12 ms·

I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected

245 points by gnabgib 1y ago

muratsu 1y ago
These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.
- tekla 1y ago
  They provide value in that they lie to you and you feel better about yourself.
  - klabb3 1y ago
    That’s exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. ”Why are you thinking this is meant to work?”. But of course, normal trusting people will believe it if it’s on the ”trusted app stores”. These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
  - muratsu 1y ago
    I don’t mind if the reality of their business is similar to gyms in the sense that they make money off of peoples desires but have low utilization. I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
- xnx 1y ago
  > CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. Source?
  - debuggerson 1y ago
    I happened to scroll through the founder’s interview on YouTube. You may take a look. https://youtu.be/t0U3UREdjmo?si=14oeWqtL9oVszab5 https://youtu.be/t0U3UREdjmo?si=14oeWqtL9oVszab5
- asdev 1y ago
  I wouldn't trust the revenue numbers, plus the churn is probably insanely high. Flashes in the pan
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    There is good money in the App Store once you crack social marketing. The founder shows several videos of reloading the App Store Connect page showing revenue numbers. It's not unbelievable. (Not to defend the app itself obviously)
- AstroBen 1y ago
  What's going on with the google reviews of that app.. basically all 5 star with one word over and over again - 'good' They're solicited, right?
  - m_ke 1y ago
    I've heard from someone who knows that they're scamming people like crazy. Supposedly they also setup a bunch of LLCs to hire influencers then never paid them.
    - thierrydamiba 1y ago
      I think a claim like that requires proof. You’re accusing them of fraud.
      - swiftcoder 1y ago
        Is fraud not a reasonable assumption, when an app that fundamentally does not do what it claims to, nonetheless has legions of glowing reviews? In the best scenario we are in a TornadoGuard (https://xkcd.com/937/ https://xkcd.com/937/) situation. More likely the developers are paying for reviews
- TuringTourist 1y ago
  I suspect this might be because diet marketing before AI was one of the most fraught with misinformation subjects you could run across. This is because the "sale" of the idea has an effect on every salesman, so all of the salesmen are trying to sell every thing at once,since that's also selling their thing, and ground truth gets stampeded. Now when you combine diet marketing and AI, you get a multiplier. Both in the sellers and the buyers, since the desire to believe is stacked.
- jimjimjim 1y ago
  This makes me sad. Yes a fool and their money are soon parted but this drives user expectations for apps even lower, pushing competent apps out of the market because of the price difference.
dyauspitr 1y ago
Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.
- rahidz 1y ago
  >I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
  - ineedasername 1y ago
    I do this too and it's been spot on. I also have a very good idea of what I'm eating though: "2 oz of steel cut oats, 1 banana, probably about 4oz by weight, without the peal, about 12 ounces of coffee with 1 tsp of sugar and about 4oz of light no-sugar almond milk"
  - dyauspitr 1y ago
    Yes, a lot initially and now I’ve looked at them so much I can roughly tell without looking it up.
  - jvanderbot 1y ago
    Not OP, but I have verified, and it is accurate. At least accurate enough from images or descriptions when assuming average proportions. Where it's really accurate is when you have measurements, even rough. I took to having a 1/2 cup scoop around the house so I could get volume measurements. Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals. For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house). It's good. But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better. It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally. I had predictive analytics and the whole 9 yards. Maybe I should have started a business! https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html
jaronheard 1y ago
I like how in the article the author includes the instructions for Cal AI: - Include a reference object (like a coin or your hand) for scale And then the screenshots show just a pictures of bowls of food with no reference objects at all. Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
- PlunderBunny 1y ago
  I noticed that too - I wonder if the coin/hand was cropped out?
  - horsawlarway 1y ago
    I'm guessing yes. I think you can even see half a coin in the cropped photo of the tofu salad (lower right edge, under the metal bowl).
TeaVMFan 1y ago
I prefer efficient manual entry to vibe-coding calories. I built my own Java-based SPA: https://frequal.com/cf/ https://frequal.com/cf/ It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Also, a certain level of human involvement is what gets you to really care and change behavior. I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.
tunesmith 1y ago
Weird article, it mentions three apps at the beginning, doesn't even test two of them in favor of two others it didn't mention, and then declares all the apps failures.
duskwuff 1y ago
Funny, I was just discussing this on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892 There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
- dwetterau 1y ago
  It will get to the point where it could know to ask those questions, like a human would. Clearly these tools are not there yet, but I think the models are probably good enough for this already.
  - bitmasher9 1y ago
    It’s probably the only thing that would get me to start taking photos of my food, but it would need to be about as accurate as I am in chronometer.
- hammock 1y ago
  Those are easy manual adjustments to make. Far easier than estimating an entire meal
fullshark 1y ago
Maybe in aggregate they are fine if the noise is unbiased and you do some things like correct it when it says an apple is tikka masala, but yeah, someone using this and lying to themselves about the calorie content of junk/comfort food seems pretty likely.
nvahalik 1y ago
I work for a company that offers nutrition tracking on an app in the App Store. We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier. We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate. We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great. Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
- irrational 1y ago
  Does that work for homemade food as well? The vast majority of the food we eat is homemade with recipes that don’t have any sort of nutritional information. I’ve always wished there was a simple way to figure out the calories. Taking a picture would be ideal.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    For homemade food it should be easier to make reliable estimates of the calorie content, because you know with certainty all the food ingredients and their amounts. The food ingredients with the highest calorie content, like various kinds of seeds or nuts or flour or meal or oil or fat or sugar or dried fruits or dairy products, come usually with calorie estimates from their vendors. For other ingredients, like various kinds of meat or of fresh vegetables or fruits, there are online databases with typical nutritional information, like the USDA database. Some of that information can even be found in the corresponding Wikipedia pages.
    - nvahalik 1y ago
      Absolutely. Weighing everything (rather than using volumetric measures) is generally going to be the BEST way to ensure consistency and accuracy. What's also important is that, in general, even if you are 20% off on something (e.g. I logged 2200 calories but I actually consumed 2600 calories) AND you are planning to eat at a caloric deficit, this usually will mean that you will still lose weight or body recomp. It'll just take a little more time. But if you are just not tracking, it's _so easy_ to miscalculate your intake to the point where you think "oh this isn't that bad." However, the truth is you consumed 4200 calories and that's a big surplus. So I/we tend to find the value partially in "simple tracking" to get you aware of what you are actually consuming and then find that transitioning to specific portions to be helpful for "dialing in" and achieving specific targets/goals.
cowanon2222 1y ago
I've had pretty good results using the AI features in Macrofactor. It's certainly not perfect, but it does a pretty good job with mixed text and photos and allows you to easily fine-tune the results. Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
- thearrow 1y ago
  Same. I was very skeptical when Macrofactor introduced this feature, but have since been incredibly impressed. The ability to give it text alongside a photo and then adjust the results (broken out by ingredients) are critical. I’ve also been taking pictures of food sitting on scales and it will take the measurement into account. Seems like the Macrofactor team took their time developing this feature, as it felt like they were one of the last to roll it out, but the extra polish definitely shows and was worth the wait.
- sunnyam 1y ago
  I think the key difference is that they perform a search of the foods in Macrofactor's database which means that you're more likely to get a good estimate. From someone who weighed and scanned a lot of foods, it has really improved the workflow
ValveFan6969 1y ago
[dead]
Kiyo-Lynn 1y ago
I’ve tried a few AI-powered calorie tracking tools too. At first it felt super convenient, just take a photo and get the numbers. But over time I kept seeing mistakes. Sometimes it would even tag a salad as soup. Eventually I went back to the old way. Fewer photos, more mindful eating. Honestly I feel better that way.
- spacecadet 1y ago
  Honestly this is it for me. Im actively trying to reduce my reliance on tech, even more so when it comes to gimmick tech. A nightly walk with no phone will make you drop pounds too...
solumunus 1y ago
