A "smart" food scale weighs in on your diet

An interesting item crossed my desk this week. (Well, actually, it crossed my kitchen counter.) It's a food scale that does much more than just weigh your food. It can also tell you the exact amount of calories, fat, and ten other nutrients that serving contains.  It will also store and tally the values for everything you eat over the course of an entire day. 

Because so many NutritionData users use our site to track and analyze their diets, I thought this might well be a product that you'd be interested in, so I gave it a thorough test-drive. All in all, I was impressed.

Most (American) home cooks do not use a food scale. That's why most recipes include measurements in volume (1 cup of flour) rather than weight (100 grams of flour).  But keeping a scale handy in the kitchen has many advantages.  It's helpful for determining cooking times for meats. (How many times have you had to dig through the trash for the wrapper to see how much the chicken weighed?) It's also useful for measuring foods such as nuts, pasta and whole fruits and vegetables. For bakers, weighing dry ingredients is more accurate and produces more consistent results.

Learning to recognize and estimate portion sizes

Many dieters find it helpful to weigh their food--at least for a while. The idea is not to go through life weighing every thing you put in your mouth. That's not realistic. (We don't need people whipping out their portable scales at the salad bar!)  But because our ideas about "normal" portion sizes have been so corrupted by the servings offered in restaurants, it can be a helpful reality check to spend a day or two learning what an ounce of cheese or three ounces of chicken actually looks like.

What I liked

As a food scale, the Eat Smart scale works beautifully (a substantial upgrade from the rickety postal-style scale I've been using). It weighs up to 3 kilograms (about 6 1/2 pounds) of food in either ounces or grams. But it's the nutrient analysis thing that sets it apart.  Once you place the food on the scale, you can also enter in a 3-digit code that identifies the food. (Codes for 999 common foods are listed in an accompanying booklet.)

The scale will then tell you the exact number of calories, carbs, fiber, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, protein, and vitamin K found in that serving of food.   You can keep a running total of your intake of these nutrients by saving each food into the scale's memory.  Obviously, if you are interested in tracking nutrients other than these 12, the scale won't help with that. (For that, you have ND!) But I could see the value of this for someone who is trying to keep track of their fiber intake, or to get a sense of how much saturated fat they are actually consuming, or whether their sodium/potassium ratio is on target, or whether they are getting enough calcium. 

It's interesting that they chose to track vitamin K, as well. As discussed in this previous post, people taking blood-thinning agents have to be sure that they get about the same amount of vitamin K each day. To make it easier, most doctors just tell you to avoid foods that are high in vitamin K, but that takes a whole lot of healthy foods off the table. Tracking your vitamin K would allow you to get the health benefits of broccoli, kale, and other vitamin K-rich foods without messing up your medication dosage.

What I didn't like

For foods that are not in the pre-programmed database, you can punch in the information for a standard serving from the nutrition facts label and the scale will calculate the appropriate values for the amount on the scale.  But, unfortunately, you can't save these foods to your running total, nor can you save them into the database for future use. You have to enter them again every time. 

So for tracking your ongoing intake, you are limited to the 999 pre-programmed foods, mostly whole foods like fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, dairy, some generic grocery items like yogurt with fruit or whole grain bread, and several beverages.  Now, if I had been the one to pick which 999 foods got pre-programmed, I probably would have eliminated things like raw meats (which we generally don't consume) and spices (which contribute negligible amounts of these nutrients) and included instead more basic packaged foods, such as common cereals. But I'm picking nits.  It's still a pretty cool gizmo.

The scale markets for $75, only about $15 more than you'd pay for a regular kitchen scale of the same quality. Interestingly, although I've never seen this type of gadget before last week, I just saw a similar model this morning a chef's catalog, retailing for about $100.  It appears as if the Salter model has more pre-stored foods and allows you to store your custom foods (big plus), but it tracks fewer nutrients (no potassium, magnesium, calcium, or vitamin K).

You can check out the EatSmart scale at their website (www.eatsmartproducts.com).  The Salter scale is available at SurLaTable.com.

What do you think? Would a scale that also tracks the nutritional content of your diet be helpful to you? Add your comments below.