Food Allergies vs Intolerances
Recent estimates suggest that 3.6% of Americans, or approximately 1 in 25 adults, live with a food allergy or intolerance (1). However, intolerance and allergy are not interchangeable terms for the same condition; rather, they represent two distinct conditions that involve separate systems of the body. Read on to find out more about what distinguishes […]
3 Steps to Mindful Eating
When clients work with me, they expect to talk about their food choices and answer questions like: How many fruits and vegetables do you eat per day? How often do you eat at restaurants in a week? Are your food choices processed or unprocessed? And so on. However, what many people don’t expect is to […]
Managing IBS with FODMAPs
Understanding IBS Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a functional gastrointestinal disorder afflicting between 10-15% of the U.S. adult population (1). There are no specific tests for IBS, so a diagnosis is made using the Rome IV Diagnostic Criteria (2): Recurrent abdominal pain (on average, at least 1 day/week in past 3 months) associated with two […]
Unsafe in Any Size Glass? A New Study on Worldwide Alcohol Consumption
A study published in August in The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, surveyed data from 195 countries on alcohol consumption and health risks, and concluded that “The level of alcohol consumption that minimized harm across health outcomes was zero standard drinks per week.” For those of us who are concerned enough […]
Is Breakfast Really the Most Important Meal of the Day?
Most of us have grown up hearing the old adage that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and health experts have been warning for years that skipping breakfast can lead to weight gain. Yet, with the popularity of intermittent fasting on the rise, the authenticity of this piece of nutrition advice has […]
Why Do We Lie to Our Cronometer?
It’s happened again. I lied to my Cronometer. Well, I didn’t entirely lie. I just didn’t tell it the whole truth. I started out the day with good intentions (don’t we all?). I entered my morning weight in my Cronometer. I had a plan to eat my usual breakfast, which requires just a few minutes of […]
How much fruit is too much?
Regardless of the type of diet followed, pretty much everyone can agree that eating vegetables is a good idea. However, when it comes to fruit, there is a much louder, contentious debate going on. On one hand, you have the keto folks arguing that the sugar in fruit will cause spikes in blood glucose and […]
2018 – The Year of Low Carb
Interview with Dr. Richard Feinman, Professor of Cell Biology, Richard Feinman, PhD, is a cell biologist who is widely credited with doing some of the first serious scientific research on the Atkins Diet. His career has spanned decades as low fat diets waxed and waned in public health recommendations. While he emphasizes not being an […]
Fighting Inflammation with Food
‘Inflammation’ is a commonly cited, yet poorly understood, condition that is often used as a “catch-all” diagnosis by both the wellness and medical community to explain non-specific symptoms like aches, pain, fatigue, and stress. In addition, inflammation seems to be linked to an increasing number of diseases, ranging from metabolic syndrome to type 2 diabetes. […]
Interview with Tom Horvath on Food, Addiction, Cravings and Being Human
Tom Horvath, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who has led the way in creating and implementing science-based approaches to helping people overcome addictions of all kinds. He was one of the founders and President for 20 years of SMART (Self-Management and Recovery Training) Recovery, an international recovery group that uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Rational […]
What is the Glycemic Index?
