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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 t

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.
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    Oh I would only weigh things raw - if we’re talking about guessing the portion sizes at a restaurant for example, you might say I’m cooked. I wonder how good an ML model might be at that task. Maybe given a photograph of the plate and the menu description.
- watwut 2y ago
  There is no profession that would require you to estimate portion sizes up to grams visually. So, trained professional will be someone who was trained in something different - a doctor for example. I guess, maybe cooks should have the best precision for this.
- acomms 2y ago
  I think they're suggesting that the portions you are judging have not been practiced hundreds of times.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wnorris510 2y ago
  If you have a known bowl and fill it to a known position every day with the same type of food, then you can probably do better than the average for that specific meal. In our research we've found a majority of calories for most people come from when they're eating out and consuming new dishes where they don't know the ingredients or portion sizes. In the study we gave people a variety of dishes to make their estimate on, some they were familiar with, some they were not. The professionals were nutritionists who had trained in portion size estimation and were shown 2D images on a computer screen. For what it's worth, we've had a lot of people who have claimed to be very accurate at portion size estimation from a long history of using a kitchen scale. We've paid many of them to do a quiz to see if they're above average accuracy and they have almost always ended up around 40% accuracy or worse.
  - shawabawa3 2y ago
    estimating from a photograph is always going to have huge error because you just cannot know e.g. the size of the plate without some external reference
    - wnorris510 2y ago
      Modern phones have LiDAR that give you the near exact volume and dimensions of everything on a plate. That's what we do: https://www.snapcalorie.com/ https://www.snapcalorie.com/ We co-authored a paper on this with Google AI and showed it got about 2x the accuracy of a nutritionist because of it.
  - maeil 2y ago
    I'd love to do such a quiz -I might even be willing to pay for the privilege! I'm quite convinced I'm really accurate at calorie estimation without using a scale but would love to be proven wrong. Zero food industry experience here, just from reading hundreds of food labels per year since very young, maybe 8 years old. Thinking about it again, I'll probably do a lot worse from a picture because I can't have a bite of the food! Just having a spoon makes it so much easier in terms of ratios.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  If you read the paper it’s pretty easy to see what they mean by this. They tested “4 professional nutritionists”. I don’t know if nutritionists get any special training at estimating portion size but my guess would be they do not.
  - wnorris510 2y ago
    Some do, some do not. We put them through a standard portion size training course regardless to be sure.
m_ke 2y ago
At Bitesnap we were surprised at how much interest there was from researchers to use our app for diet tracking. It turns out giving people a piece of paper to write “grilled cheese sandwich for lunch” is not a scalable and reliable way to collect research quality data. We even worked with USDA on putting together a food logging dataset: https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A_Benchmark_Dataset_of_Food_Photos_with_Food_Records_for_Evaluation_of_Computer_Vision_Algorithms_in_the_Context_of_Dietary_Assessment/24856449 https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A...
- wnorris510 2y ago
  We've also been surprised at SnapCalorie how many researchers have approached us to use the app for more accurate diet tracking for medical study participants. The LiDAR based portion size has been a huge draw for them. If anyone wants to check out our app or research its on our site: https://www.snapcalorie.com/ https://www.snapcalorie.com/ PS: Bitesnap was an awesome app!
  - nitwit005 2y ago
    Feels kind of incredible that something as advanced as laser imaging is being used to measure sandwich size.
- mtntreks 2y ago
  This doesn't surprise me. Just trying to keep track of calories for myself stupid things like supersized slices of bread becoming common in stores can really throw off my expected calorie counts. It seems like this can completely throw off any attempt at figuring out nutrition from an app or research perspective.
- felideon 2y ago
  What happened to your app? I was on such a research team (Scripps) that used your app for the study (PROGRESS).
  - m_ke 2y ago
taeric 2y ago
This goes a long way to further convince me that it is portion sizes in the US. Having traveled, it is quite absurd to see the difference in standard order sizes. Even for zero calorie things like water and unsweetened teas/coffees. You just get smaller cups. I'm not even sure you can get a US large in Japan for most drinks?
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  I don’t see why it would be bad to get more water to drink
  - taeric 2y ago
    I didn't mean to imply it was. My point was that everything is smaller.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    There's actually something of a stereotype that Japanese places will give you unreasonably small portions of water with meals. (Dogen plays off this in some of his videos.) But then, I think it's only been Americans I heard this from, so.
    - taeric 2y ago
      Ha! I hadn't heard of this before, so it caught me completely off guard. The coffee was the one that really surprised me. Order a coffee and get a 6-8oz cup. With nothing on the menu to indicate you can get a 12-16oz. Was surprising. (Not bad, mind. Just surprising.)
    - dfxm12 2y ago
      In both my trips to Japan (one recent, one 20yrs ago), I never noticed this, and I think I drink a lot of water in general, and especially as a tourist because I'm doing much more walking.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      The free water cup in a lot of places in the US is like a 6oz slosh now.
marinmania 2y ago
I highly recommend people get a food scale/measuring cups and weighing everything single thing they eat (even small things like nuts and cooking oil) for at least two weeks. After that I think you have a much better appreciation for how many calories your regular meals and snacks have.
- dailykoder 2y ago
  I counted calories and put everything on a scale, for about 2 or 3 months in 2022 (iirc). And you are 100% right. I had absolutely no idea how much calories some food has. There were a lot of things, but I think cashews were my biggest eye opener (probably obvious to a lot of people). I easily achieved my goal of -10kg and saved A LOT of money, because I always had food prepared. And since I was going for a calorie deficit, I easily could afford a few sweets on the weekend. Then I obviously got lazy. And while I sometimes still think I can estimate how much I am eating, I am probably wrong, because my bathroom scale says something different. My key takeaway is that it takes quite a bit of effort, but once you got into a routine, it's not hard. Edit: Also, while I might have tried to ditch "wasted calories", I didn't put too much effort in eating healthy. One step at a time.
