Filed under: Raves & Reviews, Newspapers, Food Gadgets, Light Food

One of the best ways to practice portion control is to get into the habit of measuring or weighing your foods and the easiest way to do that is to add a kitchen scale to your countertop. Such a scale can be used for weighing ingredients for baking (useful if you like to use cookbooks from outside the US), but more importantly today, they can be used to measure portion size to ensure that you don't break your diet by over-estimating portions. There are even some new scales that come programmed with the caloric value of various foods so you can find out exactly what you're about to eat. The WSJ's Catalog Critic put several popular digital scales to the test to see what worked, what didn't, and which one is really going to work for you.

Three of the scales - the Soehnle Food Control Digital Kitchen Scale, Salter Nutri-Weigh Dietary Scale and the Escali Cibo - all provided nutritional data and all were deemed to be more difficult to use than the standard digital scales. While it was convenient to have the calorie/fat information right in front of you, the testers felt that the difficulty of use would prevent most people from actually using them on a regular basis. Additionally, the caloric contents didn't take into account cooking method, so the counts were not accurate in terms of what food was consumed.

The two top scales - the Cuisinart Precision Electronic Scale and Polder Digital food scale - were both easy to use, with large buttons and clear functions in both standard and metric measures. You'll get the proper portion size quickly and easily and you can always use a website to check the calorie count if you need to.