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People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

286 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

3abiton 2y ago
This could be the reason why nutrition "science" is so fragmented. There is no way to ensure the process is being conducted correctly.
f1shy 2y ago
Just a couple of days ago, I wrote I automatically flag any submission with any kind of "dietary" studies. I'm not saying there is no one study well done, but doing it well, is just (almost) impracticable. Not only the people have literally no idea what they eat, they forget and misreport, also a human living normal life in the society has just TOO MANY variables. There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
- Sebb767 2y ago
  > There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study. Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but it's still an important field of study and we need to make progress in some way.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    It only averages out if the factors are unrelated though. If a lot of asians eat rice and don’t have a high alcohol tolerance, your study would still show a correlation between eating rice and alcohol tolerance when looking at every single person on earth.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    >Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. No they won't. If you have two correlated factors and only measure one of them you can easily get to totally wrong conclusions. If you have a food that is more often eaten by people doing a lot of sports, you will measure that eating that food is correlated with being more healthy. But it would obviously be fallacious to conclude that this food is more beneficial to health than other foods.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    > Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. In the case of dietary studies, not really. There are a few factors which are known to have a big effect on your health--being wealthy, active, and moderate in particular--and a lot of the big studies are really just uncovering yet another proxy for those factors. Of course, you can turn that around and make the realization that your diet doesn't really matter: there's no diet that will magically make up for being a couch potato. And outside the main well-known interventions (e.g., eating less calories), the solution is generally to just be more active and things like that rather than trying to tweak your diet.
  - f1shy 2y ago
    No if they correlate strongly: people eating more vegetables are more likely to do sport, and care about sleeping. Not to mention visiting a doctor much often. That is just one example.
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      Yeah this is a major issue. The first study that reports a link between some specific thing and health pollutes the data for all follow-up studies, because the folks that care the most about their health are going to change their behavior based on it. So after that you will always see a correlation with all the other things that have been reported to be healthy.
  - skirge 2y ago
    Compare people with vegetarian diet from India (over 1 billion, a good sample!) with European meat eaters, what will be the conclusions? Do effects "average out"? Or people drinking alcohol with millions of muslims? There are some obvious criteria which should be used for example divide people in age, income and cultural groups (my grandfather used to eat and did different things I did, including avoiding doctors, despite living in same country and even same home).
- bluGill 2y ago
  I have long said there are two kinds of diet studies: those that don't apply to you because you are not confined to a hospital bed or prison cell; and those that conclude despite our best effort we couldn't get people to eat their assigned diet.
  - chikere232 2y ago
    So what you're saying there's a great business opportunity in people paying to get locked in a diet-cell?
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Maybe, though I suspect there are probably a lot of laws around what you can and cannot do so better get several good lawyers to check what the laws really are around this. Drug treatment programs often work like this so that is the first place to look for laws to watch out for. I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus so that if you want to leave you have to go through a formal withdrawal process - while waiting for the bus - during which they convince you to stay). They then not only control your diet they also give you exercise (often lead by military drill instructors) thus being a healthier environment than a diet cell. I have no idea how much money they make.
      - f1shy 2y ago
        But even if the people will be confined, you have to be careful to take a broad enough population. I can expect people willing to participate in such study maybe are already orthorexic diet freaks? Or very poor people (which have a diet deviated from “mean”) Doing studies with humans ist just hard!
        bluGill 2y ago
        The topic has changed from a study to a self selected set of people who want to lose weight badly enough they are willing to pay to be confined in some setting where they cannot access food outside of what is given to them, and they are forced to follow an exercise plan of your (not their) choosing. You can of course study these people, but the only study anyone is interesting in is how different changes in conditions affect how much people lose and how much money you can get out of them.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  We decided that our analytic tech was good enough to figure out that smoking and pollution were bad for us despite infinite confounders. Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.
BoxFour 2y ago
Does this actually pose an issue for most studies? This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y. For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison. Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.
- bluGill 2y ago
  most people are embarrassed about the truth. So they will over report vegetables while not mentioning how much alcohol or tobacco they had (or illegal drugs which the study probably legally must report to the police). Or a self proclaimed vegetarian will not report meat they ate despite their claim. fat people will report they skipped desert.
  - graemep 2y ago
    I came across a comment as a humorous rule of thumb for this. 1. If you ask someone who much the drink double the answer 2. If you ask them how much the smoke, multiply the answer by five 3. If you ask them how often they have sex, divide the answer by 10.
  - BoxFour 2y ago
    Why would that be a problem for reporting relative results if the entire population is doing that? If everyone is under-reporting their alcohol consumption, that seems fine. The absolute numbers will be way off, the relative numbers to their peers won't.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Statistics can do a lot to find data from noise like this, but it is still noise. The biggest issue is nobody knows what variables are important, which are correlated, and so on. Edit: there is another issue I forget until now: time. Statistically I have several more decades of life left. So even if you get accurate results of my meals yesterday, you need to report when I died, and you probably won't have the meals for the rest of my life. Did some meal I at when I was 10 have a big effect on my life? For that matter if I know you are tracking just one day's meals I will probably eat what I think is better and that doesn't tell you anything about what I eat the rest of the time. It is easy to track people who have had a heart attack - they are likely to die of another heart attack in a few years so the study times are short. However does having had a heart attack mean either genetic difference such that your results only apply to a subset of the population, or perhaps some other factor of having had a heart attack.
Iulioh 2y ago
I'm basically tracking anything that i eat with...too much precision I always wondered if i could volunteer for this types of studies somehow
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
guerrilla 2y ago
I just weight and scan erything. The only problem is eating out. Mobile apps make this very easy today. They should be using them and scales that automatically report, with photo documentation, etc. Skip self-reporting and go straight to self-measuring.
- XorNot 2y ago
  Do you have scales which self-report because this has been on my wish list for a while now? It seems like it should exist: scales with a BLE read out that dumps out the value after a number has been stable, and flags it if I hit a button on the scale. There's a whole range of products here which seem like they should exist but just don't (but I hardly want to do a hardware startup).
  - the1HOknocks 2y ago
    I do this with the Xiaomi Mi Scale 2. You can connect it to Home Assistant. Once it has a stable reading, it auto-submits, but there's no button for flagging, although you could potentially build this yourself. I never had to connect the scale to the internet; it just worked with Bluetooth
TypingOutBugs 2y ago
I try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it’s a lot of effort. Eat out and you’re screwed (estimated at best). When you include sauces and oils etc it’s really hard to be accurate in the best of times, and it’s just a pain to keep on top of. Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count. I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.
- elektrolite 2y ago
  I think being consistently inaccurate helps. If you always get the same thing at a certain restaurant, you can start by giving your best estimate of the calories in that meal. Then if your average weight doesn't move in the direction you want you can adjust your target calories to compensate.
  - FriedrichN 2y ago
    That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week. I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.
    - manfre 2y ago
      Healthy foods are not healthy in an excessive quantity. Diets don't need to be tracked to the individual calorie. We don't burn the same amount l number of calories each day and food labels show an average of the nutritional value. If a person is consistent, they will achieve the desired result; either gaining or losing weight. I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's feasible.
alexfromapex 2y ago
I thought this was generally known that people are bad at reporting most things about themselves. It's a good argument in favor of wearables or other smart monitors, if anyone expects to do actual rigorous research it needs to be objective.
pards 2y ago