  - dutchbookmaker 2y ago
    Nuts are so deceptive. I love almonds and because I love them so much, if I don't portion them out then I end up eating 2-3X the calories that I thought I did so easily. I pretty much eat 1k calories per day during the week and then 2-3k on the weekend. It took constant lowering of calories over a year to get to this point but being hungry just feels normal and natural for me. There must be something with fat adaption going on as I never feel low on energy. Eating during the week has been completely divorced from a pleasurable activity to me too. Chicken breast, nuts, vegetables, not much else during the week. It is just easy at this point for me to wait to eat for pleasure on the weekend.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
      Might be a good idea, but I'm constantly concerned when I eat chicken breast every meal of the week. I'd rather use legumes, but chicken breast is so low on calories...
mrgaro 2y ago
I downloaded SnapCalorie to try it out on Android. I went all the way through the sign-up phase, only to discovery that I would need to activate subscription in order to have the 7-day trial. Ended up uninstalling the app :(
- wnorris510 2y ago
  We're an early stage startup and the models are expensive, we're trying to get the price as low as possible, but yes we need to charge to cover costs right now. Sorry about that! You might get a yearly discount offer that is less than $2/month if you get lucky (A/B test split). But that's less than the cost of running the model for people, so hopefully others will consider paying full price.
  - ploynog 2y ago
    I think the complaint is that you only get told that you require a paid plan AFTER signing up. At least on a brief look on the Play Store page and your website, it does not immediately mention it prominently. That seems like a very dark pattern and is, honestly, pretty scummy.
    - DrillShopper 2y ago
      It doesn't seem like - it is Which makes it par for the course in the scam that is mobile development
    - wnorris510 2y ago
      This is not a dark pattern, it's just a constraint that the app stores place on the pricing disclosure that is very non-intuitive. You have to mark your app as "free" to download if you charge a recurring subscription fee. You can only mark it as paid if there is a one time fee to download the app. Our FAQ and pricing pages all list that it is a paid only app. All of our ads explain that it's subscription based. Anyone who asks we're very transparent about it. If there's somewhere else where you think we can list it to make it more clear I'm happy to add it, just not sure where that would be.
tejohnso 2y ago
> you need to use a food scale or something that measure the volume of food Isn't that obvious? Basic high school science projects would have students using measuring devices. Are you saying that it's common for nutritional studies to tell people to eyeball their portions and that is then used as actual data? I see from the article "Nutritional epidemiology studies typically ask people to keep a food diary or complete questionnaires about their intake over the past 24 hours, a week, or even several months." I find that hard to believe. How could any study like that be taken seriously? That's like having someone stand at a street corner for an hour and observe the population to then come up with an average BMI for the neighbourhood.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I would wager that just paying attention to, and thinking about what someone eats has a decent impact on their health - so it feels like it's working, and like your estimates are accurate. After all - once you started doing it, you started losing weight/building muscle/achieving whatever result.
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    Which is a reason why keeping a food diary is an often recommended technique for changing your diet and eating healthier.
  - ellisv 2y ago
    Yes, the mere act of monitoring (including self-monitoring) leads to behavioral change. This alone can be sufficient for some people.
    - jacobr1 2y ago
      One factor is just the sheer volume of snacks and treats - outside of the portion size of any particular meal. If your were not self-aware of constant eating that can have a big impact - at least it did for a few friends of mine.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
zahlman 2y ago
>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. I can typically estimate them accurately without direct measurement, and with feedback that will tend to make errors cancel out over time. My trick is to note package weights, and divide containers into N equal portions. That is: I decide a target portion size first, and then portion it out. If the task is "measure out an ounce of butter" I realistically won't be 40% off - because I can very accurately divide a rectangular solid in half repeatedly, and the butter comes in a one-pound package. Similarly, I have a pretty good idea how much grilled chicken is on my plate, because I know how much raw chicken I cooked, because I made a whole piece from a pack of N roughly-equal pieces weighing X (values which I noted when I bought it).
- wnorris510 2y ago
  Yeah, dividing out a known portion size is a good hack that will probably help with accuracy. In our research most people's calories and error came from eating out where they didn't have these hints, but this is a good trick if you mostly cook for yourself!
  - zahlman 2y ago
    Historically I would rely on the restaurant's printed nutrition info. But I don't really eat out often enough for this to matter.
    - tombert 2y ago
      It can still be useful just to get rough estimates of what you're making at home, especially for portions and products that are roughly comparable. If I make an egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich in the morning, and forget to weigh out or count how much of something I used, it can still be useful for back-of-napkin estimates if I Google the McDonalds Sausage McMuffin with Egg. Obviously it's not going to be exactly equivalent, but I usually assume my homemade thing is 20% more than the restaurant to compensate. It's of course better if you just weigh everything out first, you can get much more accurate measurements and calorie estimates then, but this can work in a pinch.
UomoNeroNero 2y ago
I have been diabetic for 20 years. I have tried every method, app, plan, and tool, including systems falsely marketed as "smart." No method works or delivers decent results except for using a scale and weighing ALL the ingredients. For a diabetic, eating "out" is always a roll of the dice. The "fun" feedback from post-meal blood sugar is always a reminder of how "eyeballing a plate" is utterly useless.
- foxyv 2y ago
  It doesn't help that food manufacturers intentionally make it hard to measure nutrition from most of their foods. They play around with serving sizes to hide carbohydrates making you have to do math just to keep up. Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim they have zero everything despite just being sugar tablets.
