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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

#401

Post by wnorris510 »

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.

We don't discourage anyone from doing this! Free trial with access to all features stays live for the full 7 days even if you cancel immediately. Hope you enjoy it.

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

#402

Post by wnorris510 »

tln wrote: post #213
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'm on an annual plan from another app (Calory, $30) otherwise I would have bit. It gives some features with a totally free plan. That makes the IaP feel less like a bait and switch. The proposition of SnapCalorie is compelling. Calory ui is decent and I use a scale so accuracy should be good but I think their database is shitty. Meatloaf will vary from 1.5 kcal/g to 3, steak will show as 1 kcal/g, stuff like that.

You can start a 7 day free trial and cancel immediately. There is also a freemium tier at the end if you don't end up converting. We don't normally advertise this because we've been struggling to handle the load and costs of new users, but hopefully as we scale up we'll be able to support a free tier for everyone!

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

#403

Post by wnorris510 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #331
wnorris510 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would love for developers to stop messing with most apps.

Haha, you say this until Apple does a breaking change to the barcode library or Apple Health export and things stop working. Then you probably want them to change some stuff :)

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

#404

Post by wnorris510 »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #295
wnorris510 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what your goal is. My suggestion is if your goal is weight loss, don't think about calorie tracking at all. Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight. It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your…

Maximize might be a little overkill. The government recommends 5-9 servings of fruit and vegetables a day and I found that getting to that range involves putting so many vegetables in every meal that you feel full naturally.

Totally fair point. My guess though is most people who are getting 5-9 servings of whole fruits / vegetables per day consistently don't (or maybe shouldn't for long) have a goal of losing weight.

If people are hitting that goal then they can start moving into more nuanced dietary changes like minimizing adde sugars and sodium, or maximizing nuanced micros and diversity.

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

#405

Post by wisty »

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…

Not too shocking really:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1322248/

> Aiming to pour a “shot” of alcohol (1.5 ounces, 44.3 ml), both students and bartenders poured more into short, wide glasses than into tall slender glasses (46.1 ml v 44.7 ml and 54.6 ml v 46.4 ml, respectively). Practice reduced the tendency to overpour, but not for short, wide glasses. Despite an average of six years of experience, bartenders poured 20.5% more into short, wide glasses than tall, slender ones; paying careful attention reduced but did not eliminate the effect.

A plate is a very wide 'glass'.

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

#406

Post by sureglymop »

darkhorse222 wrote: post #379
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…

This should be an indication that tracking as a personal health methodology is inherently flawed. Your body is your most accurate measurement system, both in terms of precision and accuracy but also in its multidimensional, intersectional measurement apparatus that completely demolishes the poor substitutes found in personal nutrition, which are continuously shown to be either flawed in theory or in practice. Trackin…

When I was tracking calories to lose weight I just always overestimated by default – doesn't hurt if one week you happen to lose a bit more weight than you set out.

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

#407

Post by cullenking »

watwut wrote: post #386
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a healthy relationship with food, not a risk for anorexia.

Healthy relationship with food does not involve restriction or conscious attempts to loose weight. You eat when hungry and stop when not hungry. The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things) is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override behavior and diet ends.

Yeah but people in this conversation and other conversations about calorie restriction, are not arguing from the standpoint of someone being healthy, and then indulging in unhealthy relationships with food. They are talking about someone who has an unhealthy relationship with food and their body, demonstrable by their excess weight, and talking about ways to correct the poor health by having a healthy relationship with their own will. You need a healthy will in order to manage weight loss due to caloric restriction.

I think a lot of people talking past each other on this topic are really just disagreeing about what healthy will power actually is. To be specific, comments along the lines of "it's not my/their fault, it's the fault of our environment, and the availability of unhealthy food".

I think this is just having an unhealthy will. I think this is also the whole divide on things like ozempic - some people view it as enabling people to have unhealthy will power. Other people view it as the only way someone can have healthy weight. I don't think either party is wrong, I think they are just talking past eachother.

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

#408

Post by knifie_spoonie »

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.

It's the same in Australia as well. I'm a bit shocked that the US doesn't have this.

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

#409

Post by WheatMillington »

ksenzee wrote: post #338
mattlondon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 The killer for me was breakfast cereals. The box shows a full bowl of whatever, full to the brim etc. in reality the pictures are probably 5 or 6 or more servings - a single serving would barely even cover the base of the bowl and even then be 200ish calories before milk. If you just pour yourself "a bowl" of cereal without thinking or weighing then you're probably having 1200+ calories (or about 50% of your entir…

Cereal bowl sizes vary wildly, to make it even more confusing. Mine hold two cups (~450ml). Some hold way more than that. Some hold less. Buy a new set of bowls and you might be affecting your entire household’s eating habits.

You don't have to fill a bowl to the top with whatever you're eating lol

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

#410

Post by WheatMillington »

taeric wrote: post #153
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…

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?

>I'm not even sure you can get a US large in Japan for most drinks?

I've seen what large US drinks look like, and you definitely can't get that here in New Zealand. Like a litre of soft drink at a fast food place, it's absurd.

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