I genuinely can’t understand why anyone would even TRY using these apps. Of course they’re going to be terrible, but how could anyone with a modicum of intelligence suspect otherwise?
surfmike 1y ago
The founder of parrotpal (another AI calorie tracking app, supporting both text and photos) points out that using photos is one of the least accurate ways for tracking food: https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/ https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/ Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/ The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain). Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.
- tayo42 1y ago
  > seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )
  - schmichael 1y ago
    My unprofessional nutritional advice is: do what works for you! So if that’s calorie counting: great! No need to give it a second thought. But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/10671811-the-trouble-with-calories https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...
Sleepthinker 1y ago
As a gym enthusiast, if this app can’t give me accurate calorie counts and nutrient data, it’s basically useless to me. But for the average person, this is a big deal because we tend to seek convenience and want the easiest path to our goals. If this app wants to truly deliver results, it still has a long way to go. Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.
tjpnz 1y ago
If you want calorie counting to be of any value to you you're going to want to be accurate. Thankfully we're mostly creatures of habit. Source accurate numbers for everything you eat in a week and you're 90% covered for every other week. I recorded 30 items over two weeks and then added 15 more over 2.5 months. Don't sabotage your efforts with tools that don't work.
- tayo42 1y ago
  This is my experience too. Not even 2 weeks, it was like a really tedious 3 or 4 days then I pretty much knew what to take out.
smartgamer112 1y ago
Yeah cal AI is the worst of them all
senko 1y ago
CalAI is just objectively a bad app even discounting its AI calorie estimator as an irrelevant gimmick: * the UX is bad * the stats are laughable * charts worse than nothing (really, misleading to look at) * lacking basic functionality such as “duplicate for today” * can’t see or export the meal photo * their “streak” attempt at gamification is so bad it literally cannot count And yes, the AI there is atrociously bad. Not only can it not reliably detect calorie content (I don’t think anyone could on a basis of a photo in general case), but it so often mislabels food (like the example in article) it’s just a comedic relief. And there’s a “Fix” button which does nothing. It’s like they never really tried hard. Combined with the general lack of quality, looks like a typical quick money grab riding the AI hype wave. I’m pretty confident the app could be vibe-coded in a week (and that’s generous). Maybe the backend is more complex? Don’t think so as there are no social features, it just stores data. Paid for a year (Android app) to see how well they applied AI to the field, now continue to use it like a meal photo log with some (manually entered) metadata, otherwise Excel would be a nicer solution.
- Traubenfuchs 1y ago
  We live in a post quality age. Consumers just don't care. AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition. You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    Exactly. At what seems to be 30 USD a year, that's laughably low for most users. I'm actually impressed on the kids for finding a niche snake oil market and selling it to them.
  - username223 1y ago
    It's not that consumers don't care -- it's that "they" (i.e. "we") have been beaten down. Connect an image labeling API to the USDA's database of nutrients, make a slick-looking app, and you have a product. Pay for some marketing, offer a three-day trial after which you auto-bill for a year, make refunds as difficult as possible, and you have a business. At $30/yr, 10k subscriptions (deliberate or accidental) gets you $210k after app store commission. If you're lucky, you get bought out for even more. If not, you still made good money for not much work.
jonplackett 1y ago
I always just assumed these were terrible. There just isn’t enough info in a photo, even for the world’s leading calorie counting expert, to give a sensible estimate of the calories content. Ans even more so for macros. Add to that the fact vision is still pretty crap and you have a complete joke that I can’t believe anyone is paying for.
- automatic6131 1y ago
  I bet @onionweigher could - if all you ate were onions
  - teddyh 1y ago
    Human children can’t live on onions. <https://scarygoround.com/badmachinery/index.html?pg=374#showComic https://scarygoround.com/badmachinery/index.html?pg=374#show...>
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- jclardy 1y ago
  I've used the AI features in Lose It and was pretty impressed, not for the caloric estimate, but when given a picture of a breakfast burrito it accurately split it out into the component parts, from there I could manually adjust amounts easily for food I make without having to manually search out every ingredient manually. As an additional tool it is great. The issue of course is these new apps built with a sole focus of AI images for tracking. With a photo of restaurant food you can't see a sauce and the 5-10g of additional sugar content, can't get accurate guesses of what is in breads/pastas and figuring out general volumes of foods is not possible unless you have some kind of standard size reference in the frame.
  - Iulioh 1y ago
    Honestly the best use case i have seen is the ability to read a labels and add it to the database. (Similar to an OCR but better) Correcting errors in MFP is the bane of my existence. I have tried some other apps but i hated every single one of them for a reason or another and came back to MFP but that was one of the best features i would really love to have
jonplackett 1y ago
I used MyFitnessPal to lose 15kg a few years ago and I have a theory that the act of calorie counting (ie the effort of working it out and labour of putting it into the app) is a key part of why it works. It becomes just slightly more effort to eat something and it makes you stop and think. Making it easier I would expect to make it also easier to eat more.
- kamma4434 1y ago
  Attention and focus make it work. You must be ‘in it’ - otherwise it wont work.
  - myhf 1y ago
    Of course it will work. Just tell ChatGPT that it is working and it will agree with you.
    - kamma4434 1y ago
      Your scale may beg to differ - but it’s not AI-based yet.
- jclardy 1y ago
  I find a similar thing with budgeting apps. Manually tracking requires effort and for you to think twice before every purchase, whereas automatic transaction syncing with your bank means you can just not think about it. In the case of dieting/calorie counting - I don't think you can get away with not thinking about it, especially with inaccurate estimates.
- yoz-y 1y ago
  Yep. Iirc any kind of diet works as long as it is restrictive. Even if the restriction is “do not eat anything that has blue on the package”.
- devmor 1y ago
  As someone who lost nearly 100lbs (about 45kg) calorie counting and working out, this was a big part of it. It also just made me cognizant of my bad eating habits. I’d absent-mindedly snack on something, go to log it, then think “wait, why am I eating this right now?” and stop. It’s essential educating yourself on nutrition through habit.
ginko 1y ago
>The app did recognize it as an apple this time, but estimated it at 80 calories when the actual count should have been closer to 120. Where does the author take the 120 number from? The very link they gave says a large pink lady apple is 78 calories.
- hyperbovine 1y ago
  Presumably every apple has a different calorie count depending on ripeness, size, and variety...?
- llm_nerd 1y ago
  They do claim their apple is 222 grams, so presumably they took the 100g nutrition and multiplied it by 2.2.
wahnfrieden 1y ago
Others have found that CalAI likely uses Gemini 1.5 (not sure which variant) which is used because it's very cheap, not for its accuracy. I understand the fundamental issues with calorie counting via photo analysis/LLM. However these articles would be more interesting if they included comparison with results from actual cutting-edge LLMs, rather than the budget models. I acknowledge that apps don't use these models though to protect margins and lower cost. Also: > Cameras capture two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects. iPhone camera captures depth, too. I don't think it's being used in CalAI though. This article is more about current commercialized solutions rather than analysis of state of the art capability.
- tough 1y ago
  what's worse, this could be 100% done in local llms since its such a small batchable job
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    What model can run on a phone with accuracy closer to 4o than Gemini 1.5?
    - tough 1y ago
      idk tbh asking an llm to estimate calories seems like such a -bad idea- on the first place, that doesnt seem that having a better model would improve results much.
- woadwarrior01 1y ago
  > I don't think it's being used in CalAI though. They don't, but that doesn't stop them from lying about it on their homepage. > Snap a photo with Cal AI, and your phone's depth sensor calculates food volume. Our AI then analyzes and breaks down your meal to determine calories, protein, carbs, and fat. The grift must go on.
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
p1dda 1y ago
I welcome every article that exposes just how bad "AI" is.
- blibble 1y ago
  it still also can't count the legs on a dog https://vlmsarebiased.github.io/ https://vlmsarebiased.github.io/ another decade and we'll be able to get the Not Hotdog app from Silicon Valley
perching_aix 1y ago
How many times a day and how many unique food items does one need to eat to continually remain so hopelessly unfamiliar with their caloric intake that they need an app to track it? What role can AI possibly have in this, when all you need to do is either turn around the packaging or do a web search for the dish you cook to get a number?