  - yellow_lead 2y ago
    Plus the whole sugar vs. sugar alcohol nonsense, which I still don't completely understand.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      Sugar alcohols seem simple enough to me. The properties vary but they generally have fewer calories per gram and a low glycemic index, and some of them are much sweeter per calorie.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      IANA nutritionist or expert at all in this area so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding from looking into it is that the sugar alcohol doesn't break down in digestion and isn't absorbed, that's why the "carbs" from sugar alcohol "don't count." I would recommend taking it easy on the sugar alcohols even though they "don't count" because they can cause significant gas ;-)
michchinn 2y ago
From the paper (https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Thames_Nutrition5k_Towards_Automatic_Nutritional_Understanding_of_Generic_Food_CVPR_2021_paper.pdf https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Thames...): > We asked them to estimate the mass of each ingredient present on the plate and subsequently converted these values into nutrition estimates using the same USDA [9] values we used to create our dataset I get that there's a linear relationship between the mass of a food and its calories, but I'd expect that nutritionists would be better at estimating the calories in a plate of food than the mass of a food item. Most people aren't doing the math in their heads, they're using a frame of reference that recognizes calories. Did you have this in mind? Is there any research on this?
ryan-richt 2y ago
There is actually an elegant _mathematical_ solution to this problem using sensor fusion and a differential equation model of the science: if you weigh your food almost all of the time at home, and only make portion and ingredient guesses when infrequently eating out, we can actually estimate your personal rate of underestimation and correct for it. Our startup (BODYSIM.com) has also been doing research on this a long time. As founders, we all have >16 months of daily food logging mostly by kitchen scale weights, aligned to daily BIA-scale weigh-ins, fitness tracker calories, bi-weekly blood tests, monthly DEXAs, 3D scans, etc etc. We also have a science-based structural model of macronutrient balance and muscle hypertrophy. Given all that, we can VERY confidently estimate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) and its components, and predict how your fat and muscle mass will change on a daily basis. This is real math/science so you can also run it in reverse. This ("simultaneity constraint") provides enough constraints we can estimate users' individual underestimating/over-indulgence when eating out. In fact, it's better to just NOT log those days AT ALL and we can fill them in. I think this solution isn't more widely used b/c you need all this other "quantified self" type data at the same time.
- nathancahill 2y ago
  This is really interesting, and I'll probably sign up for your app (I'm training for rock climbing). I've used a kitchen scale for a few weeks at home and got pretty good at estimating portion size during that time. Biggest takeaway was that even if you aren't "over-indulging" when you eat out, the portion sizes (especially in the US, less so in Europe) are just insane. 2-3x portions. Ordering half-orders or starters and letting the food settle before eating/ordering more helped quite a bit.
  - ryan-richt 2y ago
    we'd love to have you! LMK any questions over email or whatnot.
- Full_Clark 2y ago
  How reliable do you find the calories-burned data from fitness trackers to be? Are there any brands that have higher accuracy than others? Are there any hardware features like pulse monitoring that improve the accuracy? I find that the raw step count varies up to 66% between my phone and my wrist-worn tracker and I can't close that gap just by making sure my phone is never left behind.
tombert 2y ago
I'm currently dieting again, and the only way that I've been able to properly portion calories is to weigh nearly everything I eat and then add the numbers together in Google Sheets. Eyeballing a portion of a lot of food can be nearly impossible to determine how much food you actually got, but weight is fairly straightforward and objective (at least to an ounce or so of granularity for most kitchen scales, which is good enough for dieting).
porphyra 2y ago
As someone who takes a photo of every single meal I eat, I was very excited to try out Snapcalorie but it was completely wrong for all the pictures I tried giving it. I uploaded a picture of a recent meal of tomato egg, baked octopus tentacles, and shrimp, and it identified it as pasta, mushrooms, and chicken. Also, it doesn't work for typical home meals that are eaten family-style.
darkhorse222 2y ago
This should be an indication that tracking as a personal health methodology is inherently flawed. Your body is your most accurate measurement system, both in terms of precision and accuracy but also in its multidimensional, intersectional measurement apparatus that completely demolishes the poor substitutes found in personal nutrition, which are continuously shown to be either flawed in theory or in practice. Tracking takes more work and is less accurate. Bad trade. The only use I see in tracking is to perhaps help one inform one's intuition. But that's as far as I'll go.
- sureglymop 2y ago
  When I was tracking calories to lose weight I just always overestimated by default – doesn't hurt if one week you happen to lose a bit more weight than you set out.
wisty 2y ago
Not too shocking really: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1322248/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1322248/ > Aiming to pour a “shot” of alcohol (1.5 ounces, 44.3 ml), both students and bartenders poured more into short, wide glasses than into tall slender glasses (46.1 ml v 44.7 ml and 54.6 ml v 46.4 ml, respectively). Practice reduced the tendency to overpour, but not for short, wide glasses. Despite an average of six years of experience, bartenders poured 20.5% more into short, wide glasses than tall, slender ones; paying careful attention reduced but did not eliminate the effect. A plate is a very wide 'glass'.
rapjr9 2y ago
I was part of a project that did some work in this area also, we developed a machine learning based wearable to detect chewing: https://www.ah-lab.cs.dartmouth.edu/publications/detecting-eating-episodes-ear-mounted-sensor https://www.ah-lab.cs.dartmouth.edu/publications/detecting-e...
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
Even when you weight, the weight needs to be on cooked food, otherwise it's useless. I'm not going to cook a separate meal for every member of a family
xandrius 2y ago
Fats are definitely the easiest way to mess up counting, especially when a lot of people can't compute not cooking without oil/butter. If the goal is losing weight, I found that maximising volume (e.g. Minimising calory density) works wonders for me. I am used to being full before feeling satiated (mostly upbringing I guess), so this is my trick.

