Carb Tracker review

It seems like only yesterday that the food group that must be avoided at all costs was sugar.

It was the evil mastermind of the food world, and anything containing even a single grain of sugar threatened to kill you on the spot, or worse, make you horribly, horribly fat.

Then it was fats that made you fat (which sounds quite reasonable, though my grandfather who’d lived through war and rationing had quite a different opinion on the matter), and finishing off a pork chop made you a despicable social outcast.

Finally eggs were the evil upon which the nation’s health problems hung, so it’s a wonder any of us have made it this far.

These days it’s carbs. We looked it up on Wikipedia, and apparently it’s short for carbohydrates, which is another word for sugars, apparently, so it seems we’ve gone full circle.

But this jargon seems to focus on starchy stuff, like bread and pasta, just as much as sugar, and that’s a big cross-section of the modern diet that you’re now required to eliminate from your table.

To help you keep abreast of this latest diet trend, the aptly named Carb Tracker has been designed to work as a kind of food conscience you can carry around with you.

As sarcastic as this review has been so far, and as dubious as the notion of pinning your health issues on a single type of food might be, anyone wanting a carb diary will find this to be an efficient and comprehensive application.

The app doesn’t require you to make too many plans in advance, which is a breath of fresh air when it comes to dieting, but simply to log your intake, weight and water consumption while it’s still in your memory.

Not only can you set a goal weight, but you input your carb-heavy bulk at the outset so you can track and reflect upon your progress as you go.

The benefit here, presumably, is being able to track which days you fared better than others, and then adjust your dietary habits to maximise weight loss.

There’s an infinitely long list of entries from groceries to restaurant meals, with the carbohydrate content of each ingredient or meal pre-programmed, making it a lot easier to calculate how many of those dastardly, fattening molecules are clogging up your guts.

It’s worth noting that many of the entries seem to be for US outlets, though you’re able to input all your own data, so it’s not a big deal.

Since dieting is also quite a social experience these days, it’s also interesting that Carb Tracker includes a function to print off your dietary data into a spreadsheet, giving you a hard copy whenever you need it.

Neither does the app rely on an internet connection, so should be equally useful when out and about for iPod touch users.

If you’re of the opinion that carbs are the new sugar/fats/eggs, then Carb Tracker is a great way to keep a very close eye on how many of those malicious molecules make it past your lips.