> many studies of nutritional epidemiology that try to link dietary exposures to disease outcomes are founded on really dodgy data I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction. For example, do people typically underreport junk food and overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  While far from being a potential silver bullet, I do wonder if continuous glucose monitoring could help with this. Your food log shows you didn't eat anything between noon and six in the evening but the glucose monitor shows a spike at 2PM? Your diet app could ask if you forgot to log something around that time. Maybe you want for a long walk aside while it was cold and that was the cause. Unless the question is asked, the tracking data for that time period will be questionable.
thefz 2y ago
Everything needs to be weighted on a precise scale, every ingredient and not just the macros. On top of that the reported nutrition values on labels can be wrong by a large margin so for not whole foods, we introduce an error. This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
- oersted 2y ago
  I find the way we measure calories very interesting: place the food in a metal box filled with oxygen, immerse the box in water, make the food explode so that it combusts completely, and finally measure how much the water heats up. Rather crude and fun, but that's it, see Bomb Calorimeter. I guess it makes sense in retrospect, how else would you do it? They usually just measure standard basic ingredients, then you roughly match them to your recipe and add it up. No wonder food labelling is just a ballpark.
  - djtango 2y ago
    I'm not convinced calorimetry is particularly useful for any nuanced diet planning. We can't eat wood (or coal) but they're very calorific when measured via bomb calorimetry.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      I was thinking of methane as input. But what about it as output? How much does leave the system? And should this not be in calories "out" column, but I don't think that is usually counted there...
      - djtango 2y ago
        Could you elaborate on what you mean? What does methane have to do with this and what is the "out" column? Calorimetry is just measuring the heat transfer from combustion, usually by measuring the temperature change of a known quantity of water in the classical experiment. You perform versions of it in high school and undergrad Calories are just a unit of energy, and heat can be related back to energy (joules for people using SI)
lm28469 2y ago
> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways. If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
- tomrod 2y ago
  You reduce the uncertainty of the remaining 20 by substantially increasing sample size across a randomly selected sample. Unfortunately for these studies you have multiple selection criteria that are nonrandom: (1) interest in the study (2) adherence to protocol of the study (3) reporting back in If nutrition science wants to be serious, their N should not be in the 10s but rather the 10,000s. That has an expense, but for important things it is absolutely the right thing to do.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    Until they track absolutely everything including each trial subject microbiome, hormone profile, &co over time, I still feel it just won't cut it. Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one specific gene combination or one specific microbiome mix. Which means you'd have to go through the same regimen of analysing and tracking all the parameters for yourself for it to be applicable
    - tomrod 2y ago
      Actually, this is why stats exists in the first place. Larger samples (including metastudies) are so powerful -- you can measure and predict causal impact of test factors even if you can't control for unobservables. The goal is to minimize type 1 and type 2 error. So long as those unobservables are not driving a selection bias, you get wonderful things like the central limit theorem coming to the rescue. No one can monitor or measure everything, whether philosophically (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) or prosaically (cost). But if something is true, we can often probe it enough to get at least a low-res idea of the nature of it. This moves us light years ahead of primarily using our personal experience, gut, and vibe to establish epistemologically sound assertions.
aziaziazi 2y ago
For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?: - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat) - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  For sauces, I either use a bottled sauce if I really want to stick to macros, or I try to make the exact same recipe each time and then I can select my previously created logged item in the diet app.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    That's really key. I've had great success with calorie tracking, but the first few weeks always sucks until I have my regulars figured out, then it becomes a lot easier. Afterwards, it's just a matter of repetition and measuring.
- jjj123 2y ago
  For me I mostly just try to log the high macro and/or calorie items. Like if I make a Caesar dressing I’m mostly counting the oil and if I’m being really meticulous I’ll measure the Parmesan and anchovy content. But I’ll ignore the 2tbsp lemon juice, garlic, mustard, etc. since it’s counting so little towards the totals I care about. If you’re trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not work for you, though.
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
The benefits of the Minnesota Starvation Study were that both food intake and physical activity could be accurately tracked. If we had a draft and there were conscientious objectors, would similar studies be possible as alternative service? I suspect that our ethical concerns now are greater than they were back then, so maybe it wouldn't be possible to conduct.
damnesian 2y ago
This is why sleep studies are conducted in clinics, not left to patients to self-report. they want accurate data? They will need to conduct a real study, portion the meals out themselves, give people a schedule.
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  Such studies do exist - randomized feeding trials. In these studies the participants are provided all meals and snacks, and sometimes are under constant surveillance for weeks and sometimes months on end. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/ Obviously such studies are far more invasive and expensive to run than the classic "fill out of a survey" observational study [1], so they tend to be the outliers. But they exist and have incredibly useful results. [1] There is a widely cited nutritional survey vehicle called the Nurses' Health Study, and it is the foundation of countless largely disposable nutrition clickbait results. This survey-based observation has been used to prove that meat is bad for you, and good for you. That artificial sweeteners make you thinner, and fatter. And on and on. That single "every now and then try to remember the kinds of things you ate over the past period of time" survey is the root of an incredible amount of noise in nutrition science.
  - augustk 2y ago
    Prisons seem like good places to make these kind of studies.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Prisons give you the control needed, but prisons generally are not realistic to how people could live their lives. When you are locked in a cell most of the day that limits movement (in ways different from an office where people get up to go to meetings and the like). Prisons will get you your 20 minutes a day of exercise, but it isn't representative of how most people will exercise (even counting only those who go to the gym). As such you can get a lot of data but it is unknown which data applies to normal people who live lives in ways that are likely different in ways that matter.
drchiu 2y ago
Another way to look at it is that tracking what you eat is very difficult. Currently trying to lose a few pounds and doing calorie tracking. Practically carry a scale and a calorie tracking app with me. About once a day there's still some "estimation" involved due to the fact that all the ingredients are mixed together.
- skerit 2y ago
  Indeed. I also tracked everything I ate for a long time, many years ago. As soon as you eat something made by someone else you're basically guessing.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    Statistics work in your favor here though: at 2,000 kcal a day over a month, you'll consume 56,000 kcal total. So the question isn't whether any given thing was or wasn't some value - it's how much of a buffer is in your "unknown" chunk of that month that you're not winding up way out. Like if you just tracked the things you can track, and noted the number of occurrences you didn't, then your end of the month weight will tell you whether you're overshooting or not, and you can estimate what proportion the "unknowns" might represent (and whether you should put a conscious effort into reducing them.
  - nraf 2y ago
    The estimating is often enough to make better choices. I know I’m not going to be able to eat my main, a couple slices of pizza, one or two entrees and a dessert with only 800 calories left in my budget. Sure, I might be somewhat off in my estimate, but in practice, I might forgo the entrees and dessert (or share a bite from someone else), set some of my main aside to take home, and have a slice of pizza.
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    Then write it down as x2-x2.5 of what you'd expect. Better to eat less the following day than overeat.
Refusing23 2y ago
thats a problem for research that relies on food questionaires and thats been known for a while, and probably why there's even a thing called 'the french paradox' and so on. but i get it it's expensive to do properly, and so its not really done that often, and when it happens there's usually only a few participants.
amelius 2y ago
Can't this be solved with camera plus AI? I'd be surprised if some startup isn't already working on it.
- Mathnerd314 2y ago
  There are apps, but they are incredibly inaccurate. For starters, they don't recognize the food right. Usually you have to pick from a menu of 10 items. Then they have to estimate a 3D quantity (volume) from a 2D image, then they have to estimate the density... the amazing thing though is despite all this, they are still more accurate than recall diaries.
- kol09 2y ago
  [dead]
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
There is no problem with dietary research. The 'problem' is by design. Both people doing the research and people funding the research know very well that what the flaw of this approach is, but just chose to do the shoddy job that they do because it brings in money. If it's not by design then there is a worse conclusion - the researchers/funders are incompetent. It's most likely a mix of incompetence/corruption.
