Improving your health, getting fit and losing weight never fail to top the list of New Year’s resolutions. All three are easy to do if you are willing to keep a food diary — which isn’t easy to do.
It’s a pain to record each morsel that passes your lips. Some fitness programs make you type in foods by name. They then log the nutritional data for you, but the Daily Burn Food Scanner app takes it a step further.
The iPhone app, on sale for 99 cents through Jan. 12, reads the bar code on food packages and enters the nutritional data into your food diary using the same reliable bar code scanning technology as the popular shopping app Red Laser.
Daily Burn’s weakness is the number of foods in the database. Although there are more than 250,000, it does better on big brand products than store brands, and there is currently no way to scan a banana. The company counts on users to voluntarily enter information for missing foods to expand the database.
The program syncs with the Daily Burn Web site which also tracks exercise and provides workout plans. A separate free app, Daily Burn Calorie, Workout and Weight Tracker, is needed if you want to log workouts and monitor your progress.