When making comparisons, you’re supposed to use apples to apples. But check out a calorie-counting website, and you see that even these fruits are not all created equally.
Apples can range in calories from 53 to 116 depending on where you look and you might have to grab a measuring tape or scale to tell where yours falls.
NutriBullet, along with Perfect Company, wants to make keeping tabs on nutrition a bit more seamless with its new NutriBullet Balance blender. The smart blender — introduced this week at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle — has an accompanying app and integrated scale and can recommend recipes based on what you like and your diet.
The app lets you choose your eating style, with options such as low-sugar, dairy-free, and paleo. Each recipe lists nutritional information, including calories, protein, carbs, sugar, and fiber. As you start adding ingredients, the app will show you when you’ve got the right amount. This should help you see what happens when you add an extra glob of peanut butter or a handful of spinach.
Featuring a Bluetooth-enabled Smart Nutrition Sensor, the blender acts as a “Virtual Nutritionist,” assisting you in counting calories or assessing what you’re putting in your smoothie.
Even though the blender itself has just one button, users can make the consistency of their smoothies more personalized via the app. Based on the ingredients, the app uses six algorithms to determine speed and duration of the blender, so you shouldn’t find celery chunks when you open the lid. The company hopes that you end up with a perfect blend.
It has a 1,200-watt motor and comes with two 32-ounce cups that serve as the blender’s jar and your to-go cup. The app will launch with more than 300 recipes and continue to add more; in addition to smoothies, it will have recipes for desserts, soups, dips, and other blender-made fare.
When the $180 NutriBullet Balance launches this fall (date TBD) you will be able to upload your nutrition data to Apple Health and Google Fit — helpful for those of us who don’t use a blender for 100 percent of our meal prep.
