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Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

68 points by caaqil 5y ago

engineer_22 5y ago
Monitoring my calories was one of the best things I have ever done.
- dghughes 5y ago
  Weight, finances, like anything tracking it makes you aware. I started counting calories eight years ago (Jan 11, 2014) I do it at the end of each day. I did find that tracking my weight (or my spending) makes me modify my behaviour. Even eating the crap I do I am more aware it it's made my weight stabilize. I can even see a bump in the graph of my weight after I buy groceries or a dip when I go for bike rides in the summer. I also see patterns of same weight for multiple days then a weight change up or down; trends. I'm not female and not obese but a slightly overweight middle-aged male with hypothyroidism (synthroid pill #1 Mar 12, 2013). So not the typical person most people would think of. But I never had an eating disorder just curiosity.
kebab 5y ago
Should keep in mind that this is for people who don't have a particular risk of eating disorder already
- danuker 5y ago
  The paper makes no assertions about change in risk when the risk is high.
kixiQu 5y ago
doesn't increase eating disorder incidence for undergrad women "who had not engaged in dietary self-monitoring in the past year and who were at low-risk for an eating disorder" and who were willing to sign up for this
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Honestly, I wish there was some mechanism to somehow punish authors that title their papers like a buzzfeed piece. I'm really sick of seeing things like, "Diet has no effect on BMI" and then it turns out that what they meant was that you have a lot of freedom in what you eat as long as you stay around the same total calorie intake or whatever. There's no feedback mechanism to swat these things down and it shows.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    You're not supposed to read just the title, you need to read at least the abstract. It clearly states in the abstract what the conclusions are: "Conclusions: Among dietary self-monitoring naive undergraduate women with low-risk of an eating disorder, dietary self-monitoring via MyFitnessPal for 1 month did not increase eating disorder risk, impact other aspects of mental health, or alter health behaviors including dietary intake. The null results in our study may be due to the selection of a low-risk sample; future research should explore whether there are populations for whom dietary self-monitoring is contraindicated. " Science is not easily summarized to sound bites that you can share as an image macro on social media. This is doubly true for something as difficult as nutrition.
- shusaku 5y ago
  So? That seems like exactly the population you’d want to study if your worry is that calorie counting will induce eating disorders.
  - jonex 5y ago
    Not claiming that the study itself is useless, it's important to understand how interventions affect completely healthy people, but my worry would be that it triggers eating disorders in high-risk group, that would affect wether we want to widely encourage calorie counting or just recommend it to those who specifically need it. The thread OP helpfully points out the fact that this study doesn't do much to answer that question.
knaik94 5y ago
People at risk or susceptible to an eating disorder are more likely to attach self worth to cutting calories and will use dietary self monitoring to achieve their goals. It's good that a correlation in the opposite direction lacks evidence, according to this study.
uninstantiated 5y ago
It's not surprising that merely counting calories has no effect. The idea that all calories are the same is flawed. In fact, obesity is the result of the wrong types of foods i.e. sugars which are metabolised differently by the body than other types. Sugar triggers the insulin response which leads to overeating and detrimental fluctuations in cognitive capacity and concentration. What would be more beneficial than calorie counting would be dietary education. https://scitechdaily.com/not-all-calories-are-equal-a-dietitian-explains-how-the-kinds-of-foods-you-eat-matter-to-your-body/ https://scitechdaily.com/not-all-calories-are-equal-a-dietit...
- Beaver117 5y ago
  Careful, you're summoning the CICO cult
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    Why is understanding that it’s impossible to gain wright without eating above your TDEE a cult? It’s basic thermodynamics.
    - firecall 5y ago
      I think because it's a poor message to provide people who struggle with their weight and nutrition. In fact, CICO completely neglects the nutrition aspect of what you eat. So people tend to be somewhat cavalier and claim it's easy to lose weight, it's just CICO. But that really isn't the whole story. As any actual qualified scientist in the field of nutrition will tell you. Of course you absolutely would lose weight eating under your daily calorie requirements of anything at all. However if you just ate sugar you'd probably began to lose even more weight in all the wrong ways as your body began to shut down and fail due to malnutrition! FWIW: I've been a participant on food studies with actual scientists at my local Uni :-) So the above is just what they share with me :-) YMMV :-)
      - jjoonathan 5y ago
        CICO != "Neglect Nutrition"
beebmam 5y ago
This title is incorrect and inaccurate. Please rename to: "Introducing Dietary Self-Monitoring to Undergraduate Women via a Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors: Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial"
- caaqil 5y ago
  Title is from the conclusion of the study, your suggested title exceeds the character limit or I would have already used it.
armchairhacker 5y ago
This may be a hot take, but I think the obesity crisis and that most people are overweight actually increases the prevalence of eating disorders. People don't know what a genuinely healthy body and diet/fitness regimen look like, and thinness (even extreme, unhealthy thinness) is popularized and praised as a sign of beauty and willpower because so many people are trying to lose weight and so few are trying to gain.
- knaik94 5y ago
  I believe obesity is also type of eating disorder, just towards the opposite direction to something like anorexia. Binge-eating disorder is the term used in academic studies to understand some of the underlying psychology for a part of the obesity crisis.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Anorexic here. I think this misses it a bit. People with ED’s know what a healthy body looks like. You’re talking about a population that is unhealthily obsessed with food and their body in one way or another. Like I can name the calories and macros for basically any food off the top of my head. I know the calories burnt by most common exercises and what muscles they work. I don’t even need MFP to count anymore. It’s a fun party trick. What complicates things is dysmorphia. I don’t “see” myself correctly. It’s really hard to explain but it’s kinda like something in my brain is wired wrong where my internal rendering of myself gets distorted. So then when I look at a healthy body and look at myself — even when that body is heavier than mine — my brain goes “ahh the path to go from where you are to there is to lose weight.” And I’ve had it as long as I can remember. My recovery has been learning to develop strategies to deal with when dysmorphia is particularly bad. Lotta sweatshirts, removing mirrors, and doing things in the dark along with safe foods that don’t trigger my anxiety on days when I feel disgusting. I don’t want to look underweight. I see other underweight women and know that they’re unhealthily skinny.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluecalm 5y ago
