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…
People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
391–400 of 470 posts
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
If you have an immersion blender, making mayonnaise without sugar in it is very easy: https://www.seriouseats.com/two-minute-mayonnaise (And it tastes way better than commercial mayo!) I love this author's recipes; it's the opposite of the normal recipe-preamble-slop. All of the stuff before the actual recipe is relevant information. In more complex recipes, he goes over the testing and process that led to the finish…
You can also make mayonnaise with a whisk.
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have an immersion blender, making mayonnaise without sugar in it is very easy: https://www.seriouseats.com/two-minute-mayonnaise (And it tastes way better than commercial mayo!) I love this author's recipes; it's the opposite of the normal recipe-preamble-slop. All of the stuff before the actual recipe is relevant information. In more complex recipes, he goes over the testing and process that led to the finish…
"If you have an immersion blender" You can also make mayonnaise with a whisk.
It's so much easier to do it with a hand blender though. It takes longer to clean up afterwards than it takes to make. And no maintaining a steady thin stream of oil, you just put it all into a container and blitz it.
You can make meringues and cakes with a whisk, too, but most people I know have electric mixers for that.
Mechanical eggbeaters with little flywheels were popular before the electric ones, too!
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#395One of the ... beyond annoying ... aspects of our track-everything-individuals-do-and-utilise-it-against-them contemporary information ecology is that it is so painfully difficult to make use of that information for personal advantage.
In the specific case of food intake, it should be reasonably trivial to aggregate purchase information, at grocery stores, restaurants, and online deliveries, and at least arrive at a reasonable baseline of total consumption. Rather than having to fill out a food diary from memory with uncertain measurments, one can rely on grocery and menu receipts directly.
This is more useful for those who live alone or shop for themselves (a large fraction of the population, but far from complete). It's based on the general principle that you tend to eat what you buy. There's some error imposed by food acquired elsewhere (shared at work, school, from friends, etc.), and of tossed food, but what you'll arrive at is over time a pretty accurate record of intake.
I'm surprised that such methods aren't more widely used or reported in both dietary management and research.
My own personal experience has been that I've been most successful in dietary management when 1) I have direct control over shopping and 2) I focus far more on what I eat than how much, though some of the latter applies. If I'm aware that specific foods are deleterious to goals (highly-processed, junk foods, high-caloric / high-sugar liquids, etc), then the most effective control point at minimum decision cost is at the store. If you don't buy crisps, chips, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ice cream, and the like, it's not at the house for you to consume.
I'm well aware that there are circumstances in which this is difficult to arrange, sometimes with friends or roommates, more often with families. I'll only say that clearly expressing terms and boundaries is tremendously useful here.
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such studies do exist - randomized feeding trials. In these studies the participants are provided all meals and snacks, and sometimes are under constant surveillance for weeks and sometimes months on end. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/ Obviously such studies are far more invasive and expensive to run than the classic "fill out of a survey" observational study [1], so they tend to be the outliers. But they…
The study you point to here is a guideline on conducting studies. It was unfortunately not available online so I can't evaluate their recommended methodology. Looking for actual studies that tried to do randomized feeding trials, I found "A randomized controlled-feeding trial based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans on cardiometabolic health indexes"[1] as a top hit, which fortunately had the full text [2] avail…
You linked to a study where food was provided to the subjects (the food obviously nutritionally selected and provided per the study groups), and the subjects obviously are assumed to stick to the provided food and to accurate report what they ate among that reported food (with the study counting packaging, remainders, etc). This is a *UNIVERSE* better than the classic "tell us how many eggs you ate over the past two months" type nutrition studies, which are by far the most common (e.g. the Nurses' Health Survey).
Are you expecting the people to be inprisoned? I mean, there are in-patient studies but they are obviously massively more difficult to carry out.
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite example is that cooking spray advertises 0g of fat, giving a serving size of 0.33 seconds of spray
That might even be realistic if you are spraying a baking sheet - since you cover the whole thing. But if you are cooking pancakes and spray the pan after each one you get a lot of carbs.
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We can't hit people with the paywall before they've registered because we need to assign the trial to their user record. We've tried adding more language during onboarding but no one reads any of it, they just click through.
You're mistaking challenges in building a global app for malicious intent. I left a job paying a lot more to do this because I wanted to help people.
We'll add something back to the FAQ on this, thank you all for pointing it out.
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
We co-authored a paper on this with Google AI and showed it got about 2x the accuracy of a nutritionist because of it.
Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
#400This is why sleep studies are conducted in clinics, not left to patients to self-report. they want accurate data? They will need to conduct a real study, portion the meals out themselves, give people a schedule.