Although it may seem like diet trends are constantly changing, the reality is that most popular diets are simply iterations of the low-carb, low-fat, or low-calorie diets that came before them. And while all these diets can work (at least in the short-term), the restriction and deprivation typically required often makes them unsustainable in the […]
How to Stop Nighttime Snacking
If you struggle with ‘nighttime snacking’, ‘nighttime noshing’ or the ‘midnight munchies’, you’re not alone. In fact, this annoying little habit is by far the most common dietary complaint I hear in my nutrition practice. When I ask clients the 5 W’s of their snacking situation, the answers I usually receive are: chips; after supper; […]
How to Find Credible Nutrition Information
In this further guest posting from Susan MacFarlane, RD, we discuss finding credible nutrition information. Nowadays, everyone seems to be an expert when it comes to nutrition advice: “Eat breakfast! Don’t eat until 12 pm!”; “Avoid carbs, they will make you fat! Fat makes you fat!”; “Only buy organic! Organic is a myth!” On top […]
The Golden Years: Healthy Eating for Older Adults
Today, Susan MacFarlene tackles nutrition into the Golden Years. As science and medicine continue to advance, so too does our life expectancy. According to the World Health Organization, the global life expectancy was 72.0 years in 2016; an increase of 5.5 years since the year 2000 (1). And growth in life expectancy is not expected […]
Flax, Chia, or Hemp? A Nutrition Showdown
We all know that eating flax, chia, and hemp seed is good for our health (even if we aren’t entirely sure why). In a nutshell – or should I say, a “seed” shell – flax, chia, and hemp all contain alpha linolenic acid (ALA for short); the parent fat of the omega 3 family. Susan […]
Intermittent Fasting and Weight Loss
Another post by our resident RD, Susan Macfarlene, this time tackling the sometimes controversial topic of intermittent fasting and weight loss: Fasting has been an integral part of many different religions for centuries. Fasting has gained popularity more recently among scientists and weight-loss enthusiasts alike for its touted benefits of improving insulin sensitivity, delaying aging, […]
Cronometer: The Nutrition Super Tracker
Cronometer: The Nutrition Super Tracker The USDA will no longer offer food and physical activity tracking through SuperTracker, leaving current users looking for an alternative. Cronometer has garnered a reputation with fitness and nutrition experts as the most detailed and flexible nutrition tracking software available. Find out how Cronometer compares with SuperTracker and how to […]
Introducing Solids to Babies: 6 – 12 months
In this guest post, Susan Macfarlene discusses weaning baby along with how and when to introduce solid foods. Introducing solids to your little one can be a time of great excitement and even greater angst. Nutrition myths and misinformation abound online, and many parents feel pressure to feed their child a “perfect diet” (which, by […]
Everything you Need to Know about Eating Plant-based: Part 2
Another post by our expert registered dietitian, Susan McFarlane. In this part 2 of the series, Susan continues discussion of plant-based food while getting all your required nutrients: Last month, I answered your burning questions related plant-based eating and nutrition. This month, I want to continue the discussion and provide clarity and guidance around some […]
How to Meal Plan Like a Dietitian in 5 Simple Steps
While many people aspire to create a healthy meal plan each week, few are successful at doing so, citing a lack of time, not knowing where to start, and confusion over what constitutes a healthy meal. Additionally, many people believe that meal planning requires hours of work, extensive nutrition knowledge, and elaborate cooking skills. In […]
Volumetrics: The Missing Key to Weight Loss
When it comes to losing weight, most people understand that it is necessary to burn more calories than what you consume. However, they are reluctant to place restrictions on calorie intake out of fear that they will be left feeling hungry and deprived (which as stated in a previous post, can sabotage weight loss efforts). […]
Everything you Need to Know about Eating Plant-based: Part 1
Another post by our expert registered dietitian, Susan McFarlane. In this 2 part series, Susan covers eating plant-based food while getting all your required nutrients. Interest in plant-based eating has never been greater, with an increased number of celebrities and professional athletes swapping their bacon and eggs for beans and tofu. As a dietitian and […]
Understanding cronometer.com ratios – PRAL
Another post by our expert registered dietitian, Susan McFarlane. This time, Susan tackles PRAL centered/alkaline diets and the science behind them. Potential Renal Acid Load (PRAL) Alkalinity Although it’s popularity has waned in favour of more recent dietary trends, the alkaline diet continues to be touted by many as the key to preventing disease and […]
The Key to Successful Weight Loss
Another post by our expert registered dietitian, Susan McFarlane. This time, Susan tackles the tricky subjects of hunger, satiety and the factors that contribute to them. When it comes to successful weight loss, there is no magic pill, powder, or potion that will give you results you want without requiring you to make significant and […]
How to Stay on Track during the Holidays