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.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  Oh I would only weigh things raw - if we’re talking about guessing the portion sizes at a restaurant for example, you might say I’m cooked. I wonder how good an ML model might be at that task. Maybe given a photograph of the plate and the menu description.
watwut 2y ago
There is no profession that would require you to estimate portion sizes up to grams visually. So, trained professional will be someone who was trained in something different - a doctor for example. I guess, maybe cooks should have the best precision for this.
acomms 2y ago
I think they're suggesting that the portions you are judging have not been practiced hundreds of times.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wnorris510 2y ago
If you have a known bowl and fill it to a known position every day with the same type of food, then you can probably do better than the average for that specific meal. In our research we've found a majority of calories for most people come from when they're eating out and consuming new dishes where they don't know the ingredients or portion sizes. In the study we gave people a variety of dishes to make their estimate on, some they were familiar with, some they were not. The professionals were nutritionists who had trained in portion size estimation and were shown 2D images on a computer screen. For what it's worth, we've had a lot of people who have claimed to be very accurate at portion size estimation from a long history of using a kitchen scale. We've paid many of them to do a quiz to see if they're above average accuracy and they have almost always ended up around 40% accuracy or worse.
- shawabawa3 2y ago
  estimating from a photograph is always going to have huge error because you just cannot know e.g. the size of the plate without some external reference
  - wnorris510 2y ago
    Modern phones have LiDAR that give you the near exact volume and dimensions of everything on a plate. That's what we do: https://www.snapcalorie.com/ https://www.snapcalorie.com/ We co-authored a paper on this with Google AI and showed it got about 2x the accuracy of a nutritionist because of it.
- maeil 2y ago
  I'd love to do such a quiz -I might even be willing to pay for the privilege! I'm quite convinced I'm really accurate at calorie estimation without using a scale but would love to be proven wrong. Zero food industry experience here, just from reading hundreds of food labels per year since very young, maybe 8 years old. Thinking about it again, I'll probably do a lot worse from a picture because I can't have a bite of the food! Just having a spoon makes it so much easier in terms of ratios.
zeroonetwothree 2y ago
If you read the paper it’s pretty easy to see what they mean by this. They tested “4 professional nutritionists”. I don’t know if nutritionists get any special training at estimating portion size but my guess would be they do not.
- wnorris510 2y ago
  Some do, some do not. We put them through a standard portion size training course regardless to be sure.

