the menu item as well as the calories for each topping must be declared separately
  • When the portion size of a topping decreases as more toppings are added, calories for the topping may be represented as the calories for the topping amount used in the single topping menu item with a specification that the calorie declaration is for a single topping menu item
• Sizes
  • For items with different sizes, calories for basic preparation of each size and toppings calories for each size must be displayed

Foods on Display & Self-Service

• Food on Display definition: “restaurant or restaurant-type food that is visible to the customer before the customer makes a selection, so long as there is not an ordinary expectation of further preparation by the consumer before consumption.”
• Self-Service Food definition: available at a salad bar, buffet line, cafeteria line or where the customer serves themselves
• Calories can be posted to these foods by being accompanied with signs in the following ways:
  • An individual sign adjacent to the food that provides calories per serving
  • A sign attached to a sneeze guard above each specific menu item
    • The sign must be clearly associated with the corresponding food item
  • A single sign or place card that lists the name and calorie declaration for multiple items
    • Customer must be able to view this posting as they are making menu selections
• For self-service soft drinks, the declaration of calories must be based on full volume of the cup (without ice) and description of cup size
• A packaged food on display that already has a Nutrition Facts label is sufficient

Alcohol

• Alcoholic beverages that are standard menu items (e.g., listed on the menu) are required to have calories on the menu and complete written nutrition information materials
• Alcoholic beverages that are ordered by customers at the bar but are not listed on the menu are exempt
• The USDA nutrition database is an acceptable source for obtaining information on nutrition content of alcohol
• Alcohol used to make mixed drinks or alcohol that is on display behind a bar is exempt (e.g., bottles of spirits used to make alcoholic beverage menu items that are not menu items individually)

Pizza

• Variable menu item (see above definition)
• Custom order definition: a food order that is prepared in a specific manner based on an individual consumer’s request, which requires the covered establishment to deviate from its usual preparation of a menu item. Calorie declaration is not necessary for these items.
  • Example: “Meat Lover’s” pizza containing ground meat and sausage as a standard menu item, and a customer orders a “Meat Lover’s” pizza without sausage, would make that order a custom order.
• Toppings
  • Calories must be separately declared for each topping listed on the menu or menu board
  • The menu or menu board must specify that the calories are added to the calories contained in the basic preparation of the menu item
  • Can use a range for each topping to represent the added calories across various sizes of the menu item
  • Can group toppings that have the same calorie amounts
    • after rounding as described under the formatting section
    • Must specify that the calorie declaration represents the calorie amount for each individual topping
  • If the general term, “toppings” is used on a menu or menu board, but the individual toppings are not listed
    • Calories must be declared for each option with a slash between the two calorie declarations where only two options are available (e.g., “150/250 calories”) or as a range where more than two options are available (e.g., “100-250 calories”).
• Topping quantities vary by size
  • Specify calories for:
    • Basic preparation of the menu item for each size
    • Calories for each topping listed on the menu or menu board. Calories must either be:
      • declared separately for each size of the menu item
      • declared using a slash between the two calorie declarations for each topping where only two sizes of the menu item are available (e.g., “adds 150/250 cal”) or as a range for each topping where more than two sizes of the menu item are available (e.g., “adds 100-250 cal”)

Danielle Colley, MS, RD
Director, Nutrition
fda@nutritionix.com

About Nutritionix:
Nutritionix is the world’s leading provider of interactive nutrition tools for restaurant chains.  Our web-based management platform allows restaurants to instantly publish nutrition data to the web, mobile web, and digital menu boards. Nutritionix offers menu labeling consulting services to ensure your brand stays compliant.  For more information, contact us via email at fda@nutritionix.com.

Summary

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Nutritionix 2.0 API Beta.  The beta period will last through February 2015.  We encourage you to submit feedback about the beta to api@nutritionix.com.

Top 5 New Features in API 2.0

1.  Autocomplete

Our new autocomplete endpoint returns a clean list of commonly searched foods.  You can try a demo of autocomplete on the main search bar at nutritionix.com or in our iOS app.  Read the API 2.0 Autocomplete documentation.

2.  “Natural” endpoint

We now support natural language processing!   Send a query like “1 cup orange juice” or “100 cal yogurt” and our API returns the full array USDA nutrients for your requested measurement.  This opens the doors to a wide array of smart nutrition apps, including voice recognition and more.  Read the API 2.0 Natural Endpoint documentation.

3.  Recipe Building

Using our natural endpoint, you can send up to 20 ingredients at a time to get a sum of all of the nutrients for a particular recipe.  See our documentation on how to build recipes.

4. Exact Match

Instead of only displaying search results for a user’s food query, our NutritionLink(tm) algorithm now estimates the exact portion size a user may be looking for.  This can drastically improve the user experience when adding foods to a food journal.  Check out the documentation in our API 2.0 Search Endpoint.

5.  Common International Dishes Curated by Registered Dietitians

Our in-house registered dietitian team has been hard at work building recipes for over 1,000 common food dishes from around the world.  Better yet, each dish is built with USDA SR27 nutrient data, which means every common dish has over 40 micronutrients available.  Want to know how much phosphorus is in 1 cup of shepherd’s pie?  No problem!

