A new app from FoodCalc, EveryoneEat!, which helps assist people make healthy choices while eating out, is now available for both Android and iOS smartphones. There are over 150 million people in the United States that suffer from chronic diseases and EveryoneEat! promises to help them make wiser choices while dining in more than 180,000 restaurants around the country.
Diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic diseases affect nearly half of the people in the United States. The National Restaurant Association has conducted a survey to determine that Americans spend more than 280 billion dollars per year eating out in restaurants, yet restaurants offer little information about nutritional values. If the information is available, it is shown in a generic format that covers people as a whole, rather than offering disease-specific information. EveryoneEat! will now address that problem by allowing users to view the nutritional values of menu items and how they pertain to particular conditions.
Users of the app will enter in their basic information: age, gender, height, weight, their level of activity, and their health conditions, along with their individual dietary needs. Many of the larger health associations (the American Diabetes Association, the National Kidney Foundation, the National Osteoporosis Foundation, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and various other foundations and institutes) and FoodCalc have joined together to determine the dietary needs and restraints that need to be met by people who suffer from chronic diseases. Once all the information is loaded into the app, the user selects the restaurant and suggested dishes are highlighted for the user to choose from.
Ken Marshall, chief executive officer of FoodCalc, sees the app as a solution for people who have specific dietary needs. “Today, there are dozens of ‘nutrition’ apps providing basic nutrition facts or generic health ‘scores’ for hundreds of restaurant chains. But for Americans with special dietary restrictions, it’s unfortunately left to them to decipher the nutrition facts provided, in order to understand whether a dish is appropriate for the needs mandated by their specific condition.” Unlike other nutritional informational, EveryoneEat! addresses specific problems and answers the specific questions that users care about. “What we recognize is that no matter how simple or complicated a dietary restriction, people need to easily answer the basic question, ‘does this dish meet my dietary guidelines?’, and if not, ‘what’s off and by how much?’ EveryoneEat! addresses this need head on.”
Edited by
Rich Steeves