Another guest post from Susan Macfarlane, a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist utilizing cronometer.com to help run a busy private practice in Ontario, discussing the challenge of healthy eating during the holidays. There’s a reason most people set health and fitness goals after the holidays; changing or maintaining your health habits is difficult to do in the […]
Understanding Cronometer’s Nutrient Ratios – Calcium & Magnesium
Another guest post from Susan Macfarlane, a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist running a busy private practice in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Ontario, explaining the benefits of the calcium and magnesium information you can get from Cronometer.com (https://cronometer.com). Included at the end are links to Susan’s previous article’s. Calcium What is calcium and why do I need it? […]
6 tips for getting the most from your nutrition data
At Cronometer, we pride ourselves in having the best, most comprehensive nutrition database on the market. Cronometer is a powerful tool for tracking your nutrition in great detail. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Nutrition science and nutrition data is a messy business, and in order to get the most out of Cronometer, it […]
Building a Healthy Baby
Another guest post from Susan Macfarlane, a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist running a busy private practice in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Ontario, detailing using Cronometer.com (https://cronometer.com) to help in building a healthy baby. Included at the end are links to Susan’s previous article’s. Pregnancy is a time of incredible excitement and joy in the lives of parents-to-be. […]
Understanding Cronometer’s Nutrient Ratios – Zinc/Copper
Another guest post from Susan Macfarlane, a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist running a busy private practice in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Ontario, detailing Cronometer.com’s (https://cronometer.com) nutrient ratios. Click here to see Susan’s previous article on nutrient ratios: https://cronometer.com/blog/understanding-cronometers-nutrient-ratios/ Zinc/Copper There has been a lot of discussion in the Cronometer forums about the ideal ratio of dietary zinc […]
The Nutrient Oracle: Food Suggestions
We’ve just rolled out an exciting new feature for our Gold subscribers that extends the Nutrient Oracle to be able to suggest foods to eat. Now, when you’ve logged your breakfast and lunch, and you’re scratching your head about what to make for dinner, you can ask the Oracle and get some ideas that will […]
Understanding Cronometer’s Nutrient Ratios – Omega 6 and 3
Another guest post from Susan Macfarlane, a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist running a busy private practice in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Ontario: Omega 6/Omega 3 Omega 6 and 3 are two essential fats that are categorized as polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs for short. These fats are essential since we lack the ability to make them […]
Six Tips for Successful Weight-Loss Tracking
I’m Susan Macfarlane and I’m a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist running a busy private practice in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Ontario. I’m also a nutrition contributor at cronometer.com, where I answer all your nutrition and health-related questions in the forums. This is my second blog post on cronometer.com If you’ve ever tried to lose weight in […]
New Features: Search Tabs and Polar Integration
We have a few new and useful features out that we wanted to tell everyone about: Search Tabs and Polar Integration New Search Tabs The first is a new set of search tabs that help you find the food you want even faster. Our Gold users got a sneak peak of this feature, and we […]
How Cronometer changed my nutrition practice (and can change yours too!)
I’m Susan Macfarlane and I’m a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist running a busy private nutrition practice in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Ontario. I’m also a nutrition contributor at Cronometer, where I answer all your nutrition and health-related questions in the forums. In my practice, I am an expert consultant on vegan and vegetarian diets, and specialize […]
Report issues with foods
With millions of food products on the global market, keeping our database here at cronometer.com complete and correct is a big job. We’re working on some major projects to improve our curation abilities, and today we’ve rolled out the first of these improvements. We’re making it easier to report issues with our foods so that […]
What’s Up With Vitamin A?
What’s up with vitamin A and cronometer.com? I have one lousy small carrot and I am at 278% of my daily requirement for vitamin A. Is that correct? And to add to it all, vitamin A is supposedly toxic at high doses. First, it is correct, and in this blog I will address what is […]
Net carbs and total carbs are an option now.
On the diary page below where you put your foods eaten for the day, you will find the calorie summary box. By clicking on the gear icon on the top right of the box, you will get an expanded version of the calorie summary section. At the bottom right you will see the dynamic macronutrient […]
Dynamic Macronutrient Targets: What They Mean
In this blog we will discuss the new change to Cron-O-Meter, dynamic macronutrient targets and what the targets in the dropdown menu (zone, paleo, ketogenic, LFRV) mean and resources for you to learn more on their specifics. On the diary page below where you put your foods eaten for the day, you will find the […]
Jawbone is here!