- cactusplant7374 1y ago
  Restaurants and dishes at home made by someone else that have a combination of different foods.
- matkoniecz 1y ago
  > they need an app to track it? "track" is important here How packaging or a web search will help with exactly remembering how much was eaten in past?
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    By enabling you to think in terms of what you ate, rather than numbers. If you eat a varied but regular diet, this enables you to stop having to track. You'll just know your approximate caloric budget and intake for the day, and what that means in terms of food items. When you have to take ownership of your diet (and thus your weight), that means a permanent lifestyle change. Tracking is simply not sustainable indefinitely, so you must establish better consumption habits while you do so, that will stick past the tracking. Tracking and getting to know what you eat, rather than tracking your calories, is what enables you to form such a habit and knowledge base. Eating random stuff and thus having to use AI due to a lack of easily accessible and personally learnable nutrition information makes a total mockery of this process, and runs pretty much antithetical to it.
ulfw 1y ago
This goes for most "AI" things nowadays. What was once "blockchain" has become "AI" for companies now. (PS: doesn't mean there aren't real use cases. Sadly the term AI has been stretched to cover all kinds of charlatanery)
bandrami 1y ago
AI aside we don't really know how many calories a given person will get from eating a given piece of food. We measure food's calories by burning it, but we don't get nearly all that energy from dissolving it (just consider the fact that solid human waste burns, for instance). At best we've established some (fairly broad) minima and maxima.
- bitdivision 1y ago
  Presumably the recommended daily calorie intake figures (and the calculators for these) do to some extent take this into account? i.e. I would imagine they're based on experimentally tested values rather than theoretical energy expenditure.
- matkoniecz 1y ago
  "We measure food's calories by burning it" - are you sure that how it is done? Humans (unlike say cows) do not digest parts of what is available in plants, which makes some vegetables filling and ultra-low caloric. "we don't really know how many calories a given person will get from eating a given piece of food" exact numbers of unknown, but difference is not so great, except truly extreme cases (and vast majority of fat people is not fat due to them)
- neither_color 1y ago
  add to that food calorie labels arent required to be 100% accurate, there's an acceptable range like +/- 20% iirc. That's enough to throw off a precise deficit. Calorie counting is more about directionally helping you lower your food consumption but it isnt as accurate as people think.
  - zeta0134 1y ago
    Honestly the main thing was learning that perfectly satisfying food I cook at home tends to land around 600-800 cal for a meal, where eating out almost anywhere is often twice that, even if my beverage is water. Just being aware how how heavy those otherwise delightful meals are gives me pause. Granted these figures are all a side effect of my personal eating habits and preferences, but that's rather the point of the exercise isn't it? There's a lot of individual variation, and the individual is probably best served by a personalized approach.
atleastoptimal 1y ago
it’s crazy how much money you can make with a garbage app. The fact that i’m not means i must be stupid
snakeboy 1y ago
This feels like the same type of critique people have about code-assistant LLMs. We need to be a lot more realistic about their role as a 'next-gen autocomplete' who can write some boilerplate code, not a replacement for a mid-level software developer. These apps seem useful to reduce the friction of entering your meal's calorie contents from 30 seconds of ingredient estimating, to 20 seconds (auto-filling main ingredients and a baseline portion estimate). As everyone points out, it's impossible for these to get any better than that (GIGO). But reducing the overhead for calorie-counting seems like a reasonable goal and a valuable service. Of course the marketing departments for these companies is going to say whatever bullshit they want; that's their prerogative...
mkfs 1y ago
Fat is the most calorie-dense macro at 9 per gram (protein and carb are both 4), so your accuracy is going to be heavily skewed by how accurately you can identify the fat content of the meal. The problem is that it's often in forms like oils that don't seem well-suited to AI image recognition.
- boydYVR 1y ago
  Yeah. Relying on images of food to track calories is like ... dancing about architecture.
dack 1y ago
Calorie tracking is also about educating yourself about how many calories certain things are, so you can make better decisions. Like, oil is insanely caloric and can accidentally add hundreds of calories, but it's nearly impossible to eat too many greens. Once you learn this, then the tracking is just to keep you honest - your brain knows what to do but it lies to you when it wants to bend the rules and those little cheats add up enough to throw off the whole diet.
- cainxinth 1y ago
  You develop a sixth sense for how calorific foods are when you track calories consistently. I kept a meticulous food journal for about six months before I realized I didn’t really need to anymore because I had gotten so good at just estimating my totals. Protip: most people underestimate the calories in alcohol
  - yreg 1y ago
    > most people underestimate the calories in alcohol Funny, I feel the other way around. I kept hearing about how much calories there are in alcohol, and then when I started calorie counting I didn't find it so high. Like 6 shots of gin are ~550kcal and enough to get anyone pretty drunk. Unless one is a regular heavy drinker it's not that hard to once in a while budget calories during the day to be able to get a few shots when going out in the evening. Obviously staying sober is the healthier option.
    - n4r9 1y ago
      I definitely find it suprising that a shot of gin has as many calories as an apple.
    - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
      I think when people are mentioning alcohol they typically mean beer or wine - a can of beer is ~150 calories, so have a few of those a night, which isn't at all uncommon in some households, and over a week you're up ~1 lbs.
rurban 1y ago
A classic tale of a founder winning over engineering. "This stock model from huggingface is good enough, no need to train it."
- tomp 1y ago
  The best summary of the situation I found on Twitter: The most important part of marketing and PR is lying to your customers.
tantalor 1y ago
Not hotdog
- blitzar 1y ago
  Hotdog
  - ksajh 1y ago
    Sandwich
    - blitzar 1y ago
      Not hotdog
vjulian 1y ago
I use ChatGPT (4o model) to track my daily macros, specifically calories, protein, fat, and carbs. I have a prompt containing my macro targets and a list of the foods I typically eat or have at home. Throughout the day, I report my meals, for example five large eggs, two slices of sprouted wheat toast, and a cup of spinach with a pat of butter. It calculates the macros for each meal and keeps a running macros total so I can see how I’m tracking. It’s so easy—I don’t even type, I use (the overall excellent) ChatGPT’s TTS function in the iOS app. If I eat something unexpected, I have it recalculate what I need for the rest of the day. If I were planning on 8 ounces of chicken for dinner but had an unplanned snack, it might tell me that 6 ounces will suffice now, and I now have room for more fat, so I could add some cheese. I find it quite accurate in this. Where it loses accuracy is over time. Even when focused on just a single day, the cumulative totals can be wrong when the context window gets too large. I catch this by mentally adding up the numbers it spits out. If the numbers seem off, I open a new chat. Also, it’s not reliable for looking back over multiple days or trying to track long-term patterns. When I take a photo of a meal (like when eating out), it performs very well. I ask it to list the contents of the plate, then I correct any assumptions. Once corrected, the resulting macros are usually within 5% accuracy. I also tell it the quality of the ingredients and restaurant overall, which can help a bit.
- cj 1y ago
  Do you find this easier than scanning barcodes with traditional calorie tracking apps?
  - jmacd 1y ago
    How much of your daily intake comes from food that has a barcode on it?
    - ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 1y ago
      I typically just measure ingredients and log it in Cronometer.
    - cj 1y ago
maxehmookau 1y ago
I can't see any way in which AI could ever solve this from a photo. A tablespoon of oil is 100 calories, but probably not visible in an image. Sugar in cooked meals is impossible to see. Is this aimed at a world where every food product is individually wrapped? Because most of the world doesn't live that way.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
Calorie counting is a tedious, impractical activity for anybody who isn’t even entering a bodybuilding competition. Just go on a total deficit with high-quality foods, whatever the composition.
- fastball 1y ago
  How do you know you are on a total deficit if you don't count calories?
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
    You lose weight after a week.
    - fastball 1y ago
      And what if you gain weight instead lol
      - rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
        It’s impossible for you to gain weight on a deficit. If you gained weight, you must have necessarily increased your calorie intake.
dsr_ 1y ago
Surprisingly, at no point does the author write: "This is clearly fraudulent as it does not and cannot work, so I reported it to Apple/Google."
danesparza 1y ago
