food-tracking

SAN FRANCISCO, July 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Jawbone® today unveiled new weight management features for UP® , the system that helps you manage your weight, sleep better and stay fit.

Jawbone’s entirely new food-tracking interface for UP helps you simply log food and water, quickly assess the healthiness of foods, and easily track progress toward your target weight.

The UP Insight Engine™ provides intelligent guidance around your food choices, calorie consumption and weight goals, helping you understand how each of those is related to activity and sleep.

“UP and UP24 have inspired millions of people to get engaged in their own health – we’ve shown that living better really is a universally popular proposition,” said Travis Bogard, vice president of product management and strategy at Jawbone. “For the nearly three out of four Americans that are overweight or obese*, living better often includes weight loss. Our new food and weight features for UP, combined with some exciting new food apps we’ve added to the platform, make UP the most complete solution for weight management and a healthy lifestyle.”

Simplified Weight Management

Jawbone’s new and intuitive food-tracking interface for UP delivers an easier, smarter way to track what you eat and manage your weight:

• Personalized Food Library: Quickly see and select from the foods you eat most frequently, right from the front and center of your food-logging screen. More than a quarter of meals logged in UP include regularly consumed items, making easy access to them a time-saving shortcut. UP also surfaces foods that are commonly paired with the items you’re eating via Jawbone’s intelligent food database. Enter eggs, and UP will show you other items that may be included in your meal, like bacon, toast, or potatoes.
• Access to Restaurant Menus: With half of meals in the US eaten outside of the home**, UP now lists dining establishments nearby based on your location and lets you quickly log menu items from many restaurants you visit. Quick access to menus lets you instantly select what you’re eating and automatically import calorie information when available. At local restaurants where nutrition information may not be on hand, add nutrition details and UP will save it in your library for future visits. Jawbone’s data science team will aggregate data entered from multiple users, making it available to the entire UP community for a more complete restaurant menu database.
• Food Score: Use UP’s food detail screen to quickly evaluate how healthy a dish is at a glance. UP shows you the breakdown of healthy nutrients to less healthy nutrients for any given item, along with a new Food Score to help you quickly asses the overall healthiness of individual items and full meals. You’ll also see a rolling average of the score throughout your entire day.
• Weight Goal: Log your weight and set a personal goal in the app to see your progress toward your target weight. UP will recommend a daily calorie goal and balance calories burned versus calories consumed to show you your remaining allowance for the day. And as you log new meals, a convenient progress meter shows you the number of calories you’ve already consumed – and how many you’ll be adding with each new item.
• Insights: A completely redesigned Insight Engine for UP makes its intelligent guidance and useful health tips even more accessible and intuitive. Complete with new food-specific insights and opt-in “Today I Will” commitments, you’ll be motivated to try original recipes, reinforce your diet with fiber and protein, and start building new food habits to keep you on track.

New Food Apps on the UP Platform

Jawbone teamed up with several meal planning and delivery services to take the UP system a step closer toward the promise of automatic logging and customized meal recommendations:

• Order a fresh, chef-prepared meal from the daily menu of Munchery , now in San Francisco and Seattle, and have it delivered that night . When you connect your Munchery account with UP, each meal ordered will be automatically entered for you in UP’s food-logging system, including detailed nutrition information.
• Use HealthyOut to order healthy meals from nearby restaurants nationwide, at any time.
• Use the Prep Pad WiFi connected scale from The Orange Chef Co. ™  to create recipes that can be automatically logged in UP. Prep Pad can also factor in your activity from UP to provide more personalized meal recommendations.
• Get meal plans and recipes from PlateJoy that are tailored to your preferences and customized based on your activity and sleep from UP – complete with ingredients delivered to your home.
• And coming soon, you’ll be able to choose recipe recommendations from NuMi™ by Nutrisystem® that are personalized based on your calorie goals, lifestyle preferences, and the time of day. UP will automatically log the recipes you select, and NuMi will use your activity and calorie information to make even smarter recommendations.

Backed by Industry-Leading Experts

Jawbone’s new weight management system and food tracking tools have been backed by leading dietitian Ashley Koff, RD, an international nutrition expert and regular commentator on health and food issues.

“Food journaling is proven to be an effective method for weight management and weight loss, but writing everything you eat down with pen and paper isn’t convenient for most people. What Jawbone has developed is a really simple solution to this challenge,” said Koff. “While calorie counting is a key part of weight management, the balance of your nutrient intake is equally, if not more, important. It’s great to see a simple Food Score –  intelligently developed using several nutrient ratios – alongside calorie counts in the UP system to show you at a glance how well-balanced your food is.”

Development of the new features has been led by Laura Borel, a product manager at Jawbone and founder and former CEO of Nutrivise, a consumer nutrition company acquired by Jawbone last year. Nutrivise delivered personalized and automated meal recommendations based on a user’s unique biometrics and dietary preferences, and was voted “most promising health company” by Stanford Medicine X in 2012.

Available on July 16

UP by Jawbone™ 3.2 for iOS is available today as a free download from the App Store. The UP or UP24™ wristband is required for the app.