m_ke 2y ago

At Bitesnap we were surprised at how much interest there was from researchers to use our app for diet tracking. It turns out giving people a piece of paper to write “grilled cheese sandwich for lunch” is not a scalable and reliable way to collect research quality data. We even worked with USDA on putting together a food logging dataset: https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A_Benchmark_Dataset_of_Food_Photos_with_Food_Records_for_Evaluation_of_Computer_Vision_Algorithms_in_the_Context_of_Dietary_Assessment/24856449 https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A...

wnorris510 2y ago
We've also been surprised at SnapCalorie how many researchers have approached us to use the app for more accurate diet tracking for medical study participants. The LiDAR based portion size has been a huge draw for them. If anyone wants to check out our app or research its on our site: https://www.snapcalorie.com/ https://www.snapcalorie.com/ PS: Bitesnap was an awesome app!
- nitwit005 2y ago
  Feels kind of incredible that something as advanced as laser imaging is being used to measure sandwich size.
mtntreks 2y ago
This doesn't surprise me. Just trying to keep track of calories for myself stupid things like supersized slices of bread becoming common in stores can really throw off my expected calorie counts. It seems like this can completely throw off any attempt at figuring out nutrition from an app or research perspective.
felideon 2y ago
What happened to your app? I was on such a research team (Scripps) that used your app for the study (PROGRESS).
- m_ke 2y ago

taeric 2y ago

This goes a long way to further convince me that it is portion sizes in the US. Having traveled, it is quite absurd to see the difference in standard order sizes. Even for zero calorie things like water and unsweetened teas/coffees. You just get smaller cups. I'm not even sure you can get a US large in Japan for most drinks?