varispeed 2y ago
Ideally we should find where in the brain is the calorie counter and just expose its value through an endpoint and have an app to call it.
giantg2 2y ago
Seems like a decent use of AI if we could use something like Glass to scan the label and plate to estimate calories and stuff. You could even record those portions to be used for audit.
- jjcob 2y ago
  ChatGPT does a surprisingly good job of estimating calories from a picture of your plate. Especially if you add details that are hard to tell from the picture.
FredPret 2y ago
We're far too generous with what we allow to be called "science". There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time. Practical and ethical problems abound. Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a simulation and that only from the neck down. Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science tutorials with more statistical rigor.
- _dark_matter_ 2y ago
  There are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on. Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop more and better causal inference models that improve over time.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already fall under regular biology. The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems. Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
    - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
      It sounds like your describing models. Yes we have small models. Yes we have big models. We have rat models, we have matching models, we have twin models. We have lots of models I don't know about. I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
jfbaro 2y ago
I was wondering if there’s a way to automatically measure calorie intake—like some kind of biosensor that could be worn on the body. Companies are investigating this I bet!
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Camera monitoring what goes to mouth combined with AI?
- ttoinou 2y ago
  you don't put energy into your body
everdrive 2y ago
A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs. This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it. (as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
- 2cynykyl 2y ago
  Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
  - keybored 2y ago
    [deleted]
    - 2y ago
DannyBee 2y ago
"> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions" These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :( Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale. Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc. Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines. Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies. Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results. It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful. It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.
- bluGill 2y ago
  It is an important question because people want to think whatever their vice is, it is good for them. Thus you can make lots of money if you can get a headline showing something is good, no matter how bad the study is.
fortran77 2y ago
There's have been several studies, well researched and cited, where people who claim to be "diet resistant" are given metabolic markers "double labeled water" that will accurately show caloric intake. For example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701 and https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.2001.281.5.E891 https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.200... In the NEJM article they note that every single person who claimed to be "diet resistant" was lying about food intake. > The main finding of this study is that failure to lose weight despite a self-reported low caloric intake can be explained by substantial misreporting of food intake and physical activity. The underreporting of food intake by the subjects in group 1 even occurred 24 hours after a test meal eaten under standardized conditions. In contrast, values for total energy expenditure, resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, and thermic response to exercise were comparable with those of obese subjects in group 2 who did not report a history of diet resistance. and > In addition to their greater degree of misreporting, the subjects in group 1 used thyroid medication more often, had a stronger belief that their obesity was caused by genetic and metabolic factors and not by overeating, and reported less hunger and disinhibition and more cognitive restraint than did the subjects in group 2. Subjects presenting for weight-control therapy who had these findings in association with a history of self-reported diet resistance would clearly convey the impression that a low metabolic rate caused their obesity. Calories-in/Calories-out is true for everyone, and everyone can lose weight by putting down his fork.
throw78311 2y ago
I've heard about using food tracking apps as a planner instead. Instead of logging what you ate, you add what you PLAN to eat for the day, and adjust accordingly to fulfill the nutrition requirements.
Havoc 2y ago
It’s also just really hard unless you live off packaged meals or only eat thing that are isolated. Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
- bluGill 2y ago
  For an individual trying to lose weight this isn't a problem - if you are not losing then you just need to eat less. For population level trying to figure out if curry is healthy in the first place this matters though (is it curry itself that is good/bad, one of the spices, or how much sweetener added - if all we know is curry that isn't helpful)
- bitwize 2y ago
  No, you get a food scale and weight every single ingredient before adding it to the meal. As for who got how many calories, weighing of the portions should provide that information given the ingredients and how much of each there is. Your metabolism is a system. Like any system, data about its inputs and outputs can be gathered if you would but measure it. Make getting accurate portion sizes a part of your daily routine.
lt_snuffles 2y ago
I feel bad for suggesting this, but what about using prison population for researching dietary science? Every single part of their life is controlled. As long as it's humane (stuff like coffee vs no coffee).
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  They're not guaranteed to eat what they are served - unless you're going to do force feeding as well. So it's still not great.
- bluGill 2y ago
  This has been done. However prisoners have very different activity levels - they are confined to a cell for 20 hours a day. Office works get up a lot more often and generally are in the office less hours.
- keybored 2y ago
  A certain prison industrial complex does not need more incentives.
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
The bigger problem with dietary research is that it does not take human diversity and genetics into account. See : Genetics, Nutrition, and Health: A New Frontier in Disease Prevention https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27697061.2023.2284997 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27697061.2023.22...
agos 2y ago
and let's not forget the garbage data you find in the database used by all the calorie counting apps, which make it a chore and a challenge even when you weigh everything
wnorris510 2y ago
I've done research in this space for many years at Google AI and now at SnapCalorie. The thing I find interesting is how confident people are in their ability to estimate portion size visually, and in truth how wrong they all are. We published in CVPR (top peer reviewed academic conference for computer vision) and people are on average off by 53% and even trained professionals are still off by 40%. Basically if you want to have a higher level of accuracy you need to use a food scale or something that measure the volume of food, people just can't estimate portion sizes visually. Oils, cooking fats, hidden ingredients are what people are most concerned about but they actually add far less error to people's tracking than portion. Nutrition5k is the paper we published if you want to check out more details on the breakdown of error most people get when tracking.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  >and even trained professionals are still off by 40% I find this very hard to believe, unless the term “trained professional” is quite broad. When I was much more into fitness and weighed every meal to the gram, I could tell if a bowl of cereal was a serving to within a gram or two.
  - ses1984 2y ago
    Isn’t that a bit of a special case because you know your cereal and you know your bowls? What about some cooked foods like meats which can vary in density and shape when raw, and also vary even further due to inconsistency in cooking, with more or less moisture cooked off? It’s possible to calibrate your estimates, but if you haven’t done that, it’s probably safe to assume you’re not particularly accurate.
    - wnorris510 2y ago
      There is definitely a lot of variation in density, moisture content, fat percentage between regions, cuts, cooking amounts and methods. IMO using an average number here is probably best because to some extent it's hopeless to account for all of these things. Most people don't stay consistent in tracking long enough for any of this to matter, so really it's about what is the most accurate approach to achieve your goal and sustain longer term.
JoeAltmaier 2y ago
People are bad at reporting ANYTHING. Exercise, food, sex, grooming. Just ask a lawyer or anybody trying to get a story out of somebody. This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  Yeah the problem seem to be the researchers in the first place here, they're probably in a hurry to produce papers with supposedly real data. Or maybe the researchers know all this from years working in this field, the problem might be from those simplifying the research for the public
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Generalising, this is one of the lessons of the past ~2 centuries in which we've had for the first time reasonably objective analogic recording capabilities: photography, phonography, cinema, and the like. Until their emergence, human testimony across a wide range of phenomena was the only way to transmit information and, due to its low fidelity, low information density, unreliable interpretation and unreliable reproduction, that was at best only modestly reliable. A fantastic example of this (in numerous senses) is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), made from second-hand reports and sketches. On the one hand, it doesn't look true to life, but on the other, specific features of the animal are recorded with remarkable accuracy --- the segmentation of body plates, horns, toes, and aspect of the eyes for example. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros>. And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert. Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.
