Is that white cream topping a low-fat yogurt or some kind of delicious artery clogging velouté sauce? That distinction alone could make a world a difference if you're calorie/fat counting; different methods of cooking food that ends up appearing the same can drastically change the healthiness of a food. In general, someone's time might be better spent learning the basis of maintaining a nutritional diet and everything that goes along with it, rather than snapping pictures of everything eaten, twice.
Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#22This is a bit impractical. Recognizing the food with few errors would be horribly hard. I think it is sometinhg like speech recognition or automatic translation: yes, it is easy to create some simple not very good speech recognizer or translator software, but it is incredibly hard to create a high quality one. The only remaining option is to create a user interface where the user can type-in his daily food intake ver…
> Recognizing the food with few errors would be horribly hard.
I wonder if it would be possible to have some sort of a hybrid system, where automatic recognition is attempted, with a fall-back to manual input where this fails. (The manual input could be to select from several automatic "guesses") If the app stored all the data from all users, this could eventually lead to a really big database, and the automatic recognition might get better and better.
EDIT: Also, automatic vegetable/fruit recognition is actually in production in some supermarkets, for weighing/pricing. (I saw this in France.)
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#23Meh. Just recording the weights I do along with my body weight (along with a graph of each) works fine, and it honestly couldn't be much easier [1]. [1] Shameless self-promotion: http://daytaapp.com
I love your app and wish I could find something similar for the Android platform. EDIT: Or something similar on Windows/Linux/Web(not Daytum)
Maybe a web-based compliment to Dayta for iPhone? It may be a possibility (though don't bet on it).
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#24This is a bit impractical. Recognizing the food with few errors would be horribly hard. I think it is sometinhg like speech recognition or automatic translation: yes, it is easy to create some simple not very good speech recognizer or translator software, but it is incredibly hard to create a high quality one. The only remaining option is to create a user interface where the user can type-in his daily food intake ver…
I disagree people want to do this on a computer screen. Pulling out an iphone is far less friction than remembering to enter this information next time you're on a computer.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#25I amuses me to no end how everybody assumes that the reason we eat unhealthy food is that we don't know any better. In reality, it is because unhealthy food taste better (not always, but most of the time) and is a lot more convinient.
I disagree, I just yesterday showed someone than although they has switched from Coke to apple juice, the apple juice actually had more sugar. People don't all read labels.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#26I almost always eat 100% of what I cook and put on my plate. After reading this article it struck me that some people, or even a majority of people, might not does the same. Do you throw away a significant amount of your food?
Of course I live alone and most of the time I cook what I bought in more than one meal... But what I put in my plate always goes in my stomach. How could it be otherwise? But if not, why bother with a picture of what have been left in the plate!
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#27I amuses me to no end how everybody assumes that the reason we eat unhealthy food is that we don't know any better. In reality, it is because unhealthy food taste better (not always, but most of the time) and is a lot more convinient.
I disagree, I just yesterday showed someone than although they has switched from Coke to apple juice, the apple juice actually had more sugar. People don't all read labels.
Sure it may have more net carbohydrates, but the real difference is the density of those calories and the types of carbohydrates they are.
Eating fast food contains saturated fats (and trans fats) which are incredibly difficult for the body to break down. Olive oil, on the other hand, is almost all monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which the body can break down much easier.
So yes, I think the GGP poster was more correct in that sometimes people just want a nice big fattening hamburger.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#28The biggest problem with a system like this is scale, how do you determine the size of the portion? Consider these two pictures of mash potatoes
http://www.mccormick.com/~/media/Images/Recipes/Recipe%20Det...
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6slcYXNa204/SwT183CdpjI/AAAAAAAABN...
We all know from years of experience that the first image is a larger bowl and probably contains 6-8 times the amount as the second picture, but image analysis would not.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#29I'm tired of calorie apps that think I only eat out at Chili's, McDonalds, and other chains or prepackaged foods such as Mac & Cheese, Sara Lee, and Oreos.
The ultimate food calorie app would know the calories in a Mission burrito.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#30Ideally restaurants would upload the nutrition facts of their foods to an online database. (Maybe this should be legally required.) Such a database would make this app more feasible, as the smart phone could use GPS to figure out what restaurant it is in. Maybe even better would be a numerical code next to each food item on the menu that could be input into a smart phone to provide full nutrition facts. That seems li…
This mode of doing things is, for the most part, already available. There are apps that work around the same principle as CalorieKing, where common restaurants and foodstuffs are saved in a database with their respective nutrition details. This tends to be very convenient when eating at popular restaurants, or eating commonly purchased grocery items. The GPS element is an interesting twist on the idea though. How coo…
Yeah, I've seen that kind of wiki-like functionality in the Livestrong Nutrition app, and let's face the facts: preparation styles vary wildly among different restaurants. If I type "slice of pizza" into that nutrition app, I get "large slice," "cheese slice," "small slice," and several tens of variations. It's okay, but not ideal. If I go to the local pizza joint, I want to know fairly certainly what I'm getting in terms of calories if I order one of their specialty pizzas. That's where I think a database would be useful.
As for the GPS, that would be very cool.
As has been said before, the biggest obstacle to food apps is mobilizing a sales force to convince all restaurants to embrace a product. And because many restaurants don't really have (or need) IT capabilities, it's actually costly for them to implement computers and train staff to learn the particular system. That's why OpenTable and others are having problems with adoption.