I think it's very telling that the images were not oriented correctly. I'm wondering if this is a simpler bug than the the author is letting on.
hippari2 1y ago
Would be fun if someone try this on something from East Asian cuisine vs Fish and Chips. See how well it does in complex dishes.
weird_trousers 1y ago
It would be “eventually good” if, and only if, Vision problems were solved at 100% F1-Score. Which is absolutely not! So, to me, I expected bad and I received… bad results. Paying for this crap is just throwing money out the window. Those startups should solve problems and them let people pay for it, for 99% accuracy, not at minimum of 66%.
Qem 1y ago
I wonder what are the errors bars for calorie counting, even assuming one measures food intake by weight accurately. Are the reference values in food package labelling any good, or is the variability from one batch to another and variability in absorption from one person to another so large that such calculations become an exercise of garbage-in, garbage-out?
- XorNot 1y ago
  It doesn't matter provided it's not systemic. For anything related to diet, average over time is the much more relevant factor. For example you could track calories by just tallying your grocery bills if you lived alone.
xutopia 1y ago
I just ask ChatGPT based on the weight of the food I eat and it gives me pretty accurate results.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
wnorris510 1y ago
Founder of https://snapcalorie.com https://snapcalorie.com and ex-Google AI researcher here. The article actually gets our pricing wrong, it's completely free to use SnapCalorie, the $79.99 price is a donation to support our research and help us continue providing the best tools to everyone for free. We've published in top peer reviewed academic conferences and our algorithm (can't say the same for other apps) IS actually more accurate than people trying to visually estimate portion size, but the truth is both are quite inaccurate. Most people won't spend the time to track, so photo logging is a faster and easier approximation. If you want more accurate logging you should use the voice logging feature and a kitchen scale (also completely free in our app). As many mention the goal is to learn, not to tediously track every little thing. Do what's sustainable for you and helps achieve your health and fitness goals.
- sumeno 1y ago
  What about when people give up because you massively underestimate their calories? Or when people develop eating disorders because you massively overestimate their calories? If the goal is to learn then accurate information is important, although I suppose it's harder to get a VC to fund.
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    What about the people that would have given up on the diet without even trying because they just cba to do it "properly"? Ultimately, there is no silver bullet in nutrition.
    - sumeno 1y ago
      There may not be a silver bullet but adding randomly generated numbers is not an improvement
  - wnorris510 1y ago
    We do a lot of research on preventing eating disorders. As the article mentions we did not suggest she lose weight down to being underweight like other apps did. Our app has the fruit and veg counters ABOVE the calorie meter on the dashboard. The reason for this is that maximization mindset (e.g. maximizing fruits and veg) is way healthier than a minimization mindset (e.g. minimizing calories or carbs). We actually even tried to fully remove calories from the app at some point but we had a vast majority of users churn and decided it would be healthier for people who want calorie tracking to stick with our app by having it present, but requiring them to scroll past the features that promote a healthier mindset to get there. Feedback from users has been amazing that they've slowly started focusing more on fruits and veg.
bradleylw 1y ago
[dead]
yqiang 1y ago
I'm working on an app in this area [1], and I've spent a lot of time exploring how to responsibly use AI for food tracking. My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the primary tracking method. Consistency is key to successful food tracking, and AI can certainly help users avoid the common issue of missing a meal and losing momentum. However, inaccuracies, like consistently being off by 100-200 calories per day, can significantly impact results, especially for those on lower-calorie diets (like 1,200-1,500 calories/day, which is common for many women due to their physical size). With FitBee I landed on communicating to the user that these are estimates and you probably shouldn't use it as your primary method of tracking calories. [1] https://fitbee.app https://fitbee.app
jablongo 1y ago
The article claims that none of these apps use "depth analysis", but newer iPhones have this capability. I would guess at least some of these apps are using some kind of volumetric analysis for the food when available.
jraines 1y ago
The benefit of AI as a feature in calorie counting apps is great. But you have to track stuff manually for a while to realize the benefit. Specifically: using AI for restaurant meals is a convenient starting point, from which you use your hard-won feel for weight & caloric density of things to tweak the first pass to something closer to the mark. As of now I would not at all trust a fully AI calorie counting app
- marcellus23 1y ago
  This is exactly correct. I find AI in my food tracking app (FoodNoms) to be really useful, but no, you cannot rely on it on its own. You always have to tweak the results to match what you feel in your gut (no pun intended) the counts should be. Interestingly, very similar situation to using AI for code: you shouldn't just blindly trust what it puts out, but if you know what you're doing, it can save you a lot of time.
- wnorris510 1y ago
  100%. You should not trust photo based calorie tracking and should only use it when there is no other realistic choice (e.g. eating out). You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently. The truth is these algorithms have the potential to be accurate when values are averaged out over the long term, but dish to dish they will have occasionally wildly inaccurate results.
  - sumeno 1y ago
    > You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently. Your website says: > SnapCalorie is the first app where you can take a picture of any meal and get an accurate calorie count and nutrition in seconds. So which is it? Can you get an accurate calorie count of a meal from a picture or not?
cochne 1y ago
I started using an AI calorie tracking app. For non-branded foods, the calorie counting is pretty inaccurate and sometimes very off. However, having an app that can track pictures and create short descriptions that someone else (my trainer) can easily review has been pretty helpful.
jablongo 1y ago
Establishing ground truth for this is not easy. Often the labeled calories on foods are quite inaccurate themselves, based on n=1 bomb calorimetry tests. There are also incentives that may lead to lower than actual reported calories on the label.
homefree 1y ago
I suspect none of this stuff will matter in the near term. People will just take ozempic or whatever the best iteration is and be done with it. I’ve lost substantial weight (75lbs) the hard way multiple times, it’s doable but it sucks. If the drugs make it easy with seemingly no downside then why waste time with this other stuff. Use the drugs, lose the weight, then when thin add in an exercise regimen if you don’t have one.
sudobash1 1y ago
I expect that plenty of these apps are or will be mining these photos for data about their users. I know the cat is already out of the bag as far as online tracking goes, but until now, tracking every meal & snack someone eats has been impossible (except perhaps for the most consummate doordash user). And the companies most interested in the data would be the large food corporations who bear a lot of responsibility for getting us into this obesity crisis in the first place.
foxyv 1y ago
Calorie counting is so unreliable it hardly even matters. The calorie measurements are way off. There are so many sources of macronutrients and they are all digested differently and lead to so many different amounts of "Fuel" for the body. Just the different types of carbohydrates are bad enough. An actually accurate food label would look like the spec sheet for a 5th generation fighter jet. This doesn't even take into account the variations in the human body. Some people digest different types of foods better than others. Then there are the gut microbiomes of each individual. By the time you get done, if you have counted 2000 calories you could be off by 25% or more. The big advantage that makes calorie counting work is that it makes people actually think about what they are eating.
- boydYVR 1y ago
  Yes, all bodies process food differently, and all measurement tools are inaccurate. One of the bigger benefits of tracking is the ability to see trends. If you're chronically low or high on a nutrient, a good tool will make this apparent to the user.
alis0nlaura 1y ago
SnapCalorie is a very useful tool, and not just for calorie counting but for macros and solving for nutrient deficiency.
boydYVR 1y ago
I've felt the same way for years. I used one of the big names for a month about 10 years ago, and it was a great way to learn about my habits and diet, and to experiment with IF (intermittent fasting). I tried it again, now that I'm a serial entrepreneur and single parent... and I just did NOT have the patience for the data entry. I feel same as this article that photos are not a solution. Vodka and water look the same to a camera. Since April I've been using a tool I developed for myself. It's very much a MVP with an emphasis on M, but it's cheap to run, so I'll share the url if anyone wants to try it out and share feedback. https://words.my https://words.my
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
>> Maybe the old-fashioned approach of listening to our bodies works better than any algorithm. My body is perfectly capable of eating an entire jar of peanut butter with an entire jar of honey on the side in one sitting, so, no.

