Some people read nutrition labels with the kind of zeal others reserve for tabloids. The pleasure is in the appraisal. Those crackers in the supermarket with no trans fats? Basket-worthy. A cafe’s peach muffin has one measly gram of fiber? As if.
I’m label-conscious. But until now, my own homebaked goods were stubborn little mysteries. No more.
I recently ate a 2.4-ounce zucchini muffin with raisins and walnuts that had 269 calories and 24 grams of carbohydrates. Another day, I chose the lesser of two evils, a 188-calorie slice of homemade clementine cake instead of a heftier 285-calorie triangle.
How do I know? Prep Pad is a new “smart” food scale for home cooks that doesn’t just weigh food, but also provides a breakdown of its nutritional content.
It’s instructive not only during preparation but also with leftovers.
I take time to cook healthy meals at home daily. But some meals still lack protein, and nearly all are devoured, instead of savored. I hoped that Prep Pad could offer more nutritional transparency, and that another device, the Bluetooth-enabled Hapi-Fork, could slow me down.
The 9-inch-by-6.25-inch scale made by the Orange Chef, a Google-backed company, is sold at Williams-Sonoma for $149.95. It works with the Countertop app on my iPad, which displays a breakdown of proteins, carbohydrates and fats as I build a meal. (An iPad 3 or newer is needed.)
Discoveries lie in wait.
Some made me wince. My 9 p.m. snack while watching House of Cards - plain yogurt, strawberries and granola - topped 524 calories, 25 percent of them from fat. My healthy dessert was as sneaky as the show’s politician protagonist, Frank Underwood.
By contrast, putting green beans on the Prep Pad, then typing in the ingredient, led to a pleasant surprise decades late: Green beans have roughly 4 grams of protein per cup.
Jennifer K. Nelson, the director of clinical dietetics at Mayo Clinic, confirmed that nonstarchy vegetables like broccoli have about that much protein.
My green-bean epiphany mattered because one of my goals in using Prep Pad was to eat more meat-free protein, like the ground almonds that were the “flour” in my clementine cake.
Food scales have fallen out of favor with some nutritionists, including Nelson, because the specific weight - say, 3 ounces of steak - was divorced from nutritional information. But after being told about Prep Pad, she said, “merging information with a scale can be a powerful tool in raising awareness.”
However, Nelson cautioned, “people generally find it a pain to weigh their food.”
Actually, weighing each ingredient was pretty effortless, although it did take slightly longer to weigh the item and type each ingredient into the app. What got annoying was how many bowls were dirtied. For raw eggs, you must first put a container on the scale, press a button on the app to account for its weight, then start cracking eggs into it. Ditto for mashed clementines. Ditto for flour.
By the sixth bowl, I grumpily had to call in reinforcements to wash dishes to make counter space. (You have to do this only once per recipe; then, for instance, you can add meat to your vegetable lasagna without starting over.)
Most bar codes on packaged food can be scanned. But even though more than 250,000 ingredients are in the scale’s search engine, some basics can’t be found. Quaker Instant Oatmeal comes up (3 grams of fiber per serving of 28 grams), but what about oatmeal with more fiber?
Plantains didn’t come up, so I classified them as bananas, which have fewer carbohydrates. For a scale that’s aiming for full nutritional transparency, this is a major weakness.
Taimoor Dar, a founder of the Orange Chef, says the company is improving the search results. It is also adding items.
SLOW DOWN
My second problem was trickier: I wolf my food.
The HapiFork promised to change that. This $99.99 utensil turns an accusatory red and vibrates if there’s not a pause of roughly 10 seconds between forkfuls.
Some people use the device to lose weight. A lot of different mechanisms go into satiety, but our bodies register fullness roughly 20 minutes after we start eating. So slowing down might help avoid second helpings.
With a nudge from a fork with a French pedigree, it was only a matter of time till this harried working mother ate at a luxurious pace, right?
Alas, one stumbling block was my lack of motivation deep in wintry February. Over Skype, Fabrice Boutain, the chief executive of HapiLabs, confirmed that willpower was crucial. “The HapiFork is a personal motivation device,” he said. “If you have no motivation, it won’t help.”
For an infuriating jolt to get me over that hump, I called my mother in Florida.
“I have to tell you, when we sit down to eat, in about three minutes you are all done,” she said. She evoked the specter of my chew-her-kale slowly sister.
Chiming in from stage left, my father called out: “When you eat at a table, it’s a social act. We don’t want to eat with someone who wolfs, wolfs, wolfs.”
Being criticized by a fork was easier to take. Every few days, I downloaded data from the fork to my computer to get feedback.
That three-minute breakfast with just 17 seconds between bites? The fork declared, “Not the best meal ever, but it’s OK!” It deemed an 11-minute dinner with 32-second intervals “very successful.”
Best of all, I never had to admit to my mother that she was right.
After a few weeks, the fork’s vibration became a subtle reminder to be present in the here and now instead of thinking ahead to things like the pajamas-bedtime routine.
I learned that my dinners stretched to 16 minutes if I remembered to sip water or to use a cloth napkin to trick me into thinking this weekday stir-fry was an occasion to savor.
It also made a difference that my son would notice if the fork turned red. “Mama, you’re eating wrong!” he said, happy to have the opportunity to nag an adult.
HapiLabs also plans to offer services like coaches who can review your data and meals to provide recommendations.
ActiveStyle, Pages 26 on 03/17/2014