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

321–330 of 470 posts

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

#321

Post by Ekaros »

djtango wrote: post #311
Ekaros wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of methane as input. But what about it as output? How much does leave the system? And should this not be in calories "out" column, but I don't think that is usually counted there...

Could you elaborate on what you mean? What does methane have to do with this and what is the "out" column? Calorimetry is just measuring the heat transfer from combustion, usually by measuring the temperature change of a known quantity of water in the classical experiment. You perform versions of it in high school and undergrad Calories are just a unit of energy, and heat can be related back to energy (joules for peo…

Well some of the food we eat generates flatulence of which 7% can be methane. Meaning this leaves our system without burning. As such in calorimeter it would be unburned fuel. Meaning that some calories are not absorbed failing the calories in and out equation.

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

#322

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

I like the general idea of ongoing revenue, but I want to pay something on par with buying a full version every 3-5 years. Subscription software usually costs much more than that.

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

#323

Post by UomoNeroNero »

vanviegen wrote: post #293
foxyv wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the EU, food manufacturers are required to label macronutrients (and salt) in mg/100mg or mg/100ml for fluids. Easy to compare, works great.

Yes. I can find everywhere on labels the carb amount. I use 2 app too. And after a lot of errors I acquired a six sense (that try to kill me everyday ;-D)

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

#324

Post by mattlondon »

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…

I just measure the ingredients "roughly" and same with serving I try to eye-ball halving or quartering etc and don't worry too much about being super precise. 5g is enough precision for me, unless it is something like cheese or other high-fat things. And I don't count vegetables at all (apart from potato)

Some days you'll go over, others go under etc.

It helps a lot of your partner is also weighing etc

Where it is really hard though is at a BigCo office where food is free and self-served. I have no idea what I am loading onto my plate - I try to search for something similar in the app and deliberately over-estimate the quantity knowing that there is a tendency to under estimate.

Really though weighing things is almost beside the point. It's about being aware/mindful of what you are eating. Without tracking it, it is easy to absent mindedly just snack on things and then entirely forget about that brownie you had with your morning coffee, or that ice cream you had at lunch time. You start to make choices like "Hmm I wont have that chocolate now because it would be a disappointment not to have some for dessert at dinner time" etc, whereas without tracking you'd probably just eat everything and not even realise/remember/be-aware of it.

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

#325

Post by sethhochberg »

Fricken wrote: post #315

The thing is we're all experts at eating food, we've all been doing it our whole lives. You'd think in that time one would have cultivated an intuition about whether they are eating too much or too little regardless of the nutrition information.

Constant and plentiful supplies of food are, on an evolutionary scale, a somewhat recent thing. Agriculture itself is what, around 12k years old - a few hundred generations?

We're all experts at eating food but having an instinctual understanding of exactly when to stop eating was probably much less important historically.

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

#326

Post by nottorp »

barbazoo wrote: post #281
skyyler wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, first off, commercial salad dressing almost always has sugar in it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time you're shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer "simple vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have any sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come in contact with are full of sugar. Even low GI foods still cause blood sugar to raise by some amount. All of the vegetables in the…

> commercial salad dressing almost always has sugar in it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time you're shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer "simple vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have any sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come in contact with are full of sugar. Making salad dressing is really easy btw in case anyone wants to try. Often all you need is olive oil, vineg…

> Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and you're set for most salads.

Why do you need a "dressing"? In my corner of Europe they put the above by default on every restaurant table and the salad has nothing in it (or maybe a tiny bit of oil and vinegar), you adjust it to taste.

The only places that offer salad "dressings" are american inspired and even those mostly serve it separately so you can ignore it.

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

#327

Post by TypingOutBugs »

xnorswap wrote: post #236
TypingOutBugs wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I take two protein shakes with double servings I am not halfway to my daily goal, but sure it helps! I tend to have protein powder and greek yogurt for breakfast (with peanut butter) and a double serving after the gym. That, with a protein dense lunch and dinner gets me to around 180g protein.

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

#328

Post by matwood »

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…

I'm boring and cook roughly the same few meals over and over.

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

#329

Post by TypingOutBugs »

parpfish wrote: post #221
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)

Yeah I can get that - pre-packaged cooked chicken is easier than roasted rotisserie chicken from the counter even if it's probably worse (loads of additives and flavourings)

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

#330

Post by Dilettante_ »

mrgaro wrote: post #230
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.

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.

That's pretty standard for free trials in my experience. Amazon prime, audible, musescore, I'd be harder pressed to think of a service I've recently tried where it was not like that.
Post reply on HN