People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
science.org265 points by XzetaU8 a day ago
265 points by XzetaU8 a day ago
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 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.
Oils, cooking fats, hidden ingredients are what people are most concerned about but they actually add far less error to people's tracking than portion. Nutrition5k is the paper we published if you want to check out more details on the breakdown of error most people get when tracking.
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.
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.
This makes so much more sense than the labels in the USA.
US food labelling is insane.
For example - lactose-free yogurt is often just regular yogurt with lactase enzyme added.
If that's what I wanted, I'd buy regular yogurt and take a lactaid supplement.
What other method would you deem appropriate for removing lactose from milk? A targeted enzyme that removes it seems pretty wise to me.
Since they're not gonna use tweezers, :) are you suggesting instead engineer or breed a special set of cows that don't produce lactase in their milk?
A better description would be "lactase treated" milk. In any case, I found consuming it regularly for breakfast still lead me to feel unwell over time.
However I can periodically consume dairy when I take a strong dose of lactase supplements.
From some literature it does appear that manufacturers can use "lactose free" even for non-zero amounts of lactose (10mg per 100g).
This is actually higher lactose density than many cheese varieties, especially considering I would be consuming say 150-200g of yogurt, whereas if I am eating cheese its in small careful quantity.
A2 milk not only exists but is very popular in Asia actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_a2_Milk_Company
What does A2 milk have to do with lactose? I don't see lactose mentioned in your link.
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)
My favorite example is that cooking spray advertises 0g of fat, giving a serving size of 0.33 seconds of spray
I think this is one of the crazier ones. It's just canola oil! It's the same as spreading that much canola oil on the surface, the spray is mainly convenient because it spreads it out evenly for you without you needing to contact the surface. But Pam gets to put "0g fat" and "For Fat Free Cooking" on the side of all their cans.
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.
Alt tip: dont use any fat on the pan when cooking pancakes. Gives the surface that restaurant quaility, smooth evenness.
The margins the FDA allows for class 2 and third group nutrients are also quite generous. I'm sure they made sense back when they were first introduced, but as food science has improved, the standards have not.
> The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows calorie content to exceed label calories by up to 20%
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/
> Class I nutrients are those added in fortified or fabricated foods. These nutrients are vitamins, minerals, protein, dietary fiber, or potassium. Class I nutrients must be present at 100% or more of the value declared on the label
> Class II nutrients are vitamins, minerals, protein, total carbohydrate, dietary fiber, other carbohydrate, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, or potassium that occur naturally in a food product. Class II nutrients must be present at 80% or more of the value declared on the label.
> The Third Group nutrients include calories, sugars, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium. [...] For foods with label declarations of Third Group nutrients, the ratio between the amount obtained by laboratory analysis and the amount declared on the product label in the Nutrition Facts panel must be 120% or less, i.e., the label is considered to be out of compliance if the nutrient content of a composite of the product is greater than 20% above the value declared on the label.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
Edit: Expanded the quotes to include definitions.
The rounding rule is carbs <0.5g can be rounded down to 0 and calories <5 can be rounded down to 0. But I have a feeling even if they properly labeled it without rounding, people would eat the whole pack of tic tac anyway.
https://foodlabelmaker.com/regulatory-hub/fda/rounding-rules...
So you can just make the serving size so small that everything is less than 0.5g
Plus the whole sugar vs. sugar alcohol nonsense, which I still don't completely understand.
IANA nutritionist or expert at all in this area so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding from looking into it is that the sugar alcohol doesn't break down in digestion and isn't absorbed, that's why the "carbs" from sugar alcohol "don't count."
I would recommend taking it easy on the sugar alcohols even though they "don't count" because they can cause significant gas ;-)
It depends on the type. Some are partially digested as carbohydrates. Others are not. You can look up their individual Glycemin Index.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0261/4761/8864/files/Scree...
And some like xylitol are highly toxic to dogs, must be careful around them.