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
I don’t see why it would be bad to get more water to drink
- taeric 2y ago
  I didn't mean to imply it was. My point was that everything is smaller.
- zahlman 2y ago
  There's actually something of a stereotype that Japanese places will give you unreasonably small portions of water with meals. (Dogen plays off this in some of his videos.) But then, I think it's only been Americans I heard this from, so.
  - taeric 2y ago
    Ha! I hadn't heard of this before, so it caught me completely off guard. The coffee was the one that really surprised me. Order a coffee and get a 6-8oz cup. With nothing on the menu to indicate you can get a 12-16oz. Was surprising. (Not bad, mind. Just surprising.)
  - dfxm12 2y ago
    In both my trips to Japan (one recent, one 20yrs ago), I never noticed this, and I think I drink a lot of water in general, and especially as a tourist because I'm doing much more walking.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    The free water cup in a lot of places in the US is like a 6oz slosh now.

marinmania 2y ago

I highly recommend people get a food scale/measuring cups and weighing everything single thing they eat (even small things like nuts and cooking oil) for at least two weeks. After that I think you have a much better appreciation for how many calories your regular meals and snacks have.

dailykoder 2y ago
I counted calories and put everything on a scale, for about 2 or 3 months in 2022 (iirc). And you are 100% right. I had absolutely no idea how much calories some food has. There were a lot of things, but I think cashews were my biggest eye opener (probably obvious to a lot of people). I easily achieved my goal of -10kg and saved A LOT of money, because I always had food prepared. And since I was going for a calorie deficit, I easily could afford a few sweets on the weekend. Then I obviously got lazy. And while I sometimes still think I can estimate how much I am eating, I am probably wrong, because my bathroom scale says something different. My key takeaway is that it takes quite a bit of effort, but once you got into a routine, it's not hard. Edit: Also, while I might have tried to ditch "wasted calories", I didn't put too much effort in eating healthy. One step at a time.
- dutchbookmaker 2y ago
  Nuts are so deceptive. I love almonds and because I love them so much, if I don't portion them out then I end up eating 2-3X the calories that I thought I did so easily. I pretty much eat 1k calories per day during the week and then 2-3k on the weekend. It took constant lowering of calories over a year to get to this point but being hungry just feels normal and natural for me. There must be something with fat adaption going on as I never feel low on energy. Eating during the week has been completely divorced from a pleasurable activity to me too. Chicken breast, nuts, vegetables, not much else during the week. It is just easy at this point for me to wait to eat for pleasure on the weekend.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
    Might be a good idea, but I'm constantly concerned when I eat chicken breast every meal of the week. I'd rather use legumes, but chicken breast is so low on calories...

mrgaro 2y ago

I downloaded SnapCalorie to try it out on Android. I went all the way through the sign-up phase, only to discovery that I would need to activate subscription in order to have the 7-day trial. Ended up uninstalling the app :(

wnorris510 2y ago
We're an early stage startup and the models are expensive, we're trying to get the price as low as possible, but yes we need to charge to cover costs right now. Sorry about that! You might get a yearly discount offer that is less than $2/month if you get lucky (A/B test split). But that's less than the cost of running the model for people, so hopefully others will consider paying full price.
- ploynog 2y ago
  I think the complaint is that you only get told that you require a paid plan AFTER signing up. At least on a brief look on the Play Store page and your website, it does not immediately mention it prominently. That seems like a very dark pattern and is, honestly, pretty scummy.
  - DrillShopper 2y ago
    It doesn't seem like - it is Which makes it par for the course in the scam that is mobile development
  - wnorris510 2y ago
    This is not a dark pattern, it's just a constraint that the app stores place on the pricing disclosure that is very non-intuitive. You have to mark your app as "free" to download if you charge a recurring subscription fee. You can only mark it as paid if there is a one time fee to download the app. Our FAQ and pricing pages all list that it is a paid only app. All of our ads explain that it's subscription based. Anyone who asks we're very transparent about it. If there's somewhere else where you think we can list it to make it more clear I'm happy to add it, just not sure where that would be.