ericmcer 5y ago
I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy. I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 100s of grams of sugar every day.
- knaik94 5y ago
  Moderation in eating isn't equivalent to a minor eating disorder. I agree though that some behavior you need to do today might have been seen as symptoms of a type of disordered eating in the past. But by definition, if it's keeping you healthy, it mostly shouldn't be considered disordered. I know in the past cutting up food into very small pieces was seen as a symptom of disordered eating because the thought was that you're intentionally slowing your eating so you eat less. Today's portion sizes in the US make it mandatory to break up a pre-prepared meal or a snack into smaller pieces so each bite isn't so calorically dense. In fact, in certain contexts, cutting up food is seen as proper and having manners. If you're eating a big piece of meat, you don't grab it in your hands and chew on it, generally. You cut it up into bite sized pieces.
  - russdill 5y ago
    Really wish there was a polite and socially acceptable way to ask for a reasonable portion.
    - knaik94 5y ago
      It's both fortunate and unfortunate that I come from a culture with rich delicious food and implicit pressure from elders to never deny an extra serving or leave food on the plate. It's hard saying no to a loving aunt or grandma. And most celebrations are marked by giving deserts and sweets.
- acchow 5y ago
  The sugar only comes from eating packaged products. Buy groceries to make your own food and there's no sugar problem. Snack on vegetables and tree nuts.
Melatonic 5y ago
Is this something we need to prove a negative? Why do we assume counting calories and "dietary self monitoring" is a bad thing?
- derbOac 5y ago
  So I've worked on psychiatric units clinically, as well as in obesity-related clinics. It's not uncommon to hear things from family and other social support figures along the lines of "if X starts weighing themselves or counting calories they'll develop an eating disorder". Or even, with individuals who are anorexic to the extent that it's life threatening, and they need to be weighed etc. to gain weight, family and support individuals say things like "so and so's eating disorder is caused by them weighing themselves and counting their calories. [The staff] should just stop that because it's making the problem worse." This paper is providing some data pertaining to that. I don't monitor this literature closely but last time I touched base with it these kinds of things (monitoring weight and calories) were associated with healthier outcomes. I think it depends on the context though a bit.
jasonhansel 5y ago
Note that this is calorie counting (i.e. just tracking calories consumed), not calorie restriction (trying to consume fewer calories). The study population was mostly normal weight (average BMI of 23.1). You can read the full study here: https://sci-hub.se/uptodate/S2212267221007346.pdf https://sci-hub.se/uptodate/S2212267221007346.pdf edit: Also: an interesting fact. 1 member of the (100-person) intervention group dropped out of the study because the app "made them feel bad" (p. 3) and was thus excluded from the results. One wonders if that would happen in a larger sample size--if 1% of people have to drop out because calorie counting affects their mood so badly, that'd be an important result.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Theres a really persistent lay theory that calorie counting, weighing yourself, etc. in itself causes eating disorder. I think its used defensively to avoid health behaviors but thats a different issue. I think this persistent popular idea is what this paper was trying to address.
bluecalm 5y ago
Why would it? Most people eat too much or way too much. Eating disorders resulting in eating too little are rare in comparison and they stem from well known mental issues. Like, I don't even know how you could come up with a hypothesis that counting calories increases risk of eating disorder. The argument that most anorectic people count calories so there is correlation doesn't even work because most obese people don't so if anything "not counting calories increases risk of eating disorder" is a lot plausible observational hypothesis as there is way more obese people then anorectic people among those who don't count calories and way more obese people who don't count than anorectic people who do (both % wise and in absolute numbers).
- DanBC 5y ago
  > Like, I don't even know how you could come up with a hypothesis that counting calories increases risk of eating disorder. You've said that the weight loss is caused by the mental illness. You're ignoring all the research showing that weight loss that precedes mental illness can then cause that mental illness. The causation is complex, certainly more complex than your post suggests, and is self-reinforcing. This is why re-feeding is a core part of treatment for people with anorexia.
  - bluecalm 5y ago
    I am not ignoring it. I just don't see how counting calories can cause any of that. If you want to lose weight in obsessive way you will do so with or without counting. Knowing how much you actually it is just a useful piece of information.
jonex 5y ago
Based on the abstract, they did not show anything useful, they produce a null result, this just means that there weren't any effects large enough to be statistically significant for their sample. Weirdly, the still seem to draw a conclusion based on this null result which is really not correct. To draw the conclusion that they did they would have to show that the hypothesis that there is a clinically significant change can be discarded. Which is not mentioned in the abstract that they do.
Animats 5y ago
US obesity deaths per year: 300,000.[1] US anorexia deaths per year: 145.[2] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1448478/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1448478/ [2] http://web.simmons.edu/~turnerg/MCC/Eating%20Disorders/HewittEtAl2001.pdf http://web.simmons.edu/~turnerg/MCC/Eating%20Disorders/Hewit...
michael_kariv 5y ago
Not knowing much about what constitutes a disorder my take is this. Eating is not a goal. It is a tool. Being healthy is the goal. So if you are healthy, your eating is fine
aaron695 5y ago
giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Yes. I agree. It may be useful for the first days then people will loose interest in it because is hard to add every thing they eat. And those apps are quite useless to count the real calories of a dish.