Indeed. My dog loves the dissolve-on-your-tongue melatonin, but it is super deadly to her because of the Xylitol. I keep it on a high shelf now and am very careful to pick up any pieces that might get dropped. She made it through, but that was a terrifying few days D-:
Sugar alcohols seem simple enough to me. The properties vary but they generally have fewer calories per gram and a low glycemic index, and some of them are much sweeter per calorie.
I also hate the games they play with labeling such as "no sugar added." Bought a cherry pie from a local market labeled "no sugar added" thinking it was going to be extra tart only to take it home and taste sugar. Reading the label it listed sugar alcohol which I learned can cause gas and bloating in some people, which I soon found out. Once slice had me doubled over with gas pains a whole night and shit my brains out the next day. I got my money back for that piece of garbage pie. I want to punch whoever thought no sugar added means fuck all...
And I think there's also a psychological angle here, for instance when people see that something claims to be zero sugar or low carb, it can trigger a sense of relief or permission to indulge.
I worked at Noom and the most successful users weighed the ingredients. Many users were frustrated about not losing weight even with calorie deficit, but the issue was they weren't logging accurately or skipped logging snacks and meals that were clearly not good.
What works well is to measure the same food multiple times in a container (every time same volume ).
after a while you can estimate carbs by visually inspecting the contents without scale.
Add to that automatic bolus by a semi closed loop system to correct for errors, you can achieve good results with minimal effort.
I’m rather unknowledgeable on diabetes, so here’s a question that may seem basic:
does choosing healthier meal, a salad instead of sweet ribs, not suffice for a good blood sugar?
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 salad have carbohydrates that will raise blood sugar. Carrots, onions, tomatoes, all of that will raise blood sugar. Croutons? Blood sugar.
Obviously selecting a garden salad with no dressing is a healthier choice than "sweet ribs". Most diabetics (that are managing their condition) are not going to be ordering things with refined sugar in them.
Where things get tricky is asking questions like "what's healthier, a honey-miso glazed salmon with brown rice or a salad with croutons and a honey and berry dressing?" or "What's better for you, grilled chicken with a sugary barbeque sauce or fried chicken with no sauce?"
Also watch out for "sugar by another name" ... pineapple puree, white grape juice/concentrate, apple juice/concentrate are very common commercial dressing ingredients to load up on sugar.
Sure always ask for the vinaigrette eating out, but at home make your own salad dressing:
* get a mixing bowl big enough to toss salad in, and a whisk * add 1T dijon mustard, 1T not-balsamic vinegar (balsamic is high sugar! I like sherry or beer vinegar), salt & pepper * drizzle in 1T olive oil while rapidly whisking. * Add 3 oz or more salad, toss, done for 2 servings
I just use old dijon bottles with a bit left in it to get the rest out and shake the heck out of it but I go through a lot of mustard.
The lengths I’ve seen brands go To avoid having sugar as their 1st or 2nd ingredient…
after that you have invert sugar, corn syrup, molasses, brown rice syrup etc. as following ingredients…
A few years ago organic/natural products were marketed as containing "Evaporated Cane Juice" (aka Cane Sugar) but my understanding is the FDA put an end to that one.
Making your own salad dressing is really easy and let's you have a salad you really like in a couple of minutes.
My recipe is basically what you have here, although I usually mix some balsamic and other vinegars, and add a bit lemon juice.
I went from feeling sorry for people who were "forced" to eat salads to craving them. (Side benefit of not having the afternoon urge to sleep.)
> 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, vinegar, salt and pepper and you're set for most salads. Even a restaurant should be able to whip that up.
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 finished recipe. It's a wonderful view into the world of recipe creation.
Awesome, I'll give that a try. What I like about it is that you can use whatever high quality eggs you normally use instead of the cage eggs that mass producers will use. Until now I had to resort to vegan mayo.
"If you have an immersion blender"
You can also make mayonnaise with a whisk.
Yes, you can 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!
> 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.
For the same reason you add some spices before cooking, and salt multiple times throughout a recipe.
