Top Free Apps for Healthy Eating

(HealthCastle.com) Our smart phones and iPods seems to have reached into every corner of our lives, keeping us in touch and informed whether we're at home or on the go. Why not harness that power to help you reach your healthy eating goals? There are some really great free apps available to keep you eating, ordering, shopping, and living healthy. Here, we review our top 5 favorite healthy eating apps.

Top 5 Free Healthy Eating Apps

• Best recipe app: Epicurious
  With tons of recipes that you can search using various categories, including dietary considerations and main ingredients, epicurious is a great app to get you into the habit of cooking at home. There's a whole category of "healthy lunch" recipes that might be a good place for a cooking newbie to start, or focus on your favorite ingredient to build a cooking repertoire you know you'll love. This app even builds shopping lists for you from the recipes you pick, so it's easy to see what you need to pick up at the store.
  
  
• Best calorie tracker: Livestrong.com Calorie Tracker Lite
  The free "lite" version of this app is supported by ads, but offers much of the same functionality as the paid ($2.99) version. You can enter a daily calorie goal, then enter the foods you eat and exercise you do each day to track your daily calorie allowance in real time. If you slip by eating a plate of chicken wings (a whopping 915 calories!), you can get back on track with an afternoon jog - and this app tells you how the calories consumed and burned balance out. You can also enter your weight on a regular basis to create a graph of your change in weight over time. Not sure what you should enter as your daily calorie goal? You can get a personalized calorie requirement count at our own Calories Calculator.
  
  
• Best supplement minder: My DS
  Created by the Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health, this app allows you to build a profile that tracks all of your dietary supplements so you have the list on hand to share with your doctor, pharmacist, or other health care professional to ensure your dietary supplements will not interfere with any treatment they may have in mind. You can create multiple profiles, so you can easily track all of your family members' supplements in one app. This is an especially useful tool for adult children who are helping to manage their parents' nutrition and health care.
  
  
• Best fresh-food saver: Consume Within
  One of the main reasons we eat so much packaged food is that it's just so easy to buy, store, and pull out of the freezer or the package when we want to eat. But there's no denying that food that last forever tends to be a little lacking in the nutrition department. To solve the problem of fresh foods going bad, Consume Within allows you to keep track of the foods you add to your fridge, cupboard, and freezer, then makes sure you know how long you have to consume them before they start to go bad (hence the name of the app!). You can scan labels for products that have bar codes, but for non-labeled items (like produce) or if you don't have a camera on your device, you can enter items manually as well. With a simple tracker like this, you have no excuse for not buying food with an expiry date, and making sure you actually eat it!
  
  
• Best analysis app: Fooducate
  Simply scan a product's barcode, or type in the barcode if your device doesn't have a camera, and this app provides information on calories per serving, warnings on common label "tricks" (like the unregulated use of the word "natural," for example), an analysis of the product's nutritional value (in terms of fiber, vitamins, and minerals, and so on), as well as an overall grade and healthier alternatives.