We’ve just launched support for Jawbone devices. If you own a Jawbone device you can now sync your Jawbone data to your Cron-O-Meter diary. To sync, go to the ‘Profile’ tab and scroll to the bottom where there is a section for ‘Devices’: Click the ‘Link Jawbone Account’ button to authorize cronometer.com to sync with your Jawbone […]
The Dietary Reference Intakes, not enough for you? Here are some options to consider.
In our last blog we talked about the USDA’s verbiage for nutritional information and showed you where in Cron-O-Meter that data is used. We will carry that theme through the next few blogs and show you how to make changes to Cron-O-Meter’s default settings. Cron-O-Meter uses a host of databases for our food diary. They […]
How to Read Nutrition Fact Labels: Step One in Healthy Eating
By Frank Alvarez – Health Coach The process of determining if a food is nutritious or not is arduous at best. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans have all been developed into user-friendly recommendations for how Americans should choose their foods. The guidelines are a relationship between the USDA Food Guide, My Plate, and Healthy People 2010. […]
Database updated with new USDA sr28
The USDA has recently released version sr28 of their food database. We’ve updated our foods with their new information. This release adds hundreds of new food items, as well as updates to nutritional information for existing items.
Marking Days as Complete
You can now mark a day in your diary as ‘Completed’ when you’re confident the day has everything logged to it. Once marked as complete, you can’t make any changes to the data (unless you mark is as ‘Incomplete’ again). Our charts and nutrition reports now let you choose to plot or report just on […]
35000 new food products added
A few days ago we rolled out the addition of a new data source for all of our users. The ESHA food product database adds over 35000 new food items for American food products and restaurant meals. These items contain exactly what would be on the product’s nutrition label, so they don’t necessarily have the […]
New Calories Display
We’ve just made some fairly substantial changes to our web version’s nutritional summary display area. We found a lot of users were getting confused and frustrated with how we presented calorie targets and weight loss goals. Part of how we did this has to do with the history of cronometer. It was originally developed as […]
Over 15000 new food items added!
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just added a set of over 15000 new high quality food items to our database. These foods come from the University of Minnesota Nutrition Coordination Center’s Food and Nutrition Database. It has much more than the USDA’s database, and better coverage of micronutrient values. Look for these new items […]
Database updated with new USDA sr25
The USDA has recently released version sr25 of their food database. We’ve updated our foods with this new information. This release adds over 200 new food items, as well as more accurate nutritional information for existing items.
Database updated with new USDA sr24
The USDA has recently released version sr24 of their food database. We’ve updated our foods with this new information. This release adds over 300 new food items, as well as more accurate nutritional information for existing items.
Ask The Oracle
Gold Subscribers get a new feature this week: Ask The Oracle. Located on the Foods tab, the nutrient oracle can help you explore the food database to find good sources for particular nutrients. The results can be ranked in three different ways: Highest amount Per Calorie, highest amount per Gram, and by The Oracle. The last […]
Updated Vitamin A values
We’ve updated how Vitamin A (IU) is calculated for our USDA foods. It turns out that the USDA values are using an out-dated method for calculating IU that has been discredited in recent years as being far too generous. It has been shown that our bodies do not convert carotenoids as efficiently as it was […]
Snake Oil & Supplements
The Information Is Beautiful blog have updated their excellent interactive info-graphic on supplements. They have fed hundreds of scientific studies into their data set to display the relative efficacy of various supplements. For anyone trying to keep up with the latest research and all the conflicting results from various studies, this is an invaluable tool […]
New Feature: Community Foods
Having a large database of high quality food items is crucial for a tool like CRON-O-Meter to be useful. It currently has over 8000 items from the USDA public database. However, this database is missing many commercial products and fast food items. Today we’ve rolled out a new feature: The ability to publish your custom […]
Embeddable Nutrition Label Widget
New feature today — embeddable nutrition labels for any food or recipe in the database. Just click the help button at the bottom of the widget to get the html code and paste it into any web page to show the nutrition facts for a food:
How to lose weight with CRON-O-Meter
Losing weight is straight-forward with a tool like CRON-O-Meter. This article will explain the basic steps to successful weight loss, and why a tool like CRON-O-Meter is invaluable in the process. This approach isn’t based on any dieting fads or flaky ideas. It is all grounded in good science. First of all, studies have shown […]