Plus, it's a little hard to emulsify or even suspend the oil and vinegar right there at the table.
> or maybe a tiny bit of oil and vinegar
That's what I mean by "dressing". We're talking about the same thing.
Ah well, above us they seem to call mayonnaise and other fat and high calorie stuff "dressing"?
I buy a salad kit at Trader Joe's. It has sugar in it. And I buy arugula and make 4 salads out of that one salad. I add a dash of olive oil and pecans. And end up throwing out 1/3 of dressing that came with the salad.
So I get some of the sugar sources in the kit. Just smaller amounts.
Otherwise, I just use olive oil and balsamic vinegar with arugula, pecans.
Arugula is a good source of nitrates, which are good for nitric acid.
Not a diabetic but adult later onset lactose intolerant and the problem is you really have NO idea what restaurants put into stuff, even if you ask.
Even a stupid salad, what's in the dressing, what's in the bread/croutons, what was the meat glazed with. Etc.
Restaurant food tastes good because it is generally unhealthy top to bottom, with quantities of salt, butter, etc no sane person would use at home.
One thought experiment - when was the last time you ate out and needed to add salt to anything? Now thing of home cooking how often you might add a little salt while you are eating.
The easiest thing to do is ruling out restaurants entirely, but then that's rather anti-social.. Not to mention family/friends gatherings, etc.
Things are changing nonetheless. My wife is celiac (we’re quite a problematic family: I’m diabetic, she’s celiac), but by law, she is guaranteed that a suitable menu must be available wherever she goes, or at least that waitstaff and business owners know how to handle the situation when she informs them. (I know for a fact that managing celiac disease and the most severe and dangerous intolerances is a mandatory requirement for obtaining a business license.)
I think in the US, it's basically an intractable problem the way restaurants operate and are staffed. Low margin, high failure rate businesses with many fly by night small operators. Front of house staff is high turnover, while back of house staff is largely non-English speaking of sometimes questionable immigration/work permit status.
And then there is the supply chain since most restaurants are not cooking every single part of every meal from absolute scratch ingredients.
There was a story about a woman near us operating some sort of celiac friendly/gluten free bakery. One day the donuts were delivered and she noticed some D shaped sprinkles and realized her supplier had come up short and just put some random Dunkin Donuts into the delivery. Good on her catching it, but how in good conscience could she operate a bakery advertising itself as celiac friendly/gluten free if she was outsourcing like this?
If I had any sort of food allergy that could result in hospitalization or death, I'd just stop eating out. I'd rather be a little boring than very dead.
Why would you run a bakery and not make donuts yourself? They're dead simple if you have a fryer.
I didn’t know their simple and will try. To answer your question, perhaps donuts aren’t her main product, for me it’s more about pastry which is a side bonus for bakeries, thought if I go to a personal shop I expect 95% hand made products but that my differ depending on the culture (I’m not from the US). Also they may be just cheaper (taking into account your time)
Right, and to a consumer this is all opaque.
You go to a place advertising itself as gluten free / vegan / celiac safe / whatever .. and its been outsourced.
Once it's outsourced, all bets are off. Who knows if the vendor subbed it out further, etc.
Which is why for a certain level of food sensitivity it's almost not worth eating out. It comes down to - do you trust random strangers with your life?
>does choosing healthier meal,
For a type 1 diabetic, no (gets more complex with type 2).
Your body produces insulin at a basal rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_rate
If you're healthy between the pancreas and the liver you maintain homeostasis and things are fine.
As a T1D you don't get that base rate, so your blood sugar will mostly trend up and stay high, even without eating anything. You simply have to get more insulin to avoid burning out all the systems in your body and dying slowly.
Is a really complex game. The basic reasoning is that for every X carbohydrates ingested, you need to inject Y insulin (according to a personal ratio).
However, everything is complicated by numerous factors and the technology you use.
Factors: how you feel, stress, exercise, what you ate in previous meals, your blood sugar level at the start of the meal, and the activities you’ll engage in after the meal (physical or mental).