245 points by gnabgib 1y ago

These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.

tekla 1y ago
They provide value in that they lie to you and you feel better about yourself.
- klabb3 1y ago
  That’s exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. ”Why are you thinking this is meant to work?”. But of course, normal trusting people will believe it if it’s on the ”trusted app stores”. These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
- muratsu 1y ago
  I don’t mind if the reality of their business is similar to gyms in the sense that they make money off of peoples desires but have low utilization. I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
xnx 1y ago
> CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. Source?
- debuggerson 1y ago
  I happened to scroll through the founder’s interview on YouTube. You may take a look. https://youtu.be/t0U3UREdjmo?si=14oeWqtL9oVszab5 https://youtu.be/t0U3UREdjmo?si=14oeWqtL9oVszab5
asdev 1y ago
I wouldn't trust the revenue numbers, plus the churn is probably insanely high. Flashes in the pan
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  There is good money in the App Store once you crack social marketing. The founder shows several videos of reloading the App Store Connect page showing revenue numbers. It's not unbelievable. (Not to defend the app itself obviously)
AstroBen 1y ago
What's going on with the google reviews of that app.. basically all 5 star with one word over and over again - 'good' They're solicited, right?
- m_ke 1y ago
  I've heard from someone who knows that they're scamming people like crazy. Supposedly they also setup a bunch of LLCs to hire influencers then never paid them.
  - thierrydamiba 1y ago
    I think a claim like that requires proof. You’re accusing them of fraud.
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      Is fraud not a reasonable assumption, when an app that fundamentally does not do what it claims to, nonetheless has legions of glowing reviews? In the best scenario we are in a TornadoGuard (https://xkcd.com/937/ https://xkcd.com/937/) situation. More likely the developers are paying for reviews
TuringTourist 1y ago
I suspect this might be because diet marketing before AI was one of the most fraught with misinformation subjects you could run across. This is because the "sale" of the idea has an effect on every salesman, so all of the salesmen are trying to sell every thing at once,since that's also selling their thing, and ground truth gets stampeded. Now when you combine diet marketing and AI, you get a multiplier. Both in the sellers and the buyers, since the desire to believe is stacked.
jimjimjim 1y ago
This makes me sad. Yes a fool and their money are soon parted but this drives user expectations for apps even lower, pushing competent apps out of the market because of the price difference.

dyauspitr 1y ago

Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.

rahidz 1y ago
>I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
- ineedasername 1y ago
  I do this too and it's been spot on. I also have a very good idea of what I'm eating though: "2 oz of steel cut oats, 1 banana, probably about 4oz by weight, without the peal, about 12 ounces of coffee with 1 tsp of sugar and about 4oz of light no-sugar almond milk"
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  Yes, a lot initially and now I’ve looked at them so much I can roughly tell without looking it up.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Not OP, but I have verified, and it is accurate. At least accurate enough from images or descriptions when assuming average proportions. Where it's really accurate is when you have measurements, even rough. I took to having a 1/2 cup scoop around the house so I could get volume measurements. Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals. For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house). It's good. But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better. It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally. I had predictive analytics and the whole 9 yards. Maybe I should have started a business! https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html

jaronheard 1y ago

I like how in the article the author includes the instructions for Cal AI: - Include a reference object (like a coin or your hand) for scale And then the screenshots show just a pictures of bowls of food with no reference objects at all. Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.

PlunderBunny 1y ago
I noticed that too - I wonder if the coin/hand was cropped out?
- horsawlarway 1y ago
  I'm guessing yes. I think you can even see half a coin in the cropped photo of the tofu salad (lower right edge, under the metal bowl).

TeaVMFan 1y ago

I prefer efficient manual entry to vibe-coding calories. I built my own Java-based SPA: https://frequal.com/cf/ https://frequal.com/cf/ It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.

Terr_ 1y ago
Also, a certain level of human involvement is what gets you to really care and change behavior. I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.

tunesmith 1y ago

Weird article, it mentions three apps at the beginning, doesn't even test two of them in favor of two others it didn't mention, and then declares all the apps failures.

duskwuff 1y ago

Funny, I was just discussing this on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892 There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.

dwetterau 1y ago
It will get to the point where it could know to ask those questions, like a human would. Clearly these tools are not there yet, but I think the models are probably good enough for this already.
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  It’s probably the only thing that would get me to start taking photos of my food, but it would need to be about as accurate as I am in chronometer.
hammock 1y ago
Those are easy manual adjustments to make. Far easier than estimating an entire meal

fullshark 1y ago

Maybe in aggregate they are fine if the noise is unbiased and you do some things like correct it when it says an apple is tikka masala, but yeah, someone using this and lying to themselves about the calorie content of junk/comfort food seems pretty likely.

nvahalik 1y ago

I work for a company that offers nutrition tracking on an app in the App Store. We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier. We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate. We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great. Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.

irrational 1y ago
Does that work for homemade food as well? The vast majority of the food we eat is homemade with recipes that don’t have any sort of nutritional information. I’ve always wished there was a simple way to figure out the calories. Taking a picture would be ideal.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  For homemade food it should be easier to make reliable estimates of the calorie content, because you know with certainty all the food ingredients and their amounts. The food ingredients with the highest calorie content, like various kinds of seeds or nuts or flour or meal or oil or fat or sugar or dried fruits or dairy products, come usually with calorie estimates from their vendors. For other ingredients, like various kinds of meat or of fresh vegetables or fruits, there are online databases with typical nutritional information, like the USDA database. Some of that information can even be found in the corresponding Wikipedia pages.
  - nvahalik 1y ago
    Absolutely. Weighing everything (rather than using volumetric measures) is generally going to be the BEST way to ensure consistency and accuracy. What's also important is that, in general, even if you are 20% off on something (e.g. I logged 2200 calories but I actually consumed 2600 calories) AND you are planning to eat at a caloric deficit, this usually will mean that you will still lose weight or body recomp. It'll just take a little more time. But if you are just not tracking, it's _so easy_ to miscalculate your intake to the point where you think "oh this isn't that bad." However, the truth is you consumed 4200 calories and that's a big surplus. So I/we tend to find the value partially in "simple tracking" to get you aware of what you are actually consuming and then find that transitioning to specific portions to be helpful for "dialing in" and achieving specific targets/goals.

cowanon2222 1y ago

I've had pretty good results using the AI features in Macrofactor. It's certainly not perfect, but it does a pretty good job with mixed text and photos and allows you to easily fine-tune the results. Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.

thearrow 1y ago
Same. I was very skeptical when Macrofactor introduced this feature, but have since been incredibly impressed. The ability to give it text alongside a photo and then adjust the results (broken out by ingredients) are critical. I’ve also been taking pictures of food sitting on scales and it will take the measurement into account. Seems like the Macrofactor team took their time developing this feature, as it felt like they were one of the last to roll it out, but the extra polish definitely shows and was worth the wait.
sunnyam 1y ago
I think the key difference is that they perform a search of the foods in Macrofactor's database which means that you're more likely to get a good estimate. From someone who weighed and scanned a lot of foods, it has really improved the workflow

ValveFan6969 1y ago

[dead]

Kiyo-Lynn 1y ago

I’ve tried a few AI-powered calorie tracking tools too. At first it felt super convenient, just take a photo and get the numbers. But over time I kept seeing mistakes. Sometimes it would even tag a salad as soup. Eventually I went back to the old way. Fewer photos, more mindful eating. Honestly I feel better that way.

spacecadet 1y ago
Honestly this is it for me. Im actively trying to reduce my reliance on tech, even more so when it comes to gimmick tech. A nightly walk with no phone will make you drop pounds too...

solumunus 1y ago

I genuinely can’t understand why anyone would even TRY using these apps. Of course they’re going to be terrible, but how could anyone with a modicum of intelligence suspect otherwise?

surfmike 1y ago

The founder of parrotpal (another AI calorie tracking app, supporting both text and photos) points out that using photos is one of the least accurate ways for tracking food: https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/ https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/ Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/ The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain). Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.

tayo42 1y ago
> seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )
- schmichael 1y ago
  My unprofessional nutritional advice is: do what works for you! So if that’s calorie counting: great! No need to give it a second thought. But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/10671811-the-trouble-with-calories https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...

