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.
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.
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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?
>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.
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 :(
> 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?
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?:
- sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs.
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements.
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight.
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
> This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake.
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
> For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss.
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
> they struggle with actually putting it into action [...] conceding to their cravings
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
I try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it’s a lot of effort. Eat out and you’re screwed (estimated at best). When you include sauces and oils etc it’s really hard to be accurate in the best of times, and it’s just a pain to keep on top of. Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count.
I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.
People are bad at reporting ANYTHING. Exercise, food, sex, grooming. Just ask a lawyer or anybody trying to get a story out of somebody.
This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.
Generalising, this is one of the lessons of the past ~2 centuries in which we've had for the first time reasonably objective analogic recording capabilities: photography, phonography, cinema, and the like. Until their emergence, human testimony across a wide range of phenomena was the only way to transmit information and, due to its low fidelity, low information density, unreliable interpretation and unreliable reproduction, that was at best only modestly reliable. A fantastic example of this (in numerous senses) is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), made from second-hand reports and sketches. On the one hand, it doesn't look true to life, but on the other, specific features of the animal are recorded with remarkable accuracy --- the segmentation of body plates, horns, toes, and aspect of the eyes for example. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros>.
And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert.
Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.
You cannot dispense common sense through the educational system. Most career scientists are mediocre, and/or they are trying to survive in a rigged system.
> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions
There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways.
If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
Does this actually pose an issue for most studies?
This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y.
For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison.
Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.
You are assuming that the underreporting will be uniform. In reality people may be underrporting things they are embarrassed about and maybe even overreporting the opposite.
This is a flaw in the data that is much harder to account for.
All of those headlines are based on meta-studies putting together 100 junk studies, based on bad data, which then informs actual medicine and health trends and American X Association and...
For your specific example - "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
It's kind of like feeding all of reddit's comments into chatgpt, asking it about stuff, and trusting its answers at a society-level with your health on the line.
This is why sleep studies are conducted in clinics, not left to patients to self-report. they want accurate data? They will need to conduct a real study, portion the meals out themselves, give people a schedule.
In my experience, people are especially bad at understanding how calorific alcohol is. Carbs and protein are generally 4 calories per gram. Alcohol is 7 calories per gram. Only fat is more energy dense at 9 calories per gram.
I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter option for people watching their weight -- even though all unflavored hard liquor has no carbs and is still incredibly calorific.
I thought this was generally known that people are bad at reporting most things about themselves. It's a good argument in favor of wearables or other smart monitors, if anyone expects to do actual rigorous research it needs to be objective.
Just a couple of days ago, I wrote I automatically flag any submission with any kind of "dietary" studies. I'm not saying there is no one study well done, but doing it well, is just (almost) impracticable. Not only the people have literally no idea what they eat, they forget and misreport, also a human living normal life in the society has just TOO MANY variables. There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
Another way to look at it is that tracking what you eat is very difficult. Currently trying to lose a few pounds and doing calorie tracking. Practically carry a scale and a calorie tracking app with me. About once a day there's still some "estimation" involved due to the fact that all the ingredients are mixed together.
Have used chatGPT for about a year to count my daily calorie in-take .
Since I eat out daily at fairly healthy places (Cava, Panera, chic fil a only grilled nuggets & fruit cups, Jersey Mikes number 7 mini, noodles & company, MOD pizza) GPT knows their menu & each items calories. Upon getting the food I just tell GPT what I'm about to eat each time and it counts & retains and calculates through the day.
In doing so as adult male (late 40s) 5'10 175 my body has gotten used to eating 1500 to 2k calories a day. Do weigh myself daily to ensure I'm not gaining as I do have a cheat day once a week.
I understand the sodium content is higher then if I cooked at home but I'm focused on maintaining a fit look & counting calories along with a few weekly gym visits I think keeps me as I seek.
"> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions"
These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :(
Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale.
Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc.
Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines.
Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies.
Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results.
It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful.
It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.