shadowtree 2y ago
As someone who just lost 35 pounds through clean dieting: All calorie/portion numbers on packaged food are off by 10-20%. I set MyFitnessTracker to 1.5k calories (deficit for my build) and for weeks nothing would budge - even with strict portion control and weighing everything, plus 800 extra cals spent through exercise. Once I went to "1250" calories, I started losing weight. Went from to 205 to 175 pounds. With packaged food I mean anything like cream cheese, various sides, etc. - not pre-built meals (I assume those would be off by 50%). What weighing your food really does, is reveal how shockingly little you actually should be eating. I switched to small plates for all meals, as using the normal large ones was pointless and slightly de-motivating. But yeah, it's just calories. No matter what you eat.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  Another more sensible explanation is that the calorie theory is fully wrong and unscientific, despite using numbers and measurements (it sounds very mathy though)
zahlman 2y ago
While the article may have been published today, putting "self-reported food intake" into a search engine shows me that this is not at all a new finding. I would have considered it common knowledge, even. The entire reason people can conjure the mental image of a stereotypical obsessed dieter, weighing every morsel of food and looking it up in tables, is because everyone else has barely any idea what their intake looks like.
paul7986 2y ago
Have used chatGPT for about a year to count my daily calorie in-take . Since I eat out daily at fairly healthy places (Cava, Panera, chic fil a only grilled nuggets & fruit cups, Jersey Mikes number 7 mini, noodles & company, MOD pizza) GPT knows their menu & each items calories. Upon getting the food I just tell GPT what I'm about to eat each time and it counts & retains and calculates through the day. In doing so as adult male (late 40s) 5'10 175 my body has gotten used to eating 1500 to 2k calories a day. Do weigh myself daily to ensure I'm not gaining as I do have a cheat day once a week. I understand the sodium content is higher then if I cooked at home but I'm focused on maintaining a fit look & counting calories along with a few weekly gym visits I think keeps me as I seek.
cainxinth 2y ago
In my experience, people are especially bad at understanding how calorific alcohol is. Carbs and protein are generally 4 calories per gram. Alcohol is 7 calories per gram. Only fat is more energy dense at 9 calories per gram. I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter option for people watching their weight -- even though all unflavored hard liquor has no carbs and is still incredibly calorific.
- aqme28 2y ago
  It's why you don't really see any beer below like 90-100 Calories, despite all the "low calorie" beer marketing there is out there.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Alcohol is a tricky one, because its calories are an especially bad way of measuring impact on energy and weight. It is kind of like measuring the calories of wood. It burns well, so it has a high calories, but metabolizes poorly. A block of wood is about 400 kCal/100g. Ethanol has 1325 kJ/mol of energy. If the reaction stops part way through the metabolic pathways, which happens because acetic acid is excreted in the urine after drinking, then not nearly as much energy can be derived from alcohol, only 215.1 kJ/mol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabo...
jmount 2y ago
I tried to use some dietary research as data examples in machine learning training courses. After running into self reporting (which I naively thought would be the exception, not the rule) I changed the my use of such sources to class discussions around reporting such as the following: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/brian-wansink-cornell-food-brand-lab-retractions-jama https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/br...
UomoNeroNero 2y ago
Have you ever wondered why it’s such a struggle for a diabetic to manage blood sugar levels in a sensible way? Here’s the answer. I assure you that anyone with diabetes is forced (and the word "forced" doesn’t fully convey the mental burden involved) to maintain an almost obsessive level of awareness about what they eat. There’s no comparison to someone simply “on a diet.” I guarantee you, it’s an incredibly complex task. Unless one adopts a monastic approach of always eating exactly the same carefully measured meals at home, the challenge is constant. If one day a system based on vision and AI could accomplish this task (and it can't, it’s impossible), it could charge any price and have millions of users.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Any research or studies based on self-reporting or interviews should be very suspect. Most people will answer or report what they think the researcher wants to hear, or what they think will make them "look good" even if the responses are anonymous.
idontwantthis 2y ago
My successful weight loss approach is to give up on counting calories and focus entirely on my own weight. I set a goal weight for the week, and if I weigh more than that, I don’t eat (or eat just vegetables). I’ve lost 5 kg so far and I maintained the weight loss between thanksgiving and new year’s despite spikes on the holidays. It’s taught me what proper portions feel like so I don’t have a desire to rebound as soon as I take a break.
dacox 2y ago
It's an open secret that most nutrition research is of extremely low quality - almost all relying on decades old self reported nutritional questionnaires. Sometimes dozens of these studies get wrapped up and analyzed together, and we headlines that THING IS BAD with a hazard ratio of like 1.05 (we figured out smoking was bad with a hazard ratio that was like 3! - you need a really good signal when you are analyzing such low quality data)
Fricken 2y ago
The thing is we're all experts at eating food, we've all been doing it our whole lives. You'd think in that time one would have cultivated an intuition about whether they are eating too much or too little regardless of the nutrition information.
- sethhochberg 2y ago
  Constant and plentiful supplies of food are, on an evolutionary scale, a somewhat recent thing. Agriculture itself is what, around 12k years old - a few hundred generations? We're all experts at eating food but having an instinctual understanding of exactly when to stop eating was probably much less important historically.
  - Fricken 2y ago
    Cavemen could tell the difference between feast and famine and so can we. It doesn't mean we can control ourselves. I don't believe the crux of the problem is related to the information on the nutrition label, or how accurately we read it. My theory is counting calories offers a convenient apparatus with which to perform some mental gymnastics when rationalizing why one is not actually eating too much when deep down one knows they eating too much. All the emotional reasons for eating too much are messy and we would rather not deal with them. The connection between mood and gut can be quite strong, and can vary wildly from one person to another.
qingcharles 2y ago
I remember when I was researching illegal medical experimentation on prisoners in the USA, I found a quote from a researcher saying "one of the reasons we prefer to use prisoners is because we know exactly what they do and what they eat every single day."
pluto_modadic 2y ago
This reminds me, out of the one app I *actually want* to be addictive, food tracking apps NEVER are.
arionhardison 2y ago
I had some success here by gamifying the reporting process and breaking it into sessions of compliance .. "just do this for ever".
dredmorbius 2y ago
Points of measurement are a challenging issue. One of the ... beyond annoying ... aspects of our track-everything-individuals-do-and-utilise-it-against-them contemporary information ecology is that it is so painfully difficult to make use of that information for personal advantage. In the specific case of food intake, it should be reasonably trivial to aggregate purchase information, at grocery stores, restaurants, and online deliveries, and at least arrive at a reasonable baseline of total consumption. Rather than having to fill out a food diary from memory with uncertain measurments, one can rely on grocery and menu receipts directly. This is more useful for those who live alone or shop for themselves (a large fraction of the population, but far from complete). It's based on the general principle that you tend to eat what you buy. There's some error imposed by food acquired elsewhere (shared at work, school, from friends, etc.), and of tossed food, but what you'll arrive at is over time a pretty accurate record of intake. I'm surprised that such methods aren't more widely used or reported in both dietary management and research. My own personal experience has been that I've been most successful in dietary management when 1) I have direct control over shopping and 2) I focus far more on what I eat than how much, though some of the latter applies. If I'm aware that specific foods are deleterious to goals (highly-processed, junk foods, high-caloric / high-sugar liquids, etc), then the most effective control point at minimum decision cost is at the store. If you don't buy crisps, chips, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ice cream, and the like, it's not at the house for you to consume. I'm well aware that there are circumstances in which this is difficult to arrange, sometimes with friends or roommates, more often with families. I'll only say that clearly expressing terms and boundaries is tremendously useful here.
worthless-trash 2y ago
My wife takes pictures of -everything- she eats, I'm sure she's not alone in this behavior. I can't eat until the photo is taken, and its a good one. They just need to tap these people. Its a real problem when I'm hungry.
EPWN3D 2y ago
The prevalence of self-reported studies in the nutrition world is a great hint that the field of study is deeply unserious. It's full of quack practitioners who know they can get clicks by torturing the data from a poorly-constructed study, because there's always some innumerate journalist who just needs to get some clicks to make their editor happy.
NoPicklez 2y ago
Right off the bat I'd already say its challenging to get people to calorie count and journal their food intake, unless they're nutritionists or dietitians. I've never gone down the calorie counting route because it seems so fraught with error, plus it would also get exhausting. Particularly when you're eating food you didn't prepare.
kol09 2y ago
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286 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