Ready to get started?  Head on over to the v2.0 beta documentation.

About Nutritionix

The Nutritionix API is already used by thousands of developers across the world in diet, fitness, and healthcare apps.  Here are some exciting stats about our API:

• Nutritionix database includes over 400,000 unique foods with nutrition facts
• 260K+ grocery barcodes linked to nutrition info
• 220K+ ingredient statements linked to barcodes
• Adding over 3K new grocery foods to the API every month
• Serving over 3 Million API requests every month

The Nutritionix database powers many of the worlds best health and fitness tracking apps. With our nutrition data being accessed by millions of users every month, we have a unique insight into what foods are trending amongst health-conscious consumers.

In 2014, users in our developer network scanned over 15 million barcodes into the Nutritionix API.   Here are some of the interesting category leaders of 2014:

Top Scanned Cheese Product:

Laughing Cow – Creamy Swiss, Light
Serving: 1 Wedge, 35 cal, 1.5g fat, 2g protein

Top Scanned Greek Yogurt:

Chobani – Greek Yogurt, Strawberry on the Bottom, Non-Fat
Serving: 1 Container, 120 cal, 0g fat, 12g protein

Top Scanned Tortilla Wrap:

Mission – Carb Balance Flour Tortilla, Soft Taco
Serving: 1 tortilla, 120 cal, 3g fat, 19g carb, 13g fiber, 5g protein

Top Scanned Popcorn:

Skinny Pop – 100 Cal Popcorn
Serving: 1 package, 100 cal, 9g carbs, 2g protein

Top Scanned Fiber Bar:

Fiber One – Oats & Chocolate Chewy Bar
Serving: 1 Bar, 140 cal, 9g fiber

Top Scanned Non-Dairy Milk:

Silk – PureAlmond Unsweetened Almond Milk, Vanilla
Serving: 1 cup, 30 cal, <1g carb

Top Scanned Low Calorie Bread:

Arnold – Sandwich Thins, Multi-Grain
Serving: 1 roll, 100 cal, 5g fiber, 4g protein

Top Scanned Frozen Meal

Smart Ones – Three Cheese Ziti Marinara
Serving: 1 package, 300 cal, 8g fat, 14g protein

About Nutritionix

Nutritionix maintains the largest database of restaurant and grocery nutrition information, with over 400K foods.  Over 5M health-conscious consumers rely on Nutritionix data every month to better understand what they are eating.

To learn more about our business solutions for food brands and health apps, please contact us at enterprise@nutritionix.com.

We are thrilled to announce that the Nutritionix restaurant database now integrates with Google’s Knowledge Graph.  To see it in action, search in Google for your favorite restaurant’s name, followed by the keyword word “nutrition”.

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.

With more than two-thirds (68%) of Americans overweight or obese, chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension have been on the rise. In an effort to improve the health of Americans, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture work together to update the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years. The new 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines were recently released with some surprising new recommendations. Read on to learn more!

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/

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.

Amazon Alexa now works with Track by Nutritionix, a cutting edge food tracking application, to provide nutrition information for thousands of common foods. The new Alexa skill combines the power of the comprehensive Nutritionix database with the accessibility of Alexa on Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap or Amazon Fire TV, to make it easier than ever to navigate daily food choices.

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.

Americans love bagels. In fact, according to a study by Packaged Facts, over 61% of Americans eat them. With varieties like asiago, jalapeno cheddar, pumpernickel and French toast, and toppings ranging from blueberry cream cheese, to smoked salmon, to almond butter or even pizza, it’s no wonder they’re a staple.

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

Our v2.0 API continues our mission of making it as easy as possible for people to understand and track what they eat.  Check out our major updates:

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

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.

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

We are thrilled to announce that the Nutritionix restaurant database now integrates with Google’s Knowledge Graph.  To see it in action, search in Google for your favorite restaurant’s name, followed by the keyword word “nutrition”.

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.

With more than two-thirds (68%) of Americans overweight or obese, chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension have been on the rise. In an effort to improve the health of Americans, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture work together to update the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years. The new 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines were recently released with some surprising new recommendations. Read on to learn more!

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/

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.

Amazon Alexa now works with Track by Nutritionix, a cutting edge food tracking application, to provide nutrition information for thousands of common foods. The new Alexa skill combines the power of the comprehensive Nutritionix database with the accessibility of Alexa on Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap or Amazon Fire TV, to make it easier than ever to navigate daily food choices.

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.

Americans love bagels. In fact, according to a study by Packaged Facts, over 61% of Americans eat them. With varieties like asiago, jalapeno cheddar, pumpernickel and French toast, and toppings ranging from blueberry cream cheese, to smoked salmon, to almond butter or even pizza, it’s no wonder they’re a staple.

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

Our v2.0 API continues our mission of making it as easy as possible for people to understand and track what they eat.  Check out our major updates:

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