Have you ever wondered why it’s such a struggle for a diabetic to manage blood sugar levels in a sensible way? Here’s the answer. I assure you that anyone with diabetes is forced (and the word "forced" doesn’t fully convey the mental burden involved) to maintain an almost obsessive level of awareness about what they eat. There’s no comparison to someone simply “on a diet.”
I guarantee you, it’s an incredibly complex task. Unless one adopts a monastic approach of always eating exactly the same carefully measured meals at home, the challenge is constant.
If one day a system based on vision and AI could accomplish this task (and it can't, it’s impossible), it could charge any price and have millions of users.
It's an open secret that most nutrition research is of extremely low quality - almost all relying on decades old self reported nutritional questionnaires.
Sometimes dozens of these studies get wrapped up and analyzed together, and we headlines that THING IS BAD with a hazard ratio of like 1.05 (we figured out smoking was bad with a hazard ratio that was like 3! - you need a really good signal when you are analyzing such low quality data)
The benefits of the Minnesota Starvation Study were that both food intake and physical activity could be accurately tracked. If we had a draft and there were conscientious objectors, would similar studies be possible as alternative service? I suspect that our ethical concerns now are greater than they were back then, so maybe it wouldn't be possible to conduct.
It’s also just really hard unless you live off packaged meals or only eat thing that are isolated.
Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
One of the ... beyond annoying ... aspects of our track-everything-individuals-do-and-utilise-it-against-them contemporary information ecology is that it is so painfully difficult to make use of that information for personal advantage.
In the specific case of food intake, it should be reasonably trivial to aggregate purchase information, at grocery stores, restaurants, and online deliveries, and at least arrive at a reasonable baseline of total consumption. Rather than having to fill out a food diary from memory with uncertain measurments, one can rely on grocery and menu receipts directly.
This is more useful for those who live alone or shop for themselves (a large fraction of the population, but far from complete). It's based on the general principle that you tend to eat what you buy. There's some error imposed by food acquired elsewhere (shared at work, school, from friends, etc.), and of tossed food, but what you'll arrive at is over time a pretty accurate record of intake.
I'm surprised that such methods aren't more widely used or reported in both dietary management and research.
My own personal experience has been that I've been most successful in dietary management when 1) I have direct control over shopping and 2) I focus far more on what I eat than how much, though some of the latter applies. If I'm aware that specific foods are deleterious to goals (highly-processed, junk foods, high-caloric / high-sugar liquids, etc), then the most effective control point at minimum decision cost is at the store. If you don't buy crisps, chips, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ice cream, and the like, it's not at the house for you to consume.
I'm well aware that there are circumstances in which this is difficult to arrange, sometimes with friends or roommates, more often with families. I'll only say that clearly expressing terms and boundaries is tremendously useful here.
Everything needs to be weighted on a precise scale, every ingredient and not just the macros. On top of that the reported nutrition values on labels can be wrong by a large margin so for not whole foods, we introduce an error.
This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
[+] [-] wnorris510|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] UomoNeroNero|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m_ke|1 year ago|reply
We even worked with USDA on putting together a food logging dataset: https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A...
[+] [-] marinmania|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zahlman|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] ryan-richt|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] taeric|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] LPisGood|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrgaro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] michchinn|1 year ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] wisty|1 year ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] tombert|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] xandrius|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] porphyra|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rapjr9|1 year ago|reply
https://www.ah-lab.cs.dartmouth.edu/publications/detecting-e...
[+] [-] Fire-Dragon-DoL|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] darkhorse222|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tejohnso|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aziaziazi|1 year ago|reply
- sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
[+] [-] everdrive|1 year ago|reply
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
[+] [-] Spivak|1 year ago|reply
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
[+] [-] derbOac|1 year ago|reply
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
[+] [-] keybored|1 year ago|reply
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
[+] [-] wrfrmers|1 year ago|reply
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
[+] [-] 2cynykyl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mmooss|1 year ago|reply
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
[+] [-] watwut|1 year ago|reply
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
[+] [-] landtuna|1 year ago|reply
(FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree that fewer calories causes weight loss)
[+] [-] TypingOutBugs|1 year ago|reply
I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|1 year ago|reply
This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|1 year ago|reply
And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert.
Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.