This could be the reason why nutrition "science" is so fragmented. There is no way to ensure the process is being conducted correctly.

f1shy 2y ago

Just a couple of days ago, I wrote I automatically flag any submission with any kind of "dietary" studies. I'm not saying there is no one study well done, but doing it well, is just (almost) impracticable. Not only the people have literally no idea what they eat, they forget and misreport, also a human living normal life in the society has just TOO MANY variables. There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.

Sebb767 2y ago
> There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study. Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but it's still an important field of study and we need to make progress in some way.
- echoangle 2y ago
  It only averages out if the factors are unrelated though. If a lot of asians eat rice and don’t have a high alcohol tolerance, your study would still show a correlation between eating rice and alcohol tolerance when looking at every single person on earth.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. No they won't. If you have two correlated factors and only measure one of them you can easily get to totally wrong conclusions. If you have a food that is more often eaten by people doing a lot of sports, you will measure that eating that food is correlated with being more healthy. But it would obviously be fallacious to conclude that this food is more beneficial to health than other foods.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  > Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. In the case of dietary studies, not really. There are a few factors which are known to have a big effect on your health--being wealthy, active, and moderate in particular--and a lot of the big studies are really just uncovering yet another proxy for those factors. Of course, you can turn that around and make the realization that your diet doesn't really matter: there's no diet that will magically make up for being a couch potato. And outside the main well-known interventions (e.g., eating less calories), the solution is generally to just be more active and things like that rather than trying to tweak your diet.
- f1shy 2y ago
  No if they correlate strongly: people eating more vegetables are more likely to do sport, and care about sleeping. Not to mention visiting a doctor much often. That is just one example.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Yeah this is a major issue. The first study that reports a link between some specific thing and health pollutes the data for all follow-up studies, because the folks that care the most about their health are going to change their behavior based on it. So after that you will always see a correlation with all the other things that have been reported to be healthy.
- skirge 2y ago
  Compare people with vegetarian diet from India (over 1 billion, a good sample!) with European meat eaters, what will be the conclusions? Do effects "average out"? Or people drinking alcohol with millions of muslims? There are some obvious criteria which should be used for example divide people in age, income and cultural groups (my grandfather used to eat and did different things I did, including avoiding doctors, despite living in same country and even same home).
bluGill 2y ago
I have long said there are two kinds of diet studies: those that don't apply to you because you are not confined to a hospital bed or prison cell; and those that conclude despite our best effort we couldn't get people to eat their assigned diet.
- chikere232 2y ago
  So what you're saying there's a great business opportunity in people paying to get locked in a diet-cell?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Maybe, though I suspect there are probably a lot of laws around what you can and cannot do so better get several good lawyers to check what the laws really are around this. Drug treatment programs often work like this so that is the first place to look for laws to watch out for. I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus so that if you want to leave you have to go through a formal withdrawal process - while waiting for the bus - during which they convince you to stay). They then not only control your diet they also give you exercise (often lead by military drill instructors) thus being a healthier environment than a diet cell. I have no idea how much money they make.
    - f1shy 2y ago
      But even if the people will be confined, you have to be careful to take a broad enough population. I can expect people willing to participate in such study maybe are already orthorexic diet freaks? Or very poor people (which have a diet deviated from “mean”) Doing studies with humans ist just hard!
      - bluGill 2y ago
        The topic has changed from a study to a self selected set of people who want to lose weight badly enough they are willing to pay to be confined in some setting where they cannot access food outside of what is given to them, and they are forced to follow an exercise plan of your (not their) choosing. You can of course study these people, but the only study anyone is interesting in is how different changes in conditions affect how much people lose and how much money you can get out of them.
hombre_fatal 2y ago
We decided that our analytic tech was good enough to figure out that smoking and pollution were bad for us despite infinite confounders. Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.

BoxFour 2y ago

Does this actually pose an issue for most studies? This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y. For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison. Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.

bluGill 2y ago
most people are embarrassed about the truth. So they will over report vegetables while not mentioning how much alcohol or tobacco they had (or illegal drugs which the study probably legally must report to the police). Or a self proclaimed vegetarian will not report meat they ate despite their claim. fat people will report they skipped desert.
- graemep 2y ago
  I came across a comment as a humorous rule of thumb for this. 1. If you ask someone who much the drink double the answer 2. If you ask them how much the smoke, multiply the answer by five 3. If you ask them how often they have sex, divide the answer by 10.
- BoxFour 2y ago
  Why would that be a problem for reporting relative results if the entire population is doing that? If everyone is under-reporting their alcohol consumption, that seems fine. The absolute numbers will be way off, the relative numbers to their peers won't.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Statistics can do a lot to find data from noise like this, but it is still noise. The biggest issue is nobody knows what variables are important, which are correlated, and so on. Edit: there is another issue I forget until now: time. Statistically I have several more decades of life left. So even if you get accurate results of my meals yesterday, you need to report when I died, and you probably won't have the meals for the rest of my life. Did some meal I at when I was 10 have a big effect on my life? For that matter if I know you are tracking just one day's meals I will probably eat what I think is better and that doesn't tell you anything about what I eat the rest of the time. It is easy to track people who have had a heart attack - they are likely to die of another heart attack in a few years so the study times are short. However does having had a heart attack mean either genetic difference such that your results only apply to a subset of the population, or perhaps some other factor of having had a heart attack.

Iulioh 2y ago

I'm basically tracking anything that i eat with...too much precision I always wondered if i could volunteer for this types of studies somehow

deleted 2y ago
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guerrilla 2y ago

I just weight and scan erything. The only problem is eating out. Mobile apps make this very easy today. They should be using them and scales that automatically report, with photo documentation, etc. Skip self-reporting and go straight to self-measuring.

XorNot 2y ago
Do you have scales which self-report because this has been on my wish list for a while now? It seems like it should exist: scales with a BLE read out that dumps out the value after a number has been stable, and flags it if I hit a button on the scale. There's a whole range of products here which seem like they should exist but just don't (but I hardly want to do a hardware startup).
- the1HOknocks 2y ago
  I do this with the Xiaomi Mi Scale 2. You can connect it to Home Assistant. Once it has a stable reading, it auto-submits, but there's no button for flagging, although you could potentially build this yourself. I never had to connect the scale to the internet; it just worked with Bluetooth

TypingOutBugs 2y ago

I try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it’s a lot of effort. Eat out and you’re screwed (estimated at best). When you include sauces and oils etc it’s really hard to be accurate in the best of times, and it’s just a pain to keep on top of. Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count. I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.

elektrolite 2y ago
I think being consistently inaccurate helps. If you always get the same thing at a certain restaurant, you can start by giving your best estimate of the calories in that meal. Then if your average weight doesn't move in the direction you want you can adjust your target calories to compensate.
- FriedrichN 2y ago
  That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week. I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.
  - manfre 2y ago
    Healthy foods are not healthy in an excessive quantity. Diets don't need to be tracked to the individual calorie. We don't burn the same amount l number of calories each day and food labels show an average of the nutritional value. If a person is consistent, they will achieve the desired result; either gaining or losing weight. I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's feasible.

alexfromapex 2y ago

I thought this was generally known that people are bad at reporting most things about themselves. It's a good argument in favor of wearables or other smart monitors, if anyone expects to do actual rigorous research it needs to be objective.

pards 2y ago

> many studies of nutritional epidemiology that try to link dietary exposures to disease outcomes are founded on really dodgy data I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction. For example, do people typically underreport junk food and overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?