tejohnso 2y ago

> you need to use a food scale or something that measure the volume of food Isn't that obvious? Basic high school science projects would have students using measuring devices. Are you saying that it's common for nutritional studies to tell people to eyeball their portions and that is then used as actual data? I see from the article "Nutritional epidemiology studies typically ask people to keep a food diary or complete questionnaires about their intake over the past 24 hours, a week, or even several months." I find that hard to believe. How could any study like that be taken seriously? That's like having someone stand at a street corner for an hour and observe the population to then come up with an average BMI for the neighbourhood.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I would wager that just paying attention to, and thinking about what someone eats has a decent impact on their health - so it feels like it's working, and like your estimates are accurate. After all - once you started doing it, you started losing weight/building muscle/achieving whatever result.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  Which is a reason why keeping a food diary is an often recommended technique for changing your diet and eating healthier.
- ellisv 2y ago
  Yes, the mere act of monitoring (including self-monitoring) leads to behavioral change. This alone can be sufficient for some people.
  - jacobr1 2y ago
    One factor is just the sheer volume of snacks and treats - outside of the portion size of any particular meal. If your were not self-aware of constant eating that can have a big impact - at least it did for a few friends of mine.
disgruntledphd2 2y ago

zahlman 2y ago

>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. I can typically estimate them accurately without direct measurement, and with feedback that will tend to make errors cancel out over time. My trick is to note package weights, and divide containers into N equal portions. That is: I decide a target portion size first, and then portion it out. If the task is "measure out an ounce of butter" I realistically won't be 40% off - because I can very accurately divide a rectangular solid in half repeatedly, and the butter comes in a one-pound package. Similarly, I have a pretty good idea how much grilled chicken is on my plate, because I know how much raw chicken I cooked, because I made a whole piece from a pack of N roughly-equal pieces weighing X (values which I noted when I bought it).

wnorris510 2y ago
Yeah, dividing out a known portion size is a good hack that will probably help with accuracy. In our research most people's calories and error came from eating out where they didn't have these hints, but this is a good trick if you mostly cook for yourself!
- zahlman 2y ago
  Historically I would rely on the restaurant's printed nutrition info. But I don't really eat out often enough for this to matter.
  - tombert 2y ago
    It can still be useful just to get rough estimates of what you're making at home, especially for portions and products that are roughly comparable. If I make an egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich in the morning, and forget to weigh out or count how much of something I used, it can still be useful for back-of-napkin estimates if I Google the McDonalds Sausage McMuffin with Egg. Obviously it's not going to be exactly equivalent, but I usually assume my homemade thing is 20% more than the restaurant to compensate. It's of course better if you just weigh everything out first, you can get much more accurate measurements and calorie estimates then, but this can work in a pinch.

UomoNeroNero 2y ago

I have been diabetic for 20 years. I have tried every method, app, plan, and tool, including systems falsely marketed as "smart." No method works or delivers decent results except for using a scale and weighing ALL the ingredients. For a diabetic, eating "out" is always a roll of the dice. The "fun" feedback from post-meal blood sugar is always a reminder of how "eyeballing a plate" is utterly useless.

foxyv 2y ago
It doesn't help that food manufacturers intentionally make it hard to measure nutrition from most of their foods. They play around with serving sizes to hide carbohydrates making you have to do math just to keep up. Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim they have zero everything despite just being sugar tablets.
- yellow_lead 2y ago
  Plus the whole sugar vs. sugar alcohol nonsense, which I still don't completely understand.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Sugar alcohols seem simple enough to me. The properties vary but they generally have fewer calories per gram and a low glycemic index, and some of them are much sweeter per calorie.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    IANA nutritionist or expert at all in this area so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding from looking into it is that the sugar alcohol doesn't break down in digestion and isn't absorbed, that's why the "carbs" from sugar alcohol "don't count." I would recommend taking it easy on the sugar alcohols even though they "don't count" because they can cause significant gas ;-)

michchinn 2y ago

From the paper (https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Thames_Nutrition5k_Towards_Automatic_Nutritional_Understanding_of_Generic_Food_CVPR_2021_paper.pdf https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Thames...): > We asked them to estimate the mass of each ingredient present on the plate and subsequently converted these values into nutrition estimates using the same USDA [9] values we used to create our dataset I get that there's a linear relationship between the mass of a food and its calories, but I'd expect that nutritionists would be better at estimating the calories in a plate of food than the mass of a food item. Most people aren't doing the math in their heads, they're using a frame of reference that recognizes calories. Did you have this in mind? Is there any research on this?