68 points by caaqil 5y ago

engineer_22 5y ago

Monitoring my calories was one of the best things I have ever done.

dghughes 5y ago
Weight, finances, like anything tracking it makes you aware. I started counting calories eight years ago (Jan 11, 2014) I do it at the end of each day. I did find that tracking my weight (or my spending) makes me modify my behaviour. Even eating the crap I do I am more aware it it's made my weight stabilize. I can even see a bump in the graph of my weight after I buy groceries or a dip when I go for bike rides in the summer. I also see patterns of same weight for multiple days then a weight change up or down; trends. I'm not female and not obese but a slightly overweight middle-aged male with hypothyroidism (synthroid pill #1 Mar 12, 2013). So not the typical person most people would think of. But I never had an eating disorder just curiosity.

kebab 5y ago

Should keep in mind that this is for people who don't have a particular risk of eating disorder already

danuker 5y ago
The paper makes no assertions about change in risk when the risk is high.

kixiQu 5y ago

doesn't increase eating disorder incidence for undergrad women "who had not engaged in dietary self-monitoring in the past year and who were at low-risk for an eating disorder" and who were willing to sign up for this

hiptobecubic 5y ago
Honestly, I wish there was some mechanism to somehow punish authors that title their papers like a buzzfeed piece. I'm really sick of seeing things like, "Diet has no effect on BMI" and then it turns out that what they meant was that you have a lot of freedom in what you eat as long as you stay around the same total calorie intake or whatever. There's no feedback mechanism to swat these things down and it shows.
- adrianN 5y ago
  You're not supposed to read just the title, you need to read at least the abstract. It clearly states in the abstract what the conclusions are: "Conclusions: Among dietary self-monitoring naive undergraduate women with low-risk of an eating disorder, dietary self-monitoring via MyFitnessPal for 1 month did not increase eating disorder risk, impact other aspects of mental health, or alter health behaviors including dietary intake. The null results in our study may be due to the selection of a low-risk sample; future research should explore whether there are populations for whom dietary self-monitoring is contraindicated. " Science is not easily summarized to sound bites that you can share as an image macro on social media. This is doubly true for something as difficult as nutrition.
shusaku 5y ago
So? That seems like exactly the population you’d want to study if your worry is that calorie counting will induce eating disorders.
- jonex 5y ago
  Not claiming that the study itself is useless, it's important to understand how interventions affect completely healthy people, but my worry would be that it triggers eating disorders in high-risk group, that would affect wether we want to widely encourage calorie counting or just recommend it to those who specifically need it. The thread OP helpfully points out the fact that this study doesn't do much to answer that question.