Mountain_Skies 2y ago
While far from being a potential silver bullet, I do wonder if continuous glucose monitoring could help with this. Your food log shows you didn't eat anything between noon and six in the evening but the glucose monitor shows a spike at 2PM? Your diet app could ask if you forgot to log something around that time. Maybe you want for a long walk aside while it was cold and that was the cause. Unless the question is asked, the tracking data for that time period will be questionable.

thefz 2y ago

Everything needs to be weighted on a precise scale, every ingredient and not just the macros. On top of that the reported nutrition values on labels can be wrong by a large margin so for not whole foods, we introduce an error. This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.

oersted 2y ago
I find the way we measure calories very interesting: place the food in a metal box filled with oxygen, immerse the box in water, make the food explode so that it combusts completely, and finally measure how much the water heats up. Rather crude and fun, but that's it, see Bomb Calorimeter. I guess it makes sense in retrospect, how else would you do it? They usually just measure standard basic ingredients, then you roughly match them to your recipe and add it up. No wonder food labelling is just a ballpark.
- djtango 2y ago
  I'm not convinced calorimetry is particularly useful for any nuanced diet planning. We can't eat wood (or coal) but they're very calorific when measured via bomb calorimetry.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    I was thinking of methane as input. But what about it as output? How much does leave the system? And should this not be in calories "out" column, but I don't think that is usually counted there...
    - djtango 2y ago
      Could you elaborate on what you mean? What does methane have to do with this and what is the "out" column? Calorimetry is just measuring the heat transfer from combustion, usually by measuring the temperature change of a known quantity of water in the classical experiment. You perform versions of it in high school and undergrad Calories are just a unit of energy, and heat can be related back to energy (joules for people using SI)

lm28469 2y ago

> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways. If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.

tomrod 2y ago
You reduce the uncertainty of the remaining 20 by substantially increasing sample size across a randomly selected sample. Unfortunately for these studies you have multiple selection criteria that are nonrandom: (1) interest in the study (2) adherence to protocol of the study (3) reporting back in If nutrition science wants to be serious, their N should not be in the 10s but rather the 10,000s. That has an expense, but for important things it is absolutely the right thing to do.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Until they track absolutely everything including each trial subject microbiome, hormone profile, &co over time, I still feel it just won't cut it. Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one specific gene combination or one specific microbiome mix. Which means you'd have to go through the same regimen of analysing and tracking all the parameters for yourself for it to be applicable
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Actually, this is why stats exists in the first place. Larger samples (including metastudies) are so powerful -- you can measure and predict causal impact of test factors even if you can't control for unobservables. The goal is to minimize type 1 and type 2 error. So long as those unobservables are not driving a selection bias, you get wonderful things like the central limit theorem coming to the rescue. No one can monitor or measure everything, whether philosophically (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) or prosaically (cost). But if something is true, we can often probe it enough to get at least a low-res idea of the nature of it. This moves us light years ahead of primarily using our personal experience, gut, and vibe to establish epistemologically sound assertions.

aziaziazi 2y ago

For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?: - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat) - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.

yurishimo 2y ago
For sauces, I either use a bottled sauce if I really want to stick to macros, or I try to make the exact same recipe each time and then I can select my previously created logged item in the diet app.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  That's really key. I've had great success with calorie tracking, but the first few weeks always sucks until I have my regulars figured out, then it becomes a lot easier. Afterwards, it's just a matter of repetition and measuring.
jjj123 2y ago
For me I mostly just try to log the high macro and/or calorie items. Like if I make a Caesar dressing I’m mostly counting the oil and if I’m being really meticulous I’ll measure the Parmesan and anchovy content. But I’ll ignore the 2tbsp lemon juice, garlic, mustard, etc. since it’s counting so little towards the totals I care about. If you’re trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not work for you, though.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

The benefits of the Minnesota Starvation Study were that both food intake and physical activity could be accurately tracked. If we had a draft and there were conscientious objectors, would similar studies be possible as alternative service? I suspect that our ethical concerns now are greater than they were back then, so maybe it wouldn't be possible to conduct.

damnesian 2y ago

This is why sleep studies are conducted in clinics, not left to patients to self-report. they want accurate data? They will need to conduct a real study, portion the meals out themselves, give people a schedule.

llm_nerd 2y ago
Such studies do exist - randomized feeding trials. In these studies the participants are provided all meals and snacks, and sometimes are under constant surveillance for weeks and sometimes months on end. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/ Obviously such studies are far more invasive and expensive to run than the classic "fill out of a survey" observational study [1], so they tend to be the outliers. But they exist and have incredibly useful results. [1] There is a widely cited nutritional survey vehicle called the Nurses' Health Study, and it is the foundation of countless largely disposable nutrition clickbait results. This survey-based observation has been used to prove that meat is bad for you, and good for you. That artificial sweeteners make you thinner, and fatter. And on and on. That single "every now and then try to remember the kinds of things you ate over the past period of time" survey is the root of an incredible amount of noise in nutrition science.
- augustk 2y ago
  Prisons seem like good places to make these kind of studies.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Prisons give you the control needed, but prisons generally are not realistic to how people could live their lives. When you are locked in a cell most of the day that limits movement (in ways different from an office where people get up to go to meetings and the like). Prisons will get you your 20 minutes a day of exercise, but it isn't representative of how most people will exercise (even counting only those who go to the gym). As such you can get a lot of data but it is unknown which data applies to normal people who live lives in ways that are likely different in ways that matter.

drchiu 2y ago

Another way to look at it is that tracking what you eat is very difficult. Currently trying to lose a few pounds and doing calorie tracking. Practically carry a scale and a calorie tracking app with me. About once a day there's still some "estimation" involved due to the fact that all the ingredients are mixed together.

skerit 2y ago
Indeed. I also tracked everything I ate for a long time, many years ago. As soon as you eat something made by someone else you're basically guessing.
- XorNot 2y ago
  Statistics work in your favor here though: at 2,000 kcal a day over a month, you'll consume 56,000 kcal total. So the question isn't whether any given thing was or wasn't some value - it's how much of a buffer is in your "unknown" chunk of that month that you're not winding up way out. Like if you just tracked the things you can track, and noted the number of occurrences you didn't, then your end of the month weight will tell you whether you're overshooting or not, and you can estimate what proportion the "unknowns" might represent (and whether you should put a conscious effort into reducing them.
- nraf 2y ago
  The estimating is often enough to make better choices. I know I’m not going to be able to eat my main, a couple slices of pizza, one or two entrees and a dessert with only 800 calories left in my budget. Sure, I might be somewhat off in my estimate, but in practice, I might forgo the entrees and dessert (or share a bite from someone else), set some of my main aside to take home, and have a slice of pizza.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  Then write it down as x2-x2.5 of what you'd expect. Better to eat less the following day than overeat.

Refusing23 2y ago

thats a problem for research that relies on food questionaires and thats been known for a while, and probably why there's even a thing called 'the french paradox' and so on. but i get it it's expensive to do properly, and so its not really done that often, and when it happens there's usually only a few participants.

amelius 2y ago

Can't this be solved with camera plus AI? I'd be surprised if some startup isn't already working on it.

Mathnerd314 2y ago
There are apps, but they are incredibly inaccurate. For starters, they don't recognize the food right. Usually you have to pick from a menu of 10 items. Then they have to estimate a 3D quantity (volume) from a 2D image, then they have to estimate the density... the amazing thing though is despite all this, they are still more accurate than recall diaries.
kol09 2y ago
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dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

There is no problem with dietary research. The 'problem' is by design. Both people doing the research and people funding the research know very well that what the flaw of this approach is, but just chose to do the shoddy job that they do because it brings in money. If it's not by design then there is a worse conclusion - the researchers/funders are incompetent. It's most likely a mix of incompetence/corruption.

varispeed 2y ago

Ideally we should find where in the brain is the calorie counter and just expose its value through an endpoint and have an app to call it.

giantg2 2y ago

Seems like a decent use of AI if we could use something like Glass to scan the label and plate to estimate calories and stuff. You could even record those portions to be used for audit.

jjcob 2y ago
ChatGPT does a surprisingly good job of estimating calories from a picture of your plate. Especially if you add details that are hard to tell from the picture.

