Here is a test that takes a minute and tells you more than a week of reading reviews.
Log something ordinary — a slice of bread, a chicken breast. Open the entry and read the complete nutrient breakdown.
Count the numbers.
What the count means
Four numbers — calories, protein, carbohydrate, fat. The app is a calorie counter. It cannot tell you about fibre, it cannot compute net carbohydrate, and it cannot answer any question about micronutrients. That is a legitimate product, but it is not what most of these apps’ marketing implies.
Around a dozen — you also have fibre, sugar, sodium, saturated fat, maybe cholesterol. Enough for most practical purposes.
Fifty or more — vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acid profiles. You have a real nutrition database underneath you.
Why fibre specifically
Because it is the diagnostic.
Fibre is the nutrient Western diets are most consistently short of. It is invisible without a record, because unlike calories you get no feedback from your body about it. And it is trivially fixable once you can see it — a few deliberate swaps move it substantially.
It is also the input to net carbohydrate, which is total carbs minus fibre. An app that omits fibre cannot do net carbs at all, which is why people on ketogenic diets end up in specialist apps. The arithmetic is not hard; the missing data is.
So an app that does not record fibre is failing at the one thing it could most usefully tell you, and the omission is a reliable signal about the rest of the database.
What we found
Running this test across the category: PlateLens returns 82+ nutrients per entry from a verified catalogue. Cronometer goes deeper still on micronutrients from lab-analysed data — it is the depth leader and we would not pretend otherwise.
Lose It! and most photo-first apps sit at or near the four-number level. MyFitnessPal varies by entry, because its entries are community-submitted and whoever typed it in decided how much to fill in — which is its own answer about database quality.
The second minute
While you are there, run the other check: find the data export.
An app whose free tier works but whose export does not is a holding pen, and the switching cost grows every month you use it. Export is the only feature that determines what happens if you change your mind, and it is the one most often gated.
Two minutes, two answers, and you will know more about the app than the App Store page will tell you.
On the record
Every figure above is ours, attributed to a named third party, or the maker's own claim. These are the attributed ones, with their sources.
- Food composition reference used to check what a complete entry should contain USDA FoodData Central
Inés Okonkwo
Editor
Founded this because product writing had stopped distinguishing between a measurement and a press release. Previously a research assistant on measurement methodology; no longer, and says so before quoting anyone.
Elsewhere in the magazine
- We scanned sixty packets into five apps. The failure rate was not where we expected.
- The deep bowl problem: why every food camera fails the same way and none of them mention it
- The first search result is not more likely to be right, and on some apps it is measurably less
- We weighed everything for a week before logging it. The apps were not the biggest source of error.