knaik94 5y ago

People at risk or susceptible to an eating disorder are more likely to attach self worth to cutting calories and will use dietary self monitoring to achieve their goals. It's good that a correlation in the opposite direction lacks evidence, according to this study.

uninstantiated 5y ago

It's not surprising that merely counting calories has no effect. The idea that all calories are the same is flawed. In fact, obesity is the result of the wrong types of foods i.e. sugars which are metabolised differently by the body than other types. Sugar triggers the insulin response which leads to overeating and detrimental fluctuations in cognitive capacity and concentration. What would be more beneficial than calorie counting would be dietary education. https://scitechdaily.com/not-all-calories-are-equal-a-dietitian-explains-how-the-kinds-of-foods-you-eat-matter-to-your-body/ https://scitechdaily.com/not-all-calories-are-equal-a-dietit...

Beaver117 5y ago
Careful, you're summoning the CICO cult
- l33t2328 5y ago
  Why is understanding that it’s impossible to gain wright without eating above your TDEE a cult? It’s basic thermodynamics.
  - firecall 5y ago
    I think because it's a poor message to provide people who struggle with their weight and nutrition. In fact, CICO completely neglects the nutrition aspect of what you eat. So people tend to be somewhat cavalier and claim it's easy to lose weight, it's just CICO. But that really isn't the whole story. As any actual qualified scientist in the field of nutrition will tell you. Of course you absolutely would lose weight eating under your daily calorie requirements of anything at all. However if you just ate sugar you'd probably began to lose even more weight in all the wrong ways as your body began to shut down and fail due to malnutrition! FWIW: I've been a participant on food studies with actual scientists at my local Uni :-) So the above is just what they share with me :-) YMMV :-)
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      CICO != "Neglect Nutrition"

beebmam 5y ago

This title is incorrect and inaccurate. Please rename to: "Introducing Dietary Self-Monitoring to Undergraduate Women via a Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors: Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial"

caaqil 5y ago
Title is from the conclusion of the study, your suggested title exceeds the character limit or I would have already used it.

armchairhacker 5y ago

This may be a hot take, but I think the obesity crisis and that most people are overweight actually increases the prevalence of eating disorders. People don't know what a genuinely healthy body and diet/fitness regimen look like, and thinness (even extreme, unhealthy thinness) is popularized and praised as a sign of beauty and willpower because so many people are trying to lose weight and so few are trying to gain.

knaik94 5y ago
I believe obesity is also type of eating disorder, just towards the opposite direction to something like anorexia. Binge-eating disorder is the term used in academic studies to understand some of the underlying psychology for a part of the obesity crisis.
Spivak 5y ago
Anorexic here. I think this misses it a bit. People with ED’s know what a healthy body looks like. You’re talking about a population that is unhealthily obsessed with food and their body in one way or another. Like I can name the calories and macros for basically any food off the top of my head. I know the calories burnt by most common exercises and what muscles they work. I don’t even need MFP to count anymore. It’s a fun party trick. What complicates things is dysmorphia. I don’t “see” myself correctly. It’s really hard to explain but it’s kinda like something in my brain is wired wrong where my internal rendering of myself gets distorted. So then when I look at a healthy body and look at myself — even when that body is heavier than mine — my brain goes “ahh the path to go from where you are to there is to lose weight.” And I’ve had it as long as I can remember. My recovery has been learning to develop strategies to deal with when dysmorphia is particularly bad. Lotta sweatshirts, removing mirrors, and doing things in the dark along with safe foods that don’t trigger my anxiety on days when I feel disgusting. I don’t want to look underweight. I see other underweight women and know that they’re unhealthily skinny.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bluecalm 5y ago

ericmcer 5y ago

I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy. I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 100s of grams of sugar every day.

knaik94 5y ago
Moderation in eating isn't equivalent to a minor eating disorder. I agree though that some behavior you need to do today might have been seen as symptoms of a type of disordered eating in the past. But by definition, if it's keeping you healthy, it mostly shouldn't be considered disordered. I know in the past cutting up food into very small pieces was seen as a symptom of disordered eating because the thought was that you're intentionally slowing your eating so you eat less. Today's portion sizes in the US make it mandatory to break up a pre-prepared meal or a snack into smaller pieces so each bite isn't so calorically dense. In fact, in certain contexts, cutting up food is seen as proper and having manners. If you're eating a big piece of meat, you don't grab it in your hands and chew on it, generally. You cut it up into bite sized pieces.
- russdill 5y ago
  Really wish there was a polite and socially acceptable way to ask for a reasonable portion.
  - knaik94 5y ago
    It's both fortunate and unfortunate that I come from a culture with rich delicious food and implicit pressure from elders to never deny an extra serving or leave food on the plate. It's hard saying no to a loving aunt or grandma. And most celebrations are marked by giving deserts and sweets.
acchow 5y ago
The sugar only comes from eating packaged products. Buy groceries to make your own food and there's no sugar problem. Snack on vegetables and tree nuts.

