31–40 of 302 posts
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
I work for a company that offers nutrition tracking on an app in the App Store. We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier. We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate. We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be gene…
Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/
The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).
Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.
Funny, I was just discussing this on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892 There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
Funny, I was just discussing this on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892 There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
It will get to the point where it could know to ask those questions, like a human would. Clearly these tools are not there yet, but I think the models are probably good enough for this already.
Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.
These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.