FredPret 2y ago

We're far too generous with what we allow to be called "science". There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time. Practical and ethical problems abound. Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a simulation and that only from the neck down. Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science tutorials with more statistical rigor.

_dark_matter_ 2y ago
There are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on. Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop more and better causal inference models that improve over time.
- FredPret 2y ago
  OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already fall under regular biology. The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems. Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
  - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
    It sounds like your describing models. Yes we have small models. Yes we have big models. We have rat models, we have matching models, we have twin models. We have lots of models I don't know about. I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.

jfbaro 2y ago

I was wondering if there’s a way to automatically measure calorie intake—like some kind of biosensor that could be worn on the body. Companies are investigating this I bet!

Ekaros 2y ago
Camera monitoring what goes to mouth combined with AI?
ttoinou 2y ago
you don't put energy into your body

everdrive 2y ago

A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs. This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it. (as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)

2cynykyl 2y ago
Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
- keybored 2y ago
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DannyBee 2y ago

"> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions" These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :( Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale. Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc. Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines. Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies. Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results. It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful. It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.

bluGill 2y ago
It is an important question because people want to think whatever their vice is, it is good for them. Thus you can make lots of money if you can get a headline showing something is good, no matter how bad the study is.

fortran77 2y ago

There's have been several studies, well researched and cited, where people who claim to be "diet resistant" are given metabolic markers "double labeled water" that will accurately show caloric intake. For example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701 and https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.2001.281.5.E891 https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.200... In the NEJM article they note that every single person who claimed to be "diet resistant" was lying about food intake. > The main finding of this study is that failure to lose weight despite a self-reported low caloric intake can be explained by substantial misreporting of food intake and physical activity. The underreporting of food intake by the subjects in group 1 even occurred 24 hours after a test meal eaten under standardized conditions. In contrast, values for total energy expenditure, resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, and thermic response to exercise were comparable with those of obese subjects in group 2 who did not report a history of diet resistance. and > In addition to their greater degree of misreporting, the subjects in group 1 used thyroid medication more often, had a stronger belief that their obesity was caused by genetic and metabolic factors and not by overeating, and reported less hunger and disinhibition and more cognitive restraint than did the subjects in group 2. Subjects presenting for weight-control therapy who had these findings in association with a history of self-reported diet resistance would clearly convey the impression that a low metabolic rate caused their obesity. Calories-in/Calories-out is true for everyone, and everyone can lose weight by putting down his fork.

throw78311 2y ago

I've heard about using food tracking apps as a planner instead. Instead of logging what you ate, you add what you PLAN to eat for the day, and adjust accordingly to fulfill the nutrition requirements.

Havoc 2y ago

It’s also just really hard unless you live off packaged meals or only eat thing that are isolated. Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc

bluGill 2y ago
For an individual trying to lose weight this isn't a problem - if you are not losing then you just need to eat less. For population level trying to figure out if curry is healthy in the first place this matters though (is it curry itself that is good/bad, one of the spices, or how much sweetener added - if all we know is curry that isn't helpful)
bitwize 2y ago
No, you get a food scale and weight every single ingredient before adding it to the meal. As for who got how many calories, weighing of the portions should provide that information given the ingredients and how much of each there is. Your metabolism is a system. Like any system, data about its inputs and outputs can be gathered if you would but measure it. Make getting accurate portion sizes a part of your daily routine.

lt_snuffles 2y ago

I feel bad for suggesting this, but what about using prison population for researching dietary science? Every single part of their life is controlled. As long as it's humane (stuff like coffee vs no coffee).

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
They're not guaranteed to eat what they are served - unless you're going to do force feeding as well. So it's still not great.
bluGill 2y ago
This has been done. However prisoners have very different activity levels - they are confined to a cell for 20 hours a day. Office works get up a lot more often and generally are in the office less hours.
keybored 2y ago
A certain prison industrial complex does not need more incentives.

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

The bigger problem with dietary research is that it does not take human diversity and genetics into account. See : Genetics, Nutrition, and Health: A New Frontier in Disease Prevention https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27697061.2023.2284997 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27697061.2023.22...

agos 2y ago

and let's not forget the garbage data you find in the database used by all the calorie counting apps, which make it a chore and a challenge even when you weigh everything

wnorris510 2y ago

I've done research in this space for many years at Google AI and now at SnapCalorie. The thing I find interesting is how confident people are in their ability to estimate portion size visually, and in truth how wrong they all are. We published in CVPR (top peer reviewed academic conference for computer vision) and people are on average off by 53% and even trained professionals are still off by 40%. Basically if you want to have a higher level of accuracy you need to use a food scale or something that measure the volume of food, people just can't estimate portion sizes visually. Oils, cooking fats, hidden ingredients are what people are most concerned about but they actually add far less error to people's tracking than portion. Nutrition5k is the paper we published if you want to check out more details on the breakdown of error most people get when tracking.

LPisGood 2y ago
>and even trained professionals are still off by 40% I find this very hard to believe, unless the term “trained professional” is quite broad. When I was much more into fitness and weighed every meal to the gram, I could tell if a bowl of cereal was a serving to within a gram or two.
- ses1984 2y ago
  Isn’t that a bit of a special case because you know your cereal and you know your bowls? What about some cooked foods like meats which can vary in density and shape when raw, and also vary even further due to inconsistency in cooking, with more or less moisture cooked off? It’s possible to calibrate your estimates, but if you haven’t done that, it’s probably safe to assume you’re not particularly accurate.
  - wnorris510 2y ago
    There is definitely a lot of variation in density, moisture content, fat percentage between regions, cuts, cooking amounts and methods. IMO using an average number here is probably best because to some extent it's hopeless to account for all of these things. Most people don't stay consistent in tracking long enough for any of this to matter, so really it's about what is the most accurate approach to achieve your goal and sustain longer term.

JoeAltmaier 2y ago

People are bad at reporting ANYTHING. Exercise, food, sex, grooming. Just ask a lawyer or anybody trying to get a story out of somebody. This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.

ttoinou 2y ago
Yeah the problem seem to be the researchers in the first place here, they're probably in a hurry to produce papers with supposedly real data. Or maybe the researchers know all this from years working in this field, the problem might be from those simplifying the research for the public
dredmorbius 2y ago
Generalising, this is one of the lessons of the past ~2 centuries in which we've had for the first time reasonably objective analogic recording capabilities: photography, phonography, cinema, and the like. Until their emergence, human testimony across a wide range of phenomena was the only way to transmit information and, due to its low fidelity, low information density, unreliable interpretation and unreliable reproduction, that was at best only modestly reliable. A fantastic example of this (in numerous senses) is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), made from second-hand reports and sketches. On the one hand, it doesn't look true to life, but on the other, specific features of the animal are recorded with remarkable accuracy --- the segmentation of body plates, horns, toes, and aspect of the eyes for example. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros>. And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert. Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.

shadowtree 2y ago

As someone who just lost 35 pounds through clean dieting: All calorie/portion numbers on packaged food are off by 10-20%. I set MyFitnessTracker to 1.5k calories (deficit for my build) and for weeks nothing would budge - even with strict portion control and weighing everything, plus 800 extra cals spent through exercise. Once I went to "1250" calories, I started losing weight. Went from to 205 to 175 pounds. With packaged food I mean anything like cream cheese, various sides, etc. - not pre-built meals (I assume those would be off by 50%). What weighing your food really does, is reveal how shockingly little you actually should be eating. I switched to small plates for all meals, as using the normal large ones was pointless and slightly de-motivating. But yeah, it's just calories. No matter what you eat.