Melatonic 5y ago

Is this something we need to prove a negative? Why do we assume counting calories and "dietary self monitoring" is a bad thing?

derbOac 5y ago
So I've worked on psychiatric units clinically, as well as in obesity-related clinics. It's not uncommon to hear things from family and other social support figures along the lines of "if X starts weighing themselves or counting calories they'll develop an eating disorder". Or even, with individuals who are anorexic to the extent that it's life threatening, and they need to be weighed etc. to gain weight, family and support individuals say things like "so and so's eating disorder is caused by them weighing themselves and counting their calories. [The staff] should just stop that because it's making the problem worse." This paper is providing some data pertaining to that. I don't monitor this literature closely but last time I touched base with it these kinds of things (monitoring weight and calories) were associated with healthier outcomes. I think it depends on the context though a bit.

jasonhansel 5y ago

Note that this is calorie counting (i.e. just tracking calories consumed), not calorie restriction (trying to consume fewer calories). The study population was mostly normal weight (average BMI of 23.1). You can read the full study here: https://sci-hub.se/uptodate/S2212267221007346.pdf https://sci-hub.se/uptodate/S2212267221007346.pdf edit: Also: an interesting fact. 1 member of the (100-person) intervention group dropped out of the study because the app "made them feel bad" (p. 3) and was thus excluded from the results. One wonders if that would happen in a larger sample size--if 1% of people have to drop out because calorie counting affects their mood so badly, that'd be an important result.

derbOac 5y ago
Theres a really persistent lay theory that calorie counting, weighing yourself, etc. in itself causes eating disorder. I think its used defensively to avoid health behaviors but thats a different issue. I think this persistent popular idea is what this paper was trying to address.

bluecalm 5y ago

Why would it? Most people eat too much or way too much. Eating disorders resulting in eating too little are rare in comparison and they stem from well known mental issues. Like, I don't even know how you could come up with a hypothesis that counting calories increases risk of eating disorder. The argument that most anorectic people count calories so there is correlation doesn't even work because most obese people don't so if anything "not counting calories increases risk of eating disorder" is a lot plausible observational hypothesis as there is way more obese people then anorectic people among those who don't count calories and way more obese people who don't count than anorectic people who do (both % wise and in absolute numbers).

DanBC 5y ago
> Like, I don't even know how you could come up with a hypothesis that counting calories increases risk of eating disorder. You've said that the weight loss is caused by the mental illness. You're ignoring all the research showing that weight loss that precedes mental illness can then cause that mental illness. The causation is complex, certainly more complex than your post suggests, and is self-reinforcing. This is why re-feeding is a core part of treatment for people with anorexia.
- bluecalm 5y ago
  I am not ignoring it. I just don't see how counting calories can cause any of that. If you want to lose weight in obsessive way you will do so with or without counting. Knowing how much you actually it is just a useful piece of information.

jonex 5y ago

Based on the abstract, they did not show anything useful, they produce a null result, this just means that there weren't any effects large enough to be statistically significant for their sample. Weirdly, the still seem to draw a conclusion based on this null result which is really not correct. To draw the conclusion that they did they would have to show that the hypothesis that there is a clinically significant change can be discarded. Which is not mentioned in the abstract that they do.

Animats 5y ago

US obesity deaths per year: 300,000.[1] US anorexia deaths per year: 145.[2] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1448478/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1448478/ [2] http://web.simmons.edu/~turnerg/MCC/Eating%20Disorders/HewittEtAl2001.pdf http://web.simmons.edu/~turnerg/MCC/Eating%20Disorders/Hewit...

michael_kariv 5y ago

Not knowing much about what constitutes a disorder my take is this. Eating is not a goal. It is a tool. Being healthy is the goal. So if you are healthy, your eating is fine

aaron695 5y ago

giuliomagnifico 5y ago

Yes. I agree. It may be useful for the first days then people will loose interest in it because is hard to add every thing they eat. And those apps are quite useless to count the real calories of a dish.