ryan-richt 2y ago

There is actually an elegant _mathematical_ solution to this problem using sensor fusion and a differential equation model of the science: if you weigh your food almost all of the time at home, and only make portion and ingredient guesses when infrequently eating out, we can actually estimate your personal rate of underestimation and correct for it. Our startup (BODYSIM.com) has also been doing research on this a long time. As founders, we all have >16 months of daily food logging mostly by kitchen scale weights, aligned to daily BIA-scale weigh-ins, fitness tracker calories, bi-weekly blood tests, monthly DEXAs, 3D scans, etc etc. We also have a science-based structural model of macronutrient balance and muscle hypertrophy. Given all that, we can VERY confidently estimate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) and its components, and predict how your fat and muscle mass will change on a daily basis. This is real math/science so you can also run it in reverse. This ("simultaneity constraint") provides enough constraints we can estimate users' individual underestimating/over-indulgence when eating out. In fact, it's better to just NOT log those days AT ALL and we can fill them in. I think this solution isn't more widely used b/c you need all this other "quantified self" type data at the same time.

nathancahill 2y ago
This is really interesting, and I'll probably sign up for your app (I'm training for rock climbing). I've used a kitchen scale for a few weeks at home and got pretty good at estimating portion size during that time. Biggest takeaway was that even if you aren't "over-indulging" when you eat out, the portion sizes (especially in the US, less so in Europe) are just insane. 2-3x portions. Ordering half-orders or starters and letting the food settle before eating/ordering more helped quite a bit.
- ryan-richt 2y ago
  we'd love to have you! LMK any questions over email or whatnot.
Full_Clark 2y ago
How reliable do you find the calories-burned data from fitness trackers to be? Are there any brands that have higher accuracy than others? Are there any hardware features like pulse monitoring that improve the accuracy? I find that the raw step count varies up to 66% between my phone and my wrist-worn tracker and I can't close that gap just by making sure my phone is never left behind.

tombert 2y ago

I'm currently dieting again, and the only way that I've been able to properly portion calories is to weigh nearly everything I eat and then add the numbers together in Google Sheets. Eyeballing a portion of a lot of food can be nearly impossible to determine how much food you actually got, but weight is fairly straightforward and objective (at least to an ounce or so of granularity for most kitchen scales, which is good enough for dieting).

porphyra 2y ago

As someone who takes a photo of every single meal I eat, I was very excited to try out Snapcalorie but it was completely wrong for all the pictures I tried giving it. I uploaded a picture of a recent meal of tomato egg, baked octopus tentacles, and shrimp, and it identified it as pasta, mushrooms, and chicken. Also, it doesn't work for typical home meals that are eaten family-style.

darkhorse222 2y ago

This should be an indication that tracking as a personal health methodology is inherently flawed. Your body is your most accurate measurement system, both in terms of precision and accuracy but also in its multidimensional, intersectional measurement apparatus that completely demolishes the poor substitutes found in personal nutrition, which are continuously shown to be either flawed in theory or in practice. Tracking takes more work and is less accurate. Bad trade. The only use I see in tracking is to perhaps help one inform one's intuition. But that's as far as I'll go.

sureglymop 2y ago
When I was tracking calories to lose weight I just always overestimated by default – doesn't hurt if one week you happen to lose a bit more weight than you set out.

wisty 2y ago

Not too shocking really: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1322248/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1322248/ > Aiming to pour a “shot” of alcohol (1.5 ounces, 44.3 ml), both students and bartenders poured more into short, wide glasses than into tall slender glasses (46.1 ml v 44.7 ml and 54.6 ml v 46.4 ml, respectively). Practice reduced the tendency to overpour, but not for short, wide glasses. Despite an average of six years of experience, bartenders poured 20.5% more into short, wide glasses than tall, slender ones; paying careful attention reduced but did not eliminate the effect. A plate is a very wide 'glass'.

rapjr9 2y ago

I was part of a project that did some work in this area also, we developed a machine learning based wearable to detect chewing: https://www.ah-lab.cs.dartmouth.edu/publications/detecting-eating-episodes-ear-mounted-sensor https://www.ah-lab.cs.dartmouth.edu/publications/detecting-e...

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago

Even when you weight, the weight needs to be on cooked food, otherwise it's useless. I'm not going to cook a separate meal for every member of a family

xandrius 2y ago

Fats are definitely the easiest way to mess up counting, especially when a lot of people can't compute not cooking without oil/butter. If the goal is losing weight, I found that maximising volume (e.g. Minimising calory density) works wonders for me. I am used to being full before feeling satiated (mostly upbringing I guess), so this is my trick.