If you have ever wanted to eat healthier and have a more balanced diet, you might know the struggle of trying to find an online nutrition calculator. There are so many options out there for calculators that all do similar things: track the calories and macronutrients in the food you eat.
The 5 Best Nutrition Calculators Online are:
Nutrition calculators are an important tool for anyone wanting to track their food intake. We have collected a list of the five best online nutrition calculators that track the calories and macronutrients in your food in a simple way to help you set and meet your health goals. Keep reading to learn more about online nutrition calculators as well as our top five recommendations!
Article Topics
What does a nutrition calculator do?
Anyone who is serious about healthy eating will keep track of their nutrition, whether they are trying to:
- Lose weight
- Train for an athletic event
- Improve their diet
You can keep track of your food intake by looking at, and keeping track of, the nutrition label on most foods or looking up nutrition information for foods that don’t have labels like produce.
You can use this information about your food to make sure you have a balanced diet. Some people prefer to use a pen and paper to track this information, but that can get confusing and takes a lot of work. Online nutrition calculators make food tracking easy and store the information in an account so that you can see trends or look back at previous recipes.
The 5 Best Online Nutrition Calculators
We have searched for the five best online nutrition calculators out there. We have compiled this list based on the features and ease of use. We will go through each calculator in some detail so that you can make an informed decision about which calculator you want to use.
1. Precision Nutrition
The Precision Nutrition calculator is a great tool for keeping track of your nutrition. This calculator keeps track of your calories, macros, and portions to help you meet your goals. When you set up your account, you set a goal to help the tool determine your nutritional needs. You can choose:
- Lose weight
- Build muscle
- Athletic performance
- Body recomposition
- Improve health
You will also set a timeline for your goal, set your eating style preferences, the number of meals you typically eat in a day, your activity levels. In the end, the tool will calculate how many calories you need per day as well as a guide for portion sizes based on your macro needs
2. MyFitnessPal
This tool is a popular option for tracking your nutritional needs. MyFitnessPal offers a food database that you can access without an account to see the calorie and macro information for a ton of different foods. When you make an account, you can set a weight or a macro goal. This will then be used to estimate how many calories and macros you need per day.
Once you have an account, you can start tracking your daily food intake in your “diary.” This is also where you can input and save:
- Frequent foods
- Recipes
- Physical activity
This platform also has an app for your phone, that is easy to use. It comes with a scanner as well so that you can quickly scan food labels to find and import the nutritional information.
3. Lose It!
Lose It! is the platform that is most like MyFitnessPal. This platform has all the same features as MyFitnessPal plus some. Some of the extra features include:
- Quickly add food if you know the nutritional information already without having to look up a pre-established entry on the site
- When adding food from a restaurant, you can search for restaurants by location to find the one nearest to you
- Take a picture of a food, and the app will try to guess the nutritional information
While Lose It! has a few more features than MyFitnessPal, it does not have as much connectivity. With either app, you can connect scales, other apps, and fitness trackers to the app to seamlessly track physical activity or weight. While both apps have these options, MyFitnessPal has more that can be connected.
If you like the sound of either MyFitnessPal or Lose It!, you might want to try both platforms to see which you prefer. Both are great online nutrition calculators.
4. VeryWellFit
VeryWellFit is a popular recipe website that focuses on healthy eating and offers recipes that meet various diets’ requirements. The site also has a feature for calculating the nutrition of your recipes. The tool is called the Recipe Nutrition Calculator.
This calculator is simpler than some of the other online nutrition calculators out there. It is perfect for anyone who cooks a lot or might not be as tech-savvy. This calculator does not give you personalized nutrition recommendations or goals, but it also doesn’t require an account.
To use the tool, just follow these steps:
- Enter your recipe name (so you download and save the information for later)
- Enter the recipe ingredients
- Select the number of servings in the recipe
- Optionally, you can also select the serving size
- Click “Analyze Recipe”
- Access the nutrition label for your custom recipe!
This calculator is great because even though VeryWellFit’s recipes already have nutrition information, this calculator allows you to tweak their recipe or use a completely different recipe and still know the nutritional information.