[+] [-] dennis_jeeves2|1 year ago|reply
Crows are never whiter by washing.
You cannot dispense common sense through the educational system. Most career scientists are mediocre, and/or they are trying to survive in a rigged system.
[+] [-] ttoinou|1 year ago|reply
Or maybe the researchers know all this from years working in this field, the problem might be from those simplifying the research for the public
[+] [-] lm28469|1 year ago|reply
There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways.
If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
[+] [-] BoxFour|1 year ago|reply
This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y.
For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison.
Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.
[+] [-] Turneyboy|1 year ago|reply
This is a flaw in the data that is much harder to account for.
[+] [-] liveoneggs|1 year ago|reply
For your specific example - "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
It's kind of like feeding all of reddit's comments into chatgpt, asking it about stuff, and trusting its answers at a society-level with your health on the line.
[+] [-] damnesian|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cainxinth|1 year ago|reply
I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter option for people watching their weight -- even though all unflavored hard liquor has no carbs and is still incredibly calorific.
[+] [-] alexfromapex|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] f1shy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drchiu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] paul7986|1 year ago|reply
Since I eat out daily at fairly healthy places (Cava, Panera, chic fil a only grilled nuggets & fruit cups, Jersey Mikes number 7 mini, noodles & company, MOD pizza) GPT knows their menu & each items calories. Upon getting the food I just tell GPT what I'm about to eat each time and it counts & retains and calculates through the day.
In doing so as adult male (late 40s) 5'10 175 my body has gotten used to eating 1500 to 2k calories a day. Do weigh myself daily to ensure I'm not gaining as I do have a cheat day once a week.
I understand the sodium content is higher then if I cooked at home but I'm focused on maintaining a fit look & counting calories along with a few weekly gym visits I think keeps me as I seek.
[+] [-] DannyBee|1 year ago|reply
These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :(
Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale.
Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc.
Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines.
Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies.
Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results.
It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful.
It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.
[+] [-] UomoNeroNero|1 year ago|reply
I guarantee you, it’s an incredibly complex task. Unless one adopts a monastic approach of always eating exactly the same carefully measured meals at home, the challenge is constant.
If one day a system based on vision and AI could accomplish this task (and it can't, it’s impossible), it could charge any price and have millions of users.
[+] [-] dacox|1 year ago|reply
Sometimes dozens of these studies get wrapped up and analyzed together, and we headlines that THING IS BAD with a hazard ratio of like 1.05 (we figured out smoking was bad with a hazard ratio that was like 3! - you need a really good signal when you are analyzing such low quality data)
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|1 year ago|reply
Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
[+] [-] dredmorbius|1 year ago|reply
One of the ... beyond annoying ... aspects of our track-everything-individuals-do-and-utilise-it-against-them contemporary information ecology is that it is so painfully difficult to make use of that information for personal advantage.
In the specific case of food intake, it should be reasonably trivial to aggregate purchase information, at grocery stores, restaurants, and online deliveries, and at least arrive at a reasonable baseline of total consumption. Rather than having to fill out a food diary from memory with uncertain measurments, one can rely on grocery and menu receipts directly.
This is more useful for those who live alone or shop for themselves (a large fraction of the population, but far from complete). It's based on the general principle that you tend to eat what you buy. There's some error imposed by food acquired elsewhere (shared at work, school, from friends, etc.), and of tossed food, but what you'll arrive at is over time a pretty accurate record of intake.
I'm surprised that such methods aren't more widely used or reported in both dietary management and research.
My own personal experience has been that I've been most successful in dietary management when 1) I have direct control over shopping and 2) I focus far more on what I eat than how much, though some of the latter applies. If I'm aware that specific foods are deleterious to goals (highly-processed, junk foods, high-caloric / high-sugar liquids, etc), then the most effective control point at minimum decision cost is at the store. If you don't buy crisps, chips, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ice cream, and the like, it's not at the house for you to consume.
I'm well aware that there are circumstances in which this is difficult to arrange, sometimes with friends or roommates, more often with families. I'll only say that clearly expressing terms and boundaries is tremendously useful here.
[+] [-] thefz|1 year ago|reply
This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.