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

221–230 of 470 posts

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

#221

Post by parpfish »

TypingOutBugs wrote: post #6

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.

one unintended side effect i had with myfitnesspal was that i ended up eating more prepackaged/highly-processed foods because i disliked estimating calories in home-cooked stuff so much (especially because i knew it'd be an inaccurate guess)

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

#222

Post by dfxm12 »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #191
stevesimmons wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And expensive to match the size! A pastrami sandwich at Katz's is ~$30. A croque madame at a similar place in Paris is ~€15.

People generally split a Pastrami sandwich over a couple meals or with someone else.

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

#223

Post by dfxm12 »

zahlman wrote: post #187
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why it would be bad to get more water to drink

There's actually something of a stereotype that Japanese places will give you unreasonably small portions of water with meals. (Dogen plays off this in some of his videos.) But then, I think it's only been Americans I heard this from, so.

In both my trips to Japan (one recent, one 20yrs ago), I never noticed this, and I think I drink a lot of water in general, and especially as a tourist because I'm doing much more walking.

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

#224

Post by wnorris510 »

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.

This is not a dark pattern, it's just a constraint that the app stores place on the pricing disclosure that is very non-intuitive. You have to mark your app as "free" to download if you charge a recurring subscription fee. You can only mark it as paid if there is a one time fee to download the app.

Our FAQ and pricing pages all list that it is a paid only app. All of our ads explain that it's subscription based. Anyone who asks we're very transparent about it. If there's somewhere else where you think we can list it to make it more clear I'm happy to add it, just not sure where that would be.

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

#225

Post by wnorris510 »

DrillShopper wrote: post #197
mrgaro wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

You really don't want to pay a one-time fee, it incentives the developers to stop maintaining the app.

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

#226

Post by maeil »

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…

I'd love to do such a quiz -I might even be willing to pay for the privilege! I'm quite convinced I'm really accurate at calorie estimation without using a scale but would love to be proven wrong. Zero food industry experience here, just from reading hundreds of food labels per year since very young, maybe 8 years old.

Thinking about it again, I'll probably do a lot worse from a picture because I can't have a bite of the food! Just having a spoon makes it so much easier in terms of ratios.

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

#227

Post by broof »

aziaziazi wrote: post #171
iwanttocomment wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has successfully tracked calories in the past with great effort, the trick is to be strict about measuring calorie-dense foods, but to be liberal with "lighter" foods where the calories are functionally de minimis. An ounce of olive oil has 250 kilocalories. An ounce of lean protein generally has 30-50 kilocalories. An ounce of green vegetables contains virtually no kilocalories. As such, things like o…

That may sense. Most of the folks here seems to track calories and other macro. In the meantime... > micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured ... my concern is micro : I'm engaging on a full vegetable diet (+shrooms +minerals!) and am concerned about thinks like iron, selenium, calcium... I (got-used-to) love vegetable and eat a lot of them so I'm probably fine with most micros, howev…

Brazil nuts are so high in selenium that you aren’t supposed to eat too many of them

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

#228

Post by hombre_fatal »

f1shy wrote: post #2

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, spo…

We decided that our analytic tech was good enough to figure out that smoking and pollution were bad for us despite infinite confounders.

Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.

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

#229

Post by bityard »

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.

Where in Europe? I haven't toured the _whole_ continent but I've been to restaurants in Germany, the UK, and Ireland and did not find their portions to be any different than what you'd get at the average corner restaurant in the US.

Now, there are plenty of food vendors and restaurants in the US where big portions are considered part of the experience. Especially hamburgers, subs, and other sandwiches. I once ate at a place that served a plate-sized burrito completely covered in french fries. 12 inches wide and 6 inches tall. SOME people can eat that amount of food but most people cannot, and nobody is expected to.

Finally, large portions in NY street food are often customary because for lots of people with demanding jobs and 12-16 hour shifts, lunch is often their only meal. Or, half of it is lunch, the other half is dinner later on.

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

#230

Post by mrgaro »

wnorris510 wrote: post #181
mrgaro wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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.

Thanks for you quick answer. I want to clarify that I would have liked to try the app for a few days before activating subscription.

Now with the current flow I would need to activate the subscription and then immediately go to Play Store settings to deactivate the subscription so that I would not forget it.

Post reply on HN