There’s also the issue of how you administer insulin.
In Italy, up until 3-5 years ago, most of us were using the “multiple daily injections” method, which involved taking a dose of “long-acting” insulin (lasting 24 hours) as a “base” and using “rapid or ultra-rapid” insulin at meals. Clearly, this approach provides limited control and requires a VERY habitual lifestyle (you can’t skip a meal; the long-acting insulin keeps working regardless).
Now (at least here in Italy), we are all transitioning to or already using CGM systems, which are more or less intelligent systems that continuously administer insulin at a “medium” rate. Based on input from the patient regarding the predicted amount of carbohydrates (and fats) they will consume, the system calculates the best strategy for what is called the “meal bolus” (using strategies like multi-phase, direct, etc.) and at the same time, it maintains a continuous but adaptable level of injection to achieve a target blood sugar level (day and NIGHT!!)
In essence, it’s a very nerdy way of dying slowly (hopefully as slowly as possible).
È un mondo difficile E vita intensa Felicità a momenti E futuro incerto
> È un mondo difficile E vita intensa Felicità a momenti E futuro incerto
I was curious, for the other curious:
"It's a tough world And intense life Happiness in moments And uncertain future"
Diabetes is a complex and mentally demanding disease. It affects you in the short term and has a significant impact in the long term. Everything is in your hands, fully aware that every mistake has immediate consequences but, worse, accumulates over time. That phrase (from this song) perfectly capture the mental state of my 20 years living with the disease. No tragedy (there are worse things), just deep awareness.
This depends on a lot of factors. There are some type II diabetics like this: they might need insulin after a meal with a high glycemic index, but not after a meal with a low glycemic index. There are some type II diabetics with more advanced disease who need insulin after eating anything. Type I diabetics entirely lose their ability to make insulin, which is why the disease was fatal before insulin was discovered, no matter what the kids (it was almost always kids) ate or didn’t eat. As a general rule, it is inaccurate to equate diabetes with unhealthy eating. The Venn diagram only overlaps.
Healthier isn't a good metric, A carb heavy salad will probably be worse than those protein heavy ribs by themselves (Maybe the rib sauce will tip you over, or maybe you will use a salad dressing that put any "healthiness" to the test)
That sounds really hard. Is the purpose of determining the amount of food so you can adjust the amount of insulin? Sorry, I don't know about the day to day of living with diabetes.
Yes, diabetics need to precisely adjust their insulin intake in proportion to carbohydrate intake.
Also when figuring out how much insulin is needed for a given amount of carbs you need to factor in the type of carbs, your individual response to that type of carbs, what fats/protein/fiber you eat with it (fats and fiber tend to slow down the BG rise from carbs, protein can cause a rise when eaten on its own but can also slow down the rise from carbs), what time of day it is (I need around double the amount of insulin for the same food first thing in the morning vs in the afternoon), your mood, what else is in your stomach already, the weather (hot weather can greatly increase insulin sensitivity), your current fitness level, what physical activity you have done over the last day or 2 and what you will do over the coming hours, where on your body you inject, if you are fighting any illness…
For my wife (type 1 diabetic), physical activity is the big one that throws off her calculations as a walk in a hilly area makes her blood sugar drop like a rock. Of course she always has something with sugar with her but then she has to figure out how much to consume.
Hill walks are particularly challenging for me too. I can do rowing or weightlifting with my sugars staying fairly stable or rising if it's really intense, but something about walking steadily up a gentle slope makes it drop massively. There was some interesting research a couple of years back on how exercising the calf muscle is particularly effective at lowering BG, perhaps that has something to do with it https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9404652/
Yea, as a T1D myself the amount of insulin I need is massively different from days I'm arguing on the internet compared to days I'm up doing physical exercise. Things get concerning really quick when you're a distance from anything and your glucose starts dropping.
When you eat, depending on the glycemic index of the food you're consuming your blood sugar starts immediately going up and can quickly peak at dangerous numbers if the food is sugary.
