The Food Calculator: Nutritionix.com Helps Customize Meals
When your stomach is grumbling, there’s no time to mess with math. Sure, you’ll have the cheese on that. You’d love some extra sauce. And before you know it, you’ve unwittingly created a fattening monstrosity.
That’s precisely the problem Daniel Zadoff and Matt Silverman hope to solve with their newly launched website, Nutritionix.com. It features nutrition calculators for the menus of several restaurants, so you can customize online rather than in line. As you add or subtract ingredients from your meal with a click of the mouse, you can watch a label — like the kind you’d find on the back of products at the grocery store — reflect the effects of your choices when it comes to calories, fat, sodium and protein.
Even though it’s gotten easier to track down nutrition info from chains in recent years, deciphering spreadsheets of numbers and applying them to your specific choices is still tricky on the fly. “Let’s say I get a sandwich without the mayo. I have no idea how many calories I’ve saved,” says Zadoff. Was it worth the deprivation? Was there another ingredient that he should have skipped instead?
Silverman figured out how to answer these kinds of questions back in 2004, when he created Chipotlefan.com. The basic calculator, which was not affiliated with the burrito chain in any way, proved instantly popular with regular customers like him. Thousands continue to visit every day, and they’ve been clamoring for access to similar information for additional restaurants.
So when Silverman and his buddy Zadoff graduated from George Washington University in 2008, they set out to make a more advanced version of the concept. Nutritionix.com currently has 12 restaurant calculators, ranging from national chains such as Subway and, of course, Chipotle, to local spots, including Sweetgreen. (Some pay for the privilege, but most of the restaurants on the site are ones that have released enough of their data to build the calculator.)
On it, you can fiddle with portions to figure out the bottom line when you order double meat or just eat half the fries. Then you can save the info, in case you’re keeping a food log or want to remember what to pick next time. If you’re so inclined, you can even share your choices with friends via Facebook and Twitter.
Nutritionix plans to offer a more robust version of the site in a few weeks that will add original content from a host of bloggers discussing nutrition, exercise and science.
The plan is to become a one-stop shop for anyone deciding where to dine and what to order based on their dietary needs. Zadoff said he hopes the site will eventually be able to offer information from just about every restaurant out there. “People want to know what they’re eating,” he says. “Why not be ahead of the curve?
LOCAL DINING — An Act of Merzi
For restaurants, having this info available in such a digestible form isn’t necessarily a good thing. But Qaiser Kazmi, who owns Merzi (415 7th St. NW; Merzi.com), has jumped at the chance to get on the site. He promotes his Indian-inspired cuisine as healthy, but people are often skeptical of his claims — probably because it’s so “flavorful and bloody delicious,” he suspects.
Saying “it’s filling but not overstuffing” isn’t as convincing as running the numbers: A rice bowl loaded with toppings can easily come in at less than 500 calories. Transparency is key to Kazmi, who also plans to post calories on his menu boards in the coming weeks. “This is something I want to sell,” he says. It’s time to find out whether being good for you is good for business.
