Google has quietly launched a new nutritional advice tool which lets users easily compare different foods without ever leaving the search engine.
The tool builds on the original 2013 release, which allowed you to Google a massive range of information about different foods, including their calorie content, and the amounts of fat, vitamins, carbohydrates, sugar and protein that are contained within.
But crucially it also now allows you to compare those foods with each other, just by asking the search tool to "compare" -- or by searching for one food "vs" another.
You can also extend the search to foods prepared in different ways - for instance you can compare potatoes with "potatoes mashed with milk and butter" for more accurate readings.
Neatly, you can also do this via Google Now and voice search - meaning with the right phone you can get nutritional information while cooking in the kitchen, all without touching your phone. And of course once all of this stuff is on your wrist, it will be even easier to use.
Here are some things we've learned after just a few minutes using the tool:
- Cooked bacon has 25 times fewer calories per 100g than broccoli
- Quinoa is huge higher in fat than Kale - but is three times as rich in Iron
- Crisps are almost twice the calories of popcorn, but have 1/3 less carbs
- There are 455 calories in 100g of Chorizo - but only 145 in 100g of extra lean ham
The tool will also suggest recipes, if you Google two ingredients which might work well together.
Google gets its information from the US Department of Agriculture's National Nutrient Database - which is pretty reliable, but might differ slightly from equivalents here in the UK.
"We noticed that people were doing a lot of food and nutrition searches — multi-step searches on one food and another food," Google spokesperson Krisztine Radosavljevic-Szilagyi told NPR.
"These things are often compared to one another, so we thought, why don't we make it easy?"