A diabetic will want to take dose of insulin a bit before eating in order to send their blood glucose level on a lowering trend. If you dose it right the two waves semi cancel each other out and your blood sugar goes up some, but hopefully not a huge amount.
If you get the dose wrong, it drops dangerously or rockets up and you have take correction doses.
At Bitesnap we were surprised at how much interest there was from researchers to use our app for diet tracking. It turns out giving people a piece of paper to write “grilled cheese sandwich for lunch” is not a scalable and reliable way to collect research quality data.
We even worked with USDA on putting together a food logging dataset: https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A...
We've also been surprised at SnapCalorie how many researchers have approached us to use the app for more accurate diet tracking for medical study participants. The LiDAR based portion size has been a huge draw for them.
If anyone wants to check out our app or research its on our site: https://www.snapcalorie.com/
PS: Bitesnap was an awesome app!
Feels kind of incredible that something as advanced as laser imaging is being used to measure sandwich size.
What happened to your app? I was on such a research team (Scripps) that used your app for the study (PROGRESS).
Unfortunately it was shut down after I sold the company to MyFitnessPal.
I was a shitty business person who thought it made sense to try and build a free consumer product on a bootstrapped budget. We had some traction on the B2B side that paid the bills but COVID took a dent in it and it would have taken a long time to build back the revenue stream selling to healthcare companies (tip for others, it can take 6-18months to close healthcare deals and another 6-18months to integrate)
We had a few offers to sell the company and took the one that seemed to make the most sense.
If there’s anything I can do to help out my email is michalwols at the Google email provider domain
This doesn't surprise me.
Just trying to keep track of calories for myself stupid things like supersized slices of bread becoming common in stores can really throw off my expected calorie counts.
It seems like this can completely throw off any attempt at figuring out nutrition from an app or research perspective.
I was part of a project that did some work in this area also, we developed a machine learning based wearable to detect chewing:
https://www.ah-lab.cs.dartmouth.edu/publications/detecting-e...
I highly recommend people get a food scale/measuring cups and weighing everything single thing they eat (even small things like nuts and cooking oil) for at least two weeks. After that I think you have a much better appreciation for how many calories your regular meals and snacks have.
I counted calories and put everything on a scale, for about 2 or 3 months in 2022 (iirc). And you are 100% right. I had absolutely no idea how much calories some food has. There were a lot of things, but I think cashews were my biggest eye opener (probably obvious to a lot of people). I easily achieved my goal of -10kg and saved A LOT of money, because I always had food prepared. And since I was going for a calorie deficit, I easily could afford a few sweets on the weekend.
Then I obviously got lazy. And while I sometimes still think I can estimate how much I am eating, I am probably wrong, because my bathroom scale says something different. My key takeaway is that it takes quite a bit of effort, but once you got into a routine, it's not hard.
Edit: Also, while I might have tried to ditch "wasted calories", I didn't put too much effort in eating healthy. One step at a time.
+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 entire daily quota) even before you add milk or anything else, just for breakfast.
I don't know if they still do this, but I remember Special K cereal had identical calories listed for their various varieties, despite obvious differences in the ingredients; they just changed the portion size for each variety.
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
Well, no, but people do. The whole point of this thread is "people are bad at estimating quantity." If it looks the same size as it used to be, but in reality it's half again as big, that's going to have an effect.
>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 to note package weights, and divide containers into N equal portions. That is: I decide a target portion size first, and then portion it out.
If the task is "measure out an ounce of butter" I realistically won't be 40% off - because I can very accurately divide a rectangular solid in half repeatedly, and the butter comes in a one-pound package. Similarly, I have a pretty good idea how much grilled chicken is on my plate, because I know how much raw chicken I cooked, because I made a whole piece from a pack of N roughly-equal pieces weighing X (values which I noted when I bought it).
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.
Historically I would rely on the restaurant's printed nutrition info. But I don't really eat out often enough for this to matter.