Sleepthinker 1y ago

As a gym enthusiast, if this app can’t give me accurate calorie counts and nutrient data, it’s basically useless to me. But for the average person, this is a big deal because we tend to seek convenience and want the easiest path to our goals. If this app wants to truly deliver results, it still has a long way to go. Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.

tjpnz 1y ago

If you want calorie counting to be of any value to you you're going to want to be accurate. Thankfully we're mostly creatures of habit. Source accurate numbers for everything you eat in a week and you're 90% covered for every other week. I recorded 30 items over two weeks and then added 15 more over 2.5 months. Don't sabotage your efforts with tools that don't work.

tayo42 1y ago
This is my experience too. Not even 2 weeks, it was like a really tedious 3 or 4 days then I pretty much knew what to take out.

smartgamer112 1y ago

Yeah cal AI is the worst of them all

senko 1y ago

CalAI is just objectively a bad app even discounting its AI calorie estimator as an irrelevant gimmick: * the UX is bad * the stats are laughable * charts worse than nothing (really, misleading to look at) * lacking basic functionality such as “duplicate for today” * can’t see or export the meal photo * their “streak” attempt at gamification is so bad it literally cannot count And yes, the AI there is atrociously bad. Not only can it not reliably detect calorie content (I don’t think anyone could on a basis of a photo in general case), but it so often mislabels food (like the example in article) it’s just a comedic relief. And there’s a “Fix” button which does nothing. It’s like they never really tried hard. Combined with the general lack of quality, looks like a typical quick money grab riding the AI hype wave. I’m pretty confident the app could be vibe-coded in a week (and that’s generous). Maybe the backend is more complex? Don’t think so as there are no social features, it just stores data. Paid for a year (Android app) to see how well they applied AI to the field, now continue to use it like a meal photo log with some (manually entered) metadata, otherwise Excel would be a nicer solution.

Traubenfuchs 1y ago
We live in a post quality age. Consumers just don't care. AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition. You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
- fakedang 1y ago
  Exactly. At what seems to be 30 USD a year, that's laughably low for most users. I'm actually impressed on the kids for finding a niche snake oil market and selling it to them.
- username223 1y ago
  It's not that consumers don't care -- it's that "they" (i.e. "we") have been beaten down. Connect an image labeling API to the USDA's database of nutrients, make a slick-looking app, and you have a product. Pay for some marketing, offer a three-day trial after which you auto-bill for a year, make refunds as difficult as possible, and you have a business. At $30/yr, 10k subscriptions (deliberate or accidental) gets you $210k after app store commission. If you're lucky, you get bought out for even more. If not, you still made good money for not much work.

jonplackett 1y ago

I always just assumed these were terrible. There just isn’t enough info in a photo, even for the world’s leading calorie counting expert, to give a sensible estimate of the calories content. Ans even more so for macros. Add to that the fact vision is still pretty crap and you have a complete joke that I can’t believe anyone is paying for.

automatic6131 1y ago
I bet @onionweigher could - if all you ate were onions
- teddyh 1y ago
  Human children can’t live on onions. <https://scarygoround.com/badmachinery/index.html?pg=374#showComic https://scarygoround.com/badmachinery/index.html?pg=374#show...>
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
jclardy 1y ago
I've used the AI features in Lose It and was pretty impressed, not for the caloric estimate, but when given a picture of a breakfast burrito it accurately split it out into the component parts, from there I could manually adjust amounts easily for food I make without having to manually search out every ingredient manually. As an additional tool it is great. The issue of course is these new apps built with a sole focus of AI images for tracking. With a photo of restaurant food you can't see a sauce and the 5-10g of additional sugar content, can't get accurate guesses of what is in breads/pastas and figuring out general volumes of foods is not possible unless you have some kind of standard size reference in the frame.
- Iulioh 1y ago
  Honestly the best use case i have seen is the ability to read a labels and add it to the database. (Similar to an OCR but better) Correcting errors in MFP is the bane of my existence. I have tried some other apps but i hated every single one of them for a reason or another and came back to MFP but that was one of the best features i would really love to have

jonplackett 1y ago

I used MyFitnessPal to lose 15kg a few years ago and I have a theory that the act of calorie counting (ie the effort of working it out and labour of putting it into the app) is a key part of why it works. It becomes just slightly more effort to eat something and it makes you stop and think. Making it easier I would expect to make it also easier to eat more.

kamma4434 1y ago
Attention and focus make it work. You must be ‘in it’ - otherwise it wont work.
- myhf 1y ago
  Of course it will work. Just tell ChatGPT that it is working and it will agree with you.
  - kamma4434 1y ago
    Your scale may beg to differ - but it’s not AI-based yet.
jclardy 1y ago
I find a similar thing with budgeting apps. Manually tracking requires effort and for you to think twice before every purchase, whereas automatic transaction syncing with your bank means you can just not think about it. In the case of dieting/calorie counting - I don't think you can get away with not thinking about it, especially with inaccurate estimates.
yoz-y 1y ago
Yep. Iirc any kind of diet works as long as it is restrictive. Even if the restriction is “do not eat anything that has blue on the package”.
devmor 1y ago
As someone who lost nearly 100lbs (about 45kg) calorie counting and working out, this was a big part of it. It also just made me cognizant of my bad eating habits. I’d absent-mindedly snack on something, go to log it, then think “wait, why am I eating this right now?” and stop. It’s essential educating yourself on nutrition through habit.

ginko 1y ago

>The app did recognize it as an apple this time, but estimated it at 80 calories when the actual count should have been closer to 120. Where does the author take the 120 number from? The very link they gave says a large pink lady apple is 78 calories.

hyperbovine 1y ago
Presumably every apple has a different calorie count depending on ripeness, size, and variety...?
llm_nerd 1y ago
They do claim their apple is 222 grams, so presumably they took the 100g nutrition and multiplied it by 2.2.

wahnfrieden 1y ago

Others have found that CalAI likely uses Gemini 1.5 (not sure which variant) which is used because it's very cheap, not for its accuracy. I understand the fundamental issues with calorie counting via photo analysis/LLM. However these articles would be more interesting if they included comparison with results from actual cutting-edge LLMs, rather than the budget models. I acknowledge that apps don't use these models though to protect margins and lower cost. Also: > Cameras capture two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects. iPhone camera captures depth, too. I don't think it's being used in CalAI though. This article is more about current commercialized solutions rather than analysis of state of the art capability.

tough 1y ago
what's worse, this could be 100% done in local llms since its such a small batchable job
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  What model can run on a phone with accuracy closer to 4o than Gemini 1.5?
  - tough 1y ago
    idk tbh asking an llm to estimate calories seems like such a -bad idea- on the first place, that doesnt seem that having a better model would improve results much.
woadwarrior01 1y ago
> I don't think it's being used in CalAI though. They don't, but that doesn't stop them from lying about it on their homepage. > Snap a photo with Cal AI, and your phone's depth sensor calculates food volume. Our AI then analyzes and breaks down your meal to determine calories, protein, carbs, and fat. The grift must go on.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago

p1dda 1y ago

I welcome every article that exposes just how bad "AI" is.

blibble 1y ago
it still also can't count the legs on a dog https://vlmsarebiased.github.io/ https://vlmsarebiased.github.io/ another decade and we'll be able to get the Not Hotdog app from Silicon Valley

perching_aix 1y ago

How many times a day and how many unique food items does one need to eat to continually remain so hopelessly unfamiliar with their caloric intake that they need an app to track it? What role can AI possibly have in this, when all you need to do is either turn around the packaging or do a web search for the dish you cook to get a number?

