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

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

#231

Post by felideon »

wnorris510 wrote: post #224
ploynog wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Anyo…

What FAQ and pricing pages? Your website makes no mention of pricing at all.

Edit: The "dark" pattern is in the registration flow. It doesn't mention that the app requires a subscription anywhere until after you've created an account. Surely you could add a disclaimer before creating your account? This has nothing to do with the App Store.

Edit 2: I'm not saying you intended to implement a dark pattern. Just perhaps a UX oversight.

Edit 3: The download page would be another great place to put this info, since that's the primary CTA on the home page (there's 4 prominent download buttons).

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

#232

Post by ericjmorey »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #179
tejohnso wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 complet…

I would wager that just paying attention to, and thinking about what someone eats has a decent impact on their health - so it feels like it's working, and like your estimates are accurate. After all - once you started doing it, you started losing weight/building muscle/achieving whatever result.

Which is a reason why keeping a food diary is an often recommended technique for changing your diet and eating healthier.

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

#233

Post by saulpw »

wnorris510 wrote: post #225
DrillShopper wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would often be a feature.

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

#234

Post by landtuna »

everdrive wrote: post #81

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 n…

I never understood why calories in == calories out was relevant when we can't know how many unprocessed calories are remaining undigested. Here's what the bots had to say: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/weight-loss-gurus-often-say...

(FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree that fewer calories causes weight loss)

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

#235

Post by ericjmorey »

wnorris510 wrote: post #186
zahlman wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yeah, dividing out a known portion size is a good hack that will probably help with accuracy. In our research most people's calories and error came from eating out where they didn't have these hints, but this is a good trick if you mostly cook for yourself!

I started eating half of whatever was served as an individual portion whenever I was at a restaurant and not home cooking. It's the thing that tipped the scales for me when having difficulty losing weight.

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

#236

Post by xnorswap »

TypingOutBugs wrote: post #193
XorNot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't Whey powder a traditional "solution" for loading up on protein?

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

#237

Post by ellisv »

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…

Most don't require a subscription before a trial.

I'm paying for a fitness app subscription that annually is less than 1 month of gym membership. But I had a 7 day trial which got me hooked before I had to sign up for the subscription.

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

#238

Post by vidarh »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #166
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?

Probably depends on where you go. I don't know about "the US", but as a "European" I thought serving sizes were comparable to what I get in restaurants at home. Drinks were an exception, since basically all restaurants had unlimited soda for next to nothing. This was actually great, since I was riding a motorbike in the desert in July. For reference, I live in France and visited LA and random towns in the western sta…

It absolutely varies a lot within Europe too, but my feeling at least is that the difference between European and US portion sizes gets bigger as you move towards low-end places. High-end restaurants are pretty similar in portion sizes almost everywhere I've been, presumably because they're not competing on portion sizes, while lower-end places are much more susceptible to local expectations of what is good value.

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

#239

Post by keybored »

xnorswap wrote: post #13
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.

> 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".

Replace your diet fad with a journaling fad.

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

#240

Post by foxyv »

UomoNeroNero wrote: post #200
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.

It doesn't help that food manufacturers intentionally make it hard to measure nutrition from most of their foods. They play around with serving sizes to hide carbohydrates making you have to do math just to keep up.

Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim they have zero everything despite just being sugar tablets.

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