MyFitnessPal Makes It Easier To Order Healthily At Restaurants

I’m in Las Vegas for this whole week, which means two things. One, I hate myself. Two, I’m constantly out at restaurants, which makes it even harder than usual to eat healthily.

MyFitnessPal, the popular nutrition and fitness app that was acquired by Under Armour last year, is unveiling a new feature today that should help. The app already allows you to log your meals at restaurants — in fact, co-founder Albert Lee said users are logging restaurant menu items every 3.2 seconds.

However, MyFitnessPal now includes nutritional data about a much broader swath of restaurants, and it makes it easy to look that information up before you order.

“It’s been pretty clear to us for some time now that one big pain point is how to make a healthy choice when they’re eating out at a restaurant,” Lee said.

The new feature includes menu information from 500,000 restaurants nationwide — not just big chains, Lee said, but also “single outlet” restaurants.

MyFitnessPal is working with Foursquare to get a lot of that menu data. Of course, many of those restaurants don’t provide any nutritional information publicly. In those cases, Lee said MyFitnessPal employs data science to make an estimate based on the information available. Users can also provide feedback on those estimates, so they should get better over time.

There’s also a new interface, making it easy to drill down to the menu of whatever restaurant you’re at, based on your location, or to look at a map with recommendations nearby that fit your nutritional goals.

MyFitnessPal says it’s rolling the new feature out to iOS users, with Android to come.