Siri has come a long way since it was first introduced as a feature in iOS. For one, it now works on the desktop i.e., on macOS and it’s quite capable there as well. Siri can do more things since its inception and of course with each new iteration, the AI gets more and more capable. You can view Nutrition information on iOS 12 via Siri.
To view nutrition information on iOS 12, you need to invoke Siri. The trick is to know the correct command. There are a couple that work;
- Show me nutrition information for (food name)
- Is (food name) healthy?
- How many calories are in (food name)?
- How much fat is in (food name)? You can vary this question by replacing the ‘fat’ with cholesterol, or vitamin D, or something similar.
There are probably a few more commands that will work but these are the few we have for now.
Siri can’t pull up information for every food item there is. It’s not ready to compete with the database that MyFitnessPal has but for the food items it does support at the moment, you can view how many calories it has, how much fat it has and much of it is saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats, you can see how much cholesterol, Sodium, Potassium, carbohydrates, sugar, protein, it has. For some foods like Milk you will see a break down of the vitamins and minerals it has.
Like all nutrition information, the values are based on a 2000 calorie diet. There is no way to change the quantity of a food item you see nutrition information for. For example, the coffee nutrition information is for 237g or 8 fl oz. You can’t change it to a larger or smaller quantity. The list of supported foods isn’t conclusive just yet. Siri has information for Milk, Lemonade, and Coffee but not for roasted chicken or an Apple.
This is a small feature in the grand scheme of things so it obviously wasn’t mentioned when iOS 12 was announced. That’s probably why there is no conclusive list of supported foods and it’s unlikely a lot of people are aware this feature exists at present.
If you use MyFitnessPal, and it’s connected to Apple Health, you know that it can sync nutrition information. Naturally, Apple will want to compete with that. Maybe Siri will be able to add nutrition information to the Health app too. Perhaps that won’t happen with the initial stable release of iOS 12 but with one of its later iterations.