5. HappyForks
HappyForks is a site that is like both MyFitnessPal and the VeryWellFit recipe calculator. To use all the features of the site, you will need to create a free account. The site has a recipe analyzer that is like the VeryWellFit calculator, but it also has a food diary like MyFitnessPal.
The recipe analyzer is simpler to use than the MyFitnessPal recipe tracker, but it doesn’t track exercise. This site tracks calories and macronutrient information to help you create a healthy and balanced diet without the more complicated features of some platforms available.
How to calculate the nutritional value of food
Food’s nutritional value is calculated by looking at the nutrition labels on the food packaging to determine the calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fat content.
Protein, carbohydrates, and fat are also known as macronutrients. Generally, you want to have a balance between all three macronutrients, or “macros,” to have a healthy diet and meet your nutritional goals.
Each person will have different macronutrient goals depending on their reason for tracking nutrition in the first place. Online nutrition calculators can help you set your goals and track your food to help you meet them.
Why use a nutrition calculator?
There are so many reasons to use a nutrition calculator, specifically an online one. With all of the features available with most of today’s nutrition calculators, you can easily track any food wherever you are, whether you made it yourself or ordered it at a restaurant.
You can always know just how many calories and macros you need to meet your nutritional goals too. Online nutrition calculators make healthy eating simple and easy. Keeping track of nutrients in food might just be the ultimate guide to brain health nutrition.
Set goals
When you are just starting to learn about healthy eating, you might not know how many calories you need or what kind of balance of macronutrients is best for you. Many online nutrition calculators will tell you how many calories and macros you need each day based on some basic information like your:
- Age
- Weight
- General level of physical activity
- Weekly exercise routine
Once you know what you need to do to meet your goals, you can use the platforms to keep track of your food intake and stick to a diet that fits your needs.
Keep track of recipes
Most online nutrition calculators have a feature for creating and saving recipes. With this feature, you can easily save your frequent recipes and quickly add them to your calculator when you eat that meal again. This prevents you from having to individually add each ingredient to the calculator every time you make a meal.
Without this feature, it would be tedious work to add individual ingredients to your nutrition calculator. This might cause many people to either stop tracking their nutrition information or start eating simpler, processed, or pre-packaged foods, so they don’t have to deal with complicated tracking.
Find information for restaurant food
It can be difficult to guess how many calories are in a meal at a restaurant. Sure, you could make a guess, but you could be 1,000 calories off and never know it. This can really throw people off when they are trying to track everything that they eat.
Thankfully, many online nutrition calculators have nutritional information for restaurant food in their databases so that you can simply add it to your account when you go out to eat. Of course, you will mostly find chain restaurant information on these sites. It is not likely that you will find nutrition information for the local diner, but this feature is definitely helpful.
Without restaurant meal information, many people might just give up on trying to eat healthy when they go out. This can severely derail someone who is trying to have a balanced healthy diet.
Consider physical activity
Many online nutrition calculators also have a feature for tracking physical activity and then adjusting your caloric needs based on that. For example, if one day you sit at your desk working all day, you will need fewer calories than on a day that you run five miles.
By simply adding the physical activity information to your online calculator, you can automatically see how your calorie and macro needs fluctuate from day to day for optimal nutrition.
Easily track from anywhere
Lastly, one of the best reasons to use an online nutrition calculator is convenience. Many of these calculators also have apps that you can keep on your phone to easily track your food on the go. Even if your favorite nutrition calculator doesn’t have an app, you will be able to access it from your smartphone directly from the browser.
By using an online tool for keeping track of your nutrition, you guarantee that you will always have access to it and will be able to conveniently track your food.
Wrapping Things Up
Ultimately, there are tons of choices available for a nutrition calculator that meets your needs. Whether you want one that has all of the built-in features and connected apps, or a simple website where you can find the nutrition information for your recipe, you will be able to find an online nutrition calculator for you.
We hope that this article has helped you decide which online nutrition calculator is best for you so that you can start to work toward your health goals.