cactusplant7374 1y ago
Restaurants and dishes at home made by someone else that have a combination of different foods.
matkoniecz 1y ago
> they need an app to track it? "track" is important here How packaging or a web search will help with exactly remembering how much was eaten in past?
- perching_aix 1y ago
  By enabling you to think in terms of what you ate, rather than numbers. If you eat a varied but regular diet, this enables you to stop having to track. You'll just know your approximate caloric budget and intake for the day, and what that means in terms of food items. When you have to take ownership of your diet (and thus your weight), that means a permanent lifestyle change. Tracking is simply not sustainable indefinitely, so you must establish better consumption habits while you do so, that will stick past the tracking. Tracking and getting to know what you eat, rather than tracking your calories, is what enables you to form such a habit and knowledge base. Eating random stuff and thus having to use AI due to a lack of easily accessible and personally learnable nutrition information makes a total mockery of this process, and runs pretty much antithetical to it.

ulfw 1y ago

This goes for most "AI" things nowadays. What was once "blockchain" has become "AI" for companies now. (PS: doesn't mean there aren't real use cases. Sadly the term AI has been stretched to cover all kinds of charlatanery)

bandrami 1y ago

AI aside we don't really know how many calories a given person will get from eating a given piece of food. We measure food's calories by burning it, but we don't get nearly all that energy from dissolving it (just consider the fact that solid human waste burns, for instance). At best we've established some (fairly broad) minima and maxima.

bitdivision 1y ago
Presumably the recommended daily calorie intake figures (and the calculators for these) do to some extent take this into account? i.e. I would imagine they're based on experimentally tested values rather than theoretical energy expenditure.
matkoniecz 1y ago
"We measure food's calories by burning it" - are you sure that how it is done? Humans (unlike say cows) do not digest parts of what is available in plants, which makes some vegetables filling and ultra-low caloric. "we don't really know how many calories a given person will get from eating a given piece of food" exact numbers of unknown, but difference is not so great, except truly extreme cases (and vast majority of fat people is not fat due to them)
neither_color 1y ago
add to that food calorie labels arent required to be 100% accurate, there's an acceptable range like +/- 20% iirc. That's enough to throw off a precise deficit. Calorie counting is more about directionally helping you lower your food consumption but it isnt as accurate as people think.
- zeta0134 1y ago
  Honestly the main thing was learning that perfectly satisfying food I cook at home tends to land around 600-800 cal for a meal, where eating out almost anywhere is often twice that, even if my beverage is water. Just being aware how how heavy those otherwise delightful meals are gives me pause. Granted these figures are all a side effect of my personal eating habits and preferences, but that's rather the point of the exercise isn't it? There's a lot of individual variation, and the individual is probably best served by a personalized approach.

atleastoptimal 1y ago

it’s crazy how much money you can make with a garbage app. The fact that i’m not means i must be stupid

snakeboy 1y ago

This feels like the same type of critique people have about code-assistant LLMs. We need to be a lot more realistic about their role as a 'next-gen autocomplete' who can write some boilerplate code, not a replacement for a mid-level software developer. These apps seem useful to reduce the friction of entering your meal's calorie contents from 30 seconds of ingredient estimating, to 20 seconds (auto-filling main ingredients and a baseline portion estimate). As everyone points out, it's impossible for these to get any better than that (GIGO). But reducing the overhead for calorie-counting seems like a reasonable goal and a valuable service. Of course the marketing departments for these companies is going to say whatever bullshit they want; that's their prerogative...

mkfs 1y ago

Fat is the most calorie-dense macro at 9 per gram (protein and carb are both 4), so your accuracy is going to be heavily skewed by how accurately you can identify the fat content of the meal. The problem is that it's often in forms like oils that don't seem well-suited to AI image recognition.

boydYVR 1y ago
Yeah. Relying on images of food to track calories is like ... dancing about architecture.

dack 1y ago

Calorie tracking is also about educating yourself about how many calories certain things are, so you can make better decisions. Like, oil is insanely caloric and can accidentally add hundreds of calories, but it's nearly impossible to eat too many greens. Once you learn this, then the tracking is just to keep you honest - your brain knows what to do but it lies to you when it wants to bend the rules and those little cheats add up enough to throw off the whole diet.

cainxinth 1y ago
You develop a sixth sense for how calorific foods are when you track calories consistently. I kept a meticulous food journal for about six months before I realized I didn’t really need to anymore because I had gotten so good at just estimating my totals. Protip: most people underestimate the calories in alcohol
- yreg 1y ago
  > most people underestimate the calories in alcohol Funny, I feel the other way around. I kept hearing about how much calories there are in alcohol, and then when I started calorie counting I didn't find it so high. Like 6 shots of gin are ~550kcal and enough to get anyone pretty drunk. Unless one is a regular heavy drinker it's not that hard to once in a while budget calories during the day to be able to get a few shots when going out in the evening. Obviously staying sober is the healthier option.
  - n4r9 1y ago
    I definitely find it suprising that a shot of gin has as many calories as an apple.
  - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    I think when people are mentioning alcohol they typically mean beer or wine - a can of beer is ~150 calories, so have a few of those a night, which isn't at all uncommon in some households, and over a week you're up ~1 lbs.

rurban 1y ago

A classic tale of a founder winning over engineering. "This stock model from huggingface is good enough, no need to train it."

tomp 1y ago
The best summary of the situation I found on Twitter: The most important part of marketing and PR is lying to your customers.

tantalor 1y ago

Not hotdog

blitzar 1y ago
Hotdog
- ksajh 1y ago
  Sandwich
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Not hotdog

vjulian 1y ago

I use ChatGPT (4o model) to track my daily macros, specifically calories, protein, fat, and carbs. I have a prompt containing my macro targets and a list of the foods I typically eat or have at home. Throughout the day, I report my meals, for example five large eggs, two slices of sprouted wheat toast, and a cup of spinach with a pat of butter. It calculates the macros for each meal and keeps a running macros total so I can see how I’m tracking. It’s so easy—I don’t even type, I use (the overall excellent) ChatGPT’s TTS function in the iOS app. If I eat something unexpected, I have it recalculate what I need for the rest of the day. If I were planning on 8 ounces of chicken for dinner but had an unplanned snack, it might tell me that 6 ounces will suffice now, and I now have room for more fat, so I could add some cheese. I find it quite accurate in this. Where it loses accuracy is over time. Even when focused on just a single day, the cumulative totals can be wrong when the context window gets too large. I catch this by mentally adding up the numbers it spits out. If the numbers seem off, I open a new chat. Also, it’s not reliable for looking back over multiple days or trying to track long-term patterns. When I take a photo of a meal (like when eating out), it performs very well. I ask it to list the contents of the plate, then I correct any assumptions. Once corrected, the resulting macros are usually within 5% accuracy. I also tell it the quality of the ingredients and restaurant overall, which can help a bit.

cj 1y ago
Do you find this easier than scanning barcodes with traditional calorie tracking apps?
- jmacd 1y ago
  How much of your daily intake comes from food that has a barcode on it?
  - ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 1y ago
    I typically just measure ingredients and log it in Cronometer.
  - cj 1y ago

maxehmookau 1y ago

I can't see any way in which AI could ever solve this from a photo. A tablespoon of oil is 100 calories, but probably not visible in an image. Sugar in cooked meals is impossible to see. Is this aimed at a world where every food product is individually wrapped? Because most of the world doesn't live that way.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago

Calorie counting is a tedious, impractical activity for anybody who isn’t even entering a bodybuilding competition. Just go on a total deficit with high-quality foods, whatever the composition.

fastball 1y ago
How do you know you are on a total deficit if you don't count calories?
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
  You lose weight after a week.
  - fastball 1y ago
    And what if you gain weight instead lol
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
      It’s impossible for you to gain weight on a deficit. If you gained weight, you must have necessarily increased your calorie intake.

dsr_ 1y ago

Surprisingly, at no point does the author write: "This is clearly fraudulent as it does not and cannot work, so I reported it to Apple/Google."

danesparza 1y ago

I think it's very telling that the images were not oriented correctly. I'm wondering if this is a simpler bug than the the author is letting on.

hippari2 1y ago

Would be fun if someone try this on something from East Asian cuisine vs Fish and Chips. See how well it does in complex dishes.

weird_trousers 1y ago

It would be “eventually good” if, and only if, Vision problems were solved at 100% F1-Score. Which is absolutely not! So, to me, I expected bad and I received… bad results. Paying for this crap is just throwing money out the window. Those startups should solve problems and them let people pay for it, for 99% accuracy, not at minimum of 66%.

