I’m a big advocate of having a food scale in your kitchen. Our ability to estimate how much we are eating tends to be terrible and I find my estimated size of a serving is inversely proportional to how hungry I am). So if you want to eat the right serving sizes, the only way forward is to actually weigh your food.
The NutriCrystal Wireless Smart Food Scale takes this to the next level. Not only can you weigh your food, but you can wirelessly connect it to your Droid/iPhone to actually get a read out on the nutritional value of what you’re eating.
This scale would be a dream for calorie or carb-counting dieters, diabetics or athletes. Thank goodness, I am none of those things at the moment, so I’m happy with just knowing the serving sizes. Still, this is a pretty cool functionality. First you get the app on your phone and set up a bluetooth link to the scale. Then you simply put the item on the scale and enter on your phone what it is, and you get a read out with full nutritional information.
So here are the pros and cons of this new tool:
Pros:
- Very cool ability to link to your phone (which is where we keep all of our most important info these days, right?) so you can keep track of your diet over the course of time and access it anywhere.
- Helpful for calorie counting or even just figuring out how good or bad something is for us.
- Sleek looking and comes in a variety of colors, so you won’t mind having it on your kitchen counter.
- Even if you’re not interested in nutritional values, being able to weight your food is super helpful in getting portion sizes right or making sure you have the right amount of an ingredient when precision matters, such as in baking.
- A cool potential application for this is if you’re creating your own recipes to share, this would be a great way to offer nutritional information.
- I don’t like that you have to press a button on the back of the scale to switch units of measurement. It’s a pain to flip it over, and mine seems to keep defaulting back to ml, so I have to do it over and over. You can change the unit on your phone more easily, but what about when I just want to weigh something quickly and not mess with the app?
- Like all new technologies there are some growing pains with the app. Expect this to get better with time.
At $69.95, this scale is priced a bit high for someone who just wants to know weights, but it seems reasonable if you need help gathering full nutritional information. Buy yours here.