Texting for Nutritional Information – THIS IS SO COOL!

I have a dream! A dream that all people, fat or thin, can walk into their favorite chain restaurant, look at the menu, and have a CLUE what the nutritional value is of the choices before them. I have a dream that this will neither be accomplished by an increase in government nannyship, nor by the much-needed return to home cooking, nor by the modification of restaurant menus into novelettes. I have a dream that all people can instantly get nutritional information for items in thousands of restaurants all around the country!

Well, guess what? This isn’t a dream at all – this is real, and all it takes is a phone with text messaging on it (by the way, if you can’t text message on your phone, it’s time to buy a new one!) All you do is send a text message to DIET1 (34381) with the name of the restaurant and the name of the food item. If you want Weight Watchers Points® simply add the word Points or pts or pt to the beginning of the message.

I’ll do one right now, ok. I am going to text “wendy’s small french fries.” (Wendy’s does do a good job with having nutritional info handy in-store, but I really like Wendy’s, so I am going to use them for my example. I am also going to forget for the moment that french fries, one of my favorite foods on the planet, is something I try very hard to avoid!)…ok, sent……6 seconds later I receive this text:
Wendy’s
Small French Fries
Cal : 330
Fat: 16g
Carb: 42g
Protein: 4g

Nifty! Now, if I want the WW Points®, I will have to re-text with “pts” in front, and if I want a hamburger with that, it’s another text, so this can get expensive fast if you don’t have unlimited texting. Also, it’s not a perfect database. I sent in a text for Wendy’s Mandarin Chicken Salad and got back the nutritional value for the Crispy Noodles that come with that salad. And, of course, not all restaurants are in there (some, like Fuddrucker’s, do not release their nutritional value, darn them! And others simply haven’t found their way into the database. By the way, restaurant owners can contact diet.com and request to be added). Anyhow, there is no way to know if what you want is going to be in the database unless you try it (or go to the website to see). So I don’t recommend using texting as your primary source of nutrition facts. But it’s still awfully handy, especially for those times (we all have them) when you find yourself at a restaurant without a plan and they don’t have nutritional info available.

Don’t believe me? The details can be found at http://www.diet.com/mobile. The site has pop-up ads, which is a bit annoying, but this is cool enough that I am over it. This may even be cool enough to induce me to pay for unlimited text messaging on my plan, something we have not done to this point because, well, most of the time it’s just easier to call.

By the way, text-services are becoming more and more popular. Another favorite of mine is Google’s - you can text to GOOGL now to get directions if you are driving around trying to find a place (see http://www.googletutor.com/2005/04/18/google-sms-directions ). And Abilene Christian Univerity has begun issuing iPhones to their college freshmen, which will be used for many purposes including getting directions to classes, participating in class discussions, receiving homework alerts, even managing their financial stuff. Kinda makes you want to go back to school, huh?

I expect we will see more and more of this in the future, but who would have thought that the number of fat grams in a cheeseburger would find its way to the cutting edge of Technology?