Qem 1y ago

I wonder what are the errors bars for calorie counting, even assuming one measures food intake by weight accurately. Are the reference values in food package labelling any good, or is the variability from one batch to another and variability in absorption from one person to another so large that such calculations become an exercise of garbage-in, garbage-out?

XorNot 1y ago
It doesn't matter provided it's not systemic. For anything related to diet, average over time is the much more relevant factor. For example you could track calories by just tallying your grocery bills if you lived alone.

xutopia 1y ago

I just ask ChatGPT based on the weight of the food I eat and it gives me pretty accurate results.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

wnorris510 1y ago

Founder of https://snapcalorie.com https://snapcalorie.com and ex-Google AI researcher here. The article actually gets our pricing wrong, it's completely free to use SnapCalorie, the $79.99 price is a donation to support our research and help us continue providing the best tools to everyone for free. We've published in top peer reviewed academic conferences and our algorithm (can't say the same for other apps) IS actually more accurate than people trying to visually estimate portion size, but the truth is both are quite inaccurate. Most people won't spend the time to track, so photo logging is a faster and easier approximation. If you want more accurate logging you should use the voice logging feature and a kitchen scale (also completely free in our app). As many mention the goal is to learn, not to tediously track every little thing. Do what's sustainable for you and helps achieve your health and fitness goals.

sumeno 1y ago
What about when people give up because you massively underestimate their calories? Or when people develop eating disorders because you massively overestimate their calories? If the goal is to learn then accurate information is important, although I suppose it's harder to get a VC to fund.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  What about the people that would have given up on the diet without even trying because they just cba to do it "properly"? Ultimately, there is no silver bullet in nutrition.
  - sumeno 1y ago
    There may not be a silver bullet but adding randomly generated numbers is not an improvement
- wnorris510 1y ago
  We do a lot of research on preventing eating disorders. As the article mentions we did not suggest she lose weight down to being underweight like other apps did. Our app has the fruit and veg counters ABOVE the calorie meter on the dashboard. The reason for this is that maximization mindset (e.g. maximizing fruits and veg) is way healthier than a minimization mindset (e.g. minimizing calories or carbs). We actually even tried to fully remove calories from the app at some point but we had a vast majority of users churn and decided it would be healthier for people who want calorie tracking to stick with our app by having it present, but requiring them to scroll past the features that promote a healthier mindset to get there. Feedback from users has been amazing that they've slowly started focusing more on fruits and veg.

bradleylw 1y ago

[dead]

yqiang 1y ago

I'm working on an app in this area [1], and I've spent a lot of time exploring how to responsibly use AI for food tracking. My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the primary tracking method. Consistency is key to successful food tracking, and AI can certainly help users avoid the common issue of missing a meal and losing momentum. However, inaccuracies, like consistently being off by 100-200 calories per day, can significantly impact results, especially for those on lower-calorie diets (like 1,200-1,500 calories/day, which is common for many women due to their physical size). With FitBee I landed on communicating to the user that these are estimates and you probably shouldn't use it as your primary method of tracking calories. [1] https://fitbee.app https://fitbee.app

jablongo 1y ago

The article claims that none of these apps use "depth analysis", but newer iPhones have this capability. I would guess at least some of these apps are using some kind of volumetric analysis for the food when available.

jraines 1y ago

The benefit of AI as a feature in calorie counting apps is great. But you have to track stuff manually for a while to realize the benefit. Specifically: using AI for restaurant meals is a convenient starting point, from which you use your hard-won feel for weight & caloric density of things to tweak the first pass to something closer to the mark. As of now I would not at all trust a fully AI calorie counting app

marcellus23 1y ago
This is exactly correct. I find AI in my food tracking app (FoodNoms) to be really useful, but no, you cannot rely on it on its own. You always have to tweak the results to match what you feel in your gut (no pun intended) the counts should be. Interestingly, very similar situation to using AI for code: you shouldn't just blindly trust what it puts out, but if you know what you're doing, it can save you a lot of time.
wnorris510 1y ago
100%. You should not trust photo based calorie tracking and should only use it when there is no other realistic choice (e.g. eating out). You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently. The truth is these algorithms have the potential to be accurate when values are averaged out over the long term, but dish to dish they will have occasionally wildly inaccurate results.
- sumeno 1y ago
  > You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently. Your website says: > SnapCalorie is the first app where you can take a picture of any meal and get an accurate calorie count and nutrition in seconds. So which is it? Can you get an accurate calorie count of a meal from a picture or not?

cochne 1y ago

I started using an AI calorie tracking app. For non-branded foods, the calorie counting is pretty inaccurate and sometimes very off. However, having an app that can track pictures and create short descriptions that someone else (my trainer) can easily review has been pretty helpful.

jablongo 1y ago

Establishing ground truth for this is not easy. Often the labeled calories on foods are quite inaccurate themselves, based on n=1 bomb calorimetry tests. There are also incentives that may lead to lower than actual reported calories on the label.

homefree 1y ago

I suspect none of this stuff will matter in the near term. People will just take ozempic or whatever the best iteration is and be done with it. I’ve lost substantial weight (75lbs) the hard way multiple times, it’s doable but it sucks. If the drugs make it easy with seemingly no downside then why waste time with this other stuff. Use the drugs, lose the weight, then when thin add in an exercise regimen if you don’t have one.

sudobash1 1y ago

I expect that plenty of these apps are or will be mining these photos for data about their users. I know the cat is already out of the bag as far as online tracking goes, but until now, tracking every meal & snack someone eats has been impossible (except perhaps for the most consummate doordash user). And the companies most interested in the data would be the large food corporations who bear a lot of responsibility for getting us into this obesity crisis in the first place.

foxyv 1y ago

Calorie counting is so unreliable it hardly even matters. The calorie measurements are way off. There are so many sources of macronutrients and they are all digested differently and lead to so many different amounts of "Fuel" for the body. Just the different types of carbohydrates are bad enough. An actually accurate food label would look like the spec sheet for a 5th generation fighter jet. This doesn't even take into account the variations in the human body. Some people digest different types of foods better than others. Then there are the gut microbiomes of each individual. By the time you get done, if you have counted 2000 calories you could be off by 25% or more. The big advantage that makes calorie counting work is that it makes people actually think about what they are eating.

boydYVR 1y ago
Yes, all bodies process food differently, and all measurement tools are inaccurate. One of the bigger benefits of tracking is the ability to see trends. If you're chronically low or high on a nutrient, a good tool will make this apparent to the user.

alis0nlaura 1y ago

SnapCalorie is a very useful tool, and not just for calorie counting but for macros and solving for nutrient deficiency.

boydYVR 1y ago

I've felt the same way for years. I used one of the big names for a month about 10 years ago, and it was a great way to learn about my habits and diet, and to experiment with IF (intermittent fasting). I tried it again, now that I'm a serial entrepreneur and single parent... and I just did NOT have the patience for the data entry. I feel same as this article that photos are not a solution. Vodka and water look the same to a camera. Since April I've been using a tool I developed for myself. It's very much a MVP with an emphasis on M, but it's cheap to run, so I'll share the url if anyone wants to try it out and share feedback. https://words.my https://words.my

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago

>> Maybe the old-fashioned approach of listening to our bodies works better than any algorithm. My body is perfectly capable of eating an entire jar of peanut butter with an entire jar of honey on the side in one sitting, so, no.