ttoinou 2y ago
Another more sensible explanation is that the calorie theory is fully wrong and unscientific, despite using numbers and measurements (it sounds very mathy though)

zahlman 2y ago

While the article may have been published today, putting "self-reported food intake" into a search engine shows me that this is not at all a new finding. I would have considered it common knowledge, even. The entire reason people can conjure the mental image of a stereotypical obsessed dieter, weighing every morsel of food and looking it up in tables, is because everyone else has barely any idea what their intake looks like.

paul7986 2y ago

Have used chatGPT for about a year to count my daily calorie in-take . Since I eat out daily at fairly healthy places (Cava, Panera, chic fil a only grilled nuggets & fruit cups, Jersey Mikes number 7 mini, noodles & company, MOD pizza) GPT knows their menu & each items calories. Upon getting the food I just tell GPT what I'm about to eat each time and it counts & retains and calculates through the day. In doing so as adult male (late 40s) 5'10 175 my body has gotten used to eating 1500 to 2k calories a day. Do weigh myself daily to ensure I'm not gaining as I do have a cheat day once a week. I understand the sodium content is higher then if I cooked at home but I'm focused on maintaining a fit look & counting calories along with a few weekly gym visits I think keeps me as I seek.

cainxinth 2y ago

In my experience, people are especially bad at understanding how calorific alcohol is. Carbs and protein are generally 4 calories per gram. Alcohol is 7 calories per gram. Only fat is more energy dense at 9 calories per gram. I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter option for people watching their weight -- even though all unflavored hard liquor has no carbs and is still incredibly calorific.

aqme28 2y ago
It's why you don't really see any beer below like 90-100 Calories, despite all the "low calorie" beer marketing there is out there.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
Alcohol is a tricky one, because its calories are an especially bad way of measuring impact on energy and weight. It is kind of like measuring the calories of wood. It burns well, so it has a high calories, but metabolizes poorly. A block of wood is about 400 kCal/100g. Ethanol has 1325 kJ/mol of energy. If the reaction stops part way through the metabolic pathways, which happens because acetic acid is excreted in the urine after drinking, then not nearly as much energy can be derived from alcohol, only 215.1 kJ/mol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabo...

jmount 2y ago

I tried to use some dietary research as data examples in machine learning training courses. After running into self reporting (which I naively thought would be the exception, not the rule) I changed the my use of such sources to class discussions around reporting such as the following: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/brian-wansink-cornell-food-brand-lab-retractions-jama https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/br...

UomoNeroNero 2y ago

Have you ever wondered why it’s such a struggle for a diabetic to manage blood sugar levels in a sensible way? Here’s the answer. I assure you that anyone with diabetes is forced (and the word "forced" doesn’t fully convey the mental burden involved) to maintain an almost obsessive level of awareness about what they eat. There’s no comparison to someone simply “on a diet.” I guarantee you, it’s an incredibly complex task. Unless one adopts a monastic approach of always eating exactly the same carefully measured meals at home, the challenge is constant. If one day a system based on vision and AI could accomplish this task (and it can't, it’s impossible), it could charge any price and have millions of users.

SoftTalker 2y ago

Any research or studies based on self-reporting or interviews should be very suspect. Most people will answer or report what they think the researcher wants to hear, or what they think will make them "look good" even if the responses are anonymous.

idontwantthis 2y ago

My successful weight loss approach is to give up on counting calories and focus entirely on my own weight. I set a goal weight for the week, and if I weigh more than that, I don’t eat (or eat just vegetables). I’ve lost 5 kg so far and I maintained the weight loss between thanksgiving and new year’s despite spikes on the holidays. It’s taught me what proper portions feel like so I don’t have a desire to rebound as soon as I take a break.

dacox 2y ago

It's an open secret that most nutrition research is of extremely low quality - almost all relying on decades old self reported nutritional questionnaires. Sometimes dozens of these studies get wrapped up and analyzed together, and we headlines that THING IS BAD with a hazard ratio of like 1.05 (we figured out smoking was bad with a hazard ratio that was like 3! - you need a really good signal when you are analyzing such low quality data)

Fricken 2y ago

The thing is we're all experts at eating food, we've all been doing it our whole lives. You'd think in that time one would have cultivated an intuition about whether they are eating too much or too little regardless of the nutrition information.

sethhochberg 2y ago
Constant and plentiful supplies of food are, on an evolutionary scale, a somewhat recent thing. Agriculture itself is what, around 12k years old - a few hundred generations? We're all experts at eating food but having an instinctual understanding of exactly when to stop eating was probably much less important historically.
- Fricken 2y ago
  Cavemen could tell the difference between feast and famine and so can we. It doesn't mean we can control ourselves. I don't believe the crux of the problem is related to the information on the nutrition label, or how accurately we read it. My theory is counting calories offers a convenient apparatus with which to perform some mental gymnastics when rationalizing why one is not actually eating too much when deep down one knows they eating too much. All the emotional reasons for eating too much are messy and we would rather not deal with them. The connection between mood and gut can be quite strong, and can vary wildly from one person to another.

qingcharles 2y ago

I remember when I was researching illegal medical experimentation on prisoners in the USA, I found a quote from a researcher saying "one of the reasons we prefer to use prisoners is because we know exactly what they do and what they eat every single day."

pluto_modadic 2y ago

This reminds me, out of the one app I *actually want* to be addictive, food tracking apps NEVER are.

arionhardison 2y ago

I had some success here by gamifying the reporting process and breaking it into sessions of compliance .. "just do this for ever".

dredmorbius 2y ago

Points of measurement are a challenging issue. One of the ... beyond annoying ... aspects of our track-everything-individuals-do-and-utilise-it-against-them contemporary information ecology is that it is so painfully difficult to make use of that information for personal advantage. In the specific case of food intake, it should be reasonably trivial to aggregate purchase information, at grocery stores, restaurants, and online deliveries, and at least arrive at a reasonable baseline of total consumption. Rather than having to fill out a food diary from memory with uncertain measurments, one can rely on grocery and menu receipts directly. This is more useful for those who live alone or shop for themselves (a large fraction of the population, but far from complete). It's based on the general principle that you tend to eat what you buy. There's some error imposed by food acquired elsewhere (shared at work, school, from friends, etc.), and of tossed food, but what you'll arrive at is over time a pretty accurate record of intake. I'm surprised that such methods aren't more widely used or reported in both dietary management and research. My own personal experience has been that I've been most successful in dietary management when 1) I have direct control over shopping and 2) I focus far more on what I eat than how much, though some of the latter applies. If I'm aware that specific foods are deleterious to goals (highly-processed, junk foods, high-caloric / high-sugar liquids, etc), then the most effective control point at minimum decision cost is at the store. If you don't buy crisps, chips, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ice cream, and the like, it's not at the house for you to consume. I'm well aware that there are circumstances in which this is difficult to arrange, sometimes with friends or roommates, more often with families. I'll only say that clearly expressing terms and boundaries is tremendously useful here.

worthless-trash 2y ago

My wife takes pictures of -everything- she eats, I'm sure she's not alone in this behavior. I can't eat until the photo is taken, and its a good one. They just need to tap these people. Its a real problem when I'm hungry.

EPWN3D 2y ago

The prevalence of self-reported studies in the nutrition world is a great hint that the field of study is deeply unserious. It's full of quack practitioners who know they can get clicks by torturing the data from a poorly-constructed study, because there's always some innumerate journalist who just needs to get some clicks to make their editor happy.

NoPicklez 2y ago

Right off the bat I'd already say its challenging to get people to calorie count and journal their food intake, unless they're nutritionists or dietitians. I've never gone down the calorie counting route because it seems so fraught with error, plus it would also get exhausting. Particularly when you're eating food you didn't prepare.

kol09 2y ago

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