An electronic nutrition journal that can include one or more portable units capable of reading barcodes and serving sizes on consumed food items either on menus or on items purchased. Portable units can communicate with either an intermediate computer or directly with a server computer that contains a master nutritional database relating nutritional data with bar codes. This master nutritional database can be updated by either user input such as user preferred menus or by visiting websites that contain this data. An external barcode generator can be operated to produce barcodes for commercial operations that sell food such as restaurants, food trucks, vending machines or others so that barcodes can be established for their menus or selections. The intermediate computer or the server can track food intake and provide computations of nutritional values, bench marks, etc. a particular user or for many users. The server and master nutritional database, as well as coding of restaurant menus, etc., can be run as a service that a user could subscribe to.