Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 470 posts

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

#191

Post by lotsoweiners »

stevesimmons wrote: post #170
taeric wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Portion sizes in the US are ridiculous... often 2-3x larger than here in Europe. When I regularly visited New York for work, and we'd get takeaway sandwiches, I'd have to open them and remove half the filling. I just couldn't physically eat that volume of meat, cheese or especially mayonnaise. For all drinks, I'd order small.

New York deli sandwiches are certainly not representative of what you get everywhere in the US. They are famously large.

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

#192

Post by felideon »

m_ke wrote: post #139
wnorris510 wrote: post #130

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 w…

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

What happened to your app? I was on such a research team (Scripps) that used your app for the study (PROGRESS).

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

#193

Post by TypingOutBugs »

XorNot wrote: post #20
xnorswap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count This is why one of the best ways to lose weight is to just keep a food diary / count calories. You don't need any special / fad diet, just the act of trying to keep a note of everything you eat will cause you to stop and think, "I don't need to eat this".

This is what happened to me when I needed to lose weight. The act of counting calories more or less completely revamped my diet in a positive way. Turned out I was also stupidly deficient on protein day to day.

Yeah I am doing 1g per lb of lean body weight and let's just say I have been eating a disturbing amount of egg white (I'm a big guy!)

Getting protein in takes dedication & awareness

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

#194

Post by shawabawa3 »

wnorris510 wrote: post #160
LPisGood wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If you have a known bowl and fill it to a known position every day with the same type of food, then you can probably do better than the average for that specific meal. In our research we've found a majority of calories for most people come from when they're eating out and consuming new dishes where they don't know the ingredients or portion sizes. In the study we gave people a variety of dishes to make their estimate…

estimating from a photograph is always going to have huge error because you just cannot know e.g. the size of the plate without some external reference

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

#195

Post by bluGill »

f1shy wrote: post #149
bluGill wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, though I suspect there are probably a lot of laws around what you can and cannot do so better get several good lawyers to check what the laws really are around this. Drug treatment programs often work like this so that is the first place to look for laws to watch out for. I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus…

But even if the people will be confined, you have to be careful to take a broad enough population. I can expect people willing to participate in such study maybe are already orthorexic diet freaks? Or very poor people (which have a diet deviated from “mean”) Doing studies with humans ist just hard!

The topic has changed from a study to a self selected set of people who want to lose weight badly enough they are willing to pay to be confined in some setting where they cannot access food outside of what is given to them, and they are forced to follow an exercise plan of your (not their) choosing.

You can of course study these people, but the only study anyone is interesting in is how different changes in conditions affect how much people lose and how much money you can get out of them.

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

#196

Post by zahlman »

tzs wrote: post #116
aziaziazi wrote: post #29

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…

This won't be useful for you because you share food with others, but for people who do not share food and are interested in long term tracking rather than short term (e.g., they want to take off some weight at a healthy rate and keep it off, as opposed to people who just want to lose a few pounds rapidly for their class reunion and will make no effort after that to keep it off) there is a simple trick that can make i…

>Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out.

Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from the container.

Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to figure out how many portions it typically provides; then, going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food accordingly.

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

#197

Post by DrillShopper »

mrgaro wrote: post #176
wnorris510 wrote: post #130

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 w…

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 :(

This is the problem with any fitness app.

They either need to show you ads, charge you for premium for services that used to be free making your free tier functionally useless (looking at you, MFP who gated barcode scanning behind their honestly ludicrously priced subscription), or sell your data, and they often do all three.

The entire industry is like this, and honestly an app that charges one time and fucks off would be ideal but given the amount you'd probably need to charge as a one off (or for major upgrades) most consumers would rather have the slow bleed of $10/mo than $25 one time.

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

#198

Post by bluGill »

lt_snuffles wrote: post #113

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

This has been done. However prisoners have very different activity levels - they are confined to a cell for 20 hours a day. Office works get up a lot more often and generally are in the office less hours.

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

#199

Post by DrillShopper »

ploynog wrote: post #188
wnorris510 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're an early stage startup and the models are expensive, we're trying to get the price as low as possible, but yes we need to charge to cover costs right now. Sorry about that! You might get a yearly discount offer that is less than $2/month if you get lucky (A/B test split). But that's less than the cost of running the model for people, so hopefully others will consider paying full price.

I think the complaint is that you only get told that you require a paid plan AFTER signing up. At least on a brief look on the Play Store page and your website, it does not immediately mention it prominently. That seems like a very dark pattern and is, honestly, pretty scummy.

It doesn't seem like - it is

Which makes it par for the course in the scam that is mobile development

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

#200

Post by UomoNeroNero »

wnorris510 wrote: post #130

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 w…

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.
Post reply on HN