It can still be useful just to get rough estimates of what you're making at home, especially for portions and products that are roughly comparable.
If I make an egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich in the morning, and forget to weigh out or count how much of something I used, it can still be useful for back-of-napkin estimates if I Google the McDonalds Sausage McMuffin with Egg.
Obviously it's not going to be exactly equivalent, but I usually assume my homemade thing is 20% more than the restaurant to compensate.
It's of course better if you just weigh everything out first, you can get much more accurate measurements and calorie estimates then, but this can work in a pinch.
There is actually an elegant _mathematical_ solution to this problem using sensor fusion and a differential equation model of the science: if you weigh your food almost all of the time at home, and only make portion and ingredient guesses when infrequently eating out, we can actually estimate your personal rate of underestimation and correct for it.
Our startup (BODYSIM.com) has also been doing research on this a long time. As founders, we all have >16 months of daily food logging mostly by kitchen scale weights, aligned to daily BIA-scale weigh-ins, fitness tracker calories, bi-weekly blood tests, monthly DEXAs, 3D scans, etc etc. We also have a science-based structural model of macronutrient balance and muscle hypertrophy. Given all that, we can VERY confidently estimate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) and its components, and predict how your fat and muscle mass will change on a daily basis. This is real math/science so you can also run it in reverse. This ("simultaneity constraint") provides enough constraints we can estimate users' individual underestimating/over-indulgence when eating out. In fact, it's better to just NOT log those days AT ALL and we can fill them in. I think this solution isn't more widely used b/c you need all this other "quantified self" type data at the same time.
This is really interesting, and I'll probably sign up for your app (I'm training for rock climbing). I've used a kitchen scale for a few weeks at home and got pretty good at estimating portion size during that time. Biggest takeaway was that even if you aren't "over-indulging" when you eat out, the portion sizes (especially in the US, less so in Europe) are just insane. 2-3x portions. Ordering half-orders or starters and letting the food settle before eating/ordering more helped quite a bit.
How reliable do you find the calories-burned data from fitness trackers to be? Are there any brands that have higher accuracy than others? Are there any hardware features like pulse monitoring that improve the accuracy?
I find that the raw step count varies up to 66% between my phone and my wrist-worn tracker and I can't close that gap just by making sure my phone is never left behind.
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?
Portion sizes in the US are ridiculous... often 2-3x larger than here in Europe.
When I regularly visited New York for work, and we'd get takeaway sandwiches, I'd have to open them and remove half the filling. I just couldn't physically eat that volume of meat, cheese or especially mayonnaise. For all drinks, I'd order small.
Where in Europe? I haven't toured the _whole_ continent but I've been to restaurants in Germany, the UK, and Ireland and did not find their portions to be any different than what you'd get at the average corner restaurant in the US.
Now, there are plenty of food vendors and restaurants in the US where big portions are considered part of the experience. Especially hamburgers, subs, and other sandwiches. I once ate at a place that served a plate-sized burrito completely covered in french fries. 12 inches wide and 6 inches tall. SOME people can eat that amount of food but most people cannot, and nobody is expected to.
Finally, large portions in NY street food are often customary because for lots of people with demanding jobs and 12-16 hour shifts, lunch is often their only meal. Or, half of it is lunch, the other half is dinner later on.
New York deli sandwiches are certainly not representative of what you get everywhere in the US. They are famously large.
And expensive to match the size! A pastrami sandwich at Katz's is ~$30. A croque madame at a similar place in Paris is ~€15.
People generally split a Pastrami sandwich over a couple meals or with someone else.
They may be famously large, but I don't think they are abnormally large for most of the US nowadays? I certainly didn't think they were particularly big when I visited.
Katz serves roughly 3/4 lbs of meat. That is particularly big. You can get triple hamburgers which would be similar is size - but most people are ordering singles or doubles. And you can find other kinds of large sandwiches around the country ... but it is not the most common of sizes.
I think what made them not seem excessively large to me, is that it didn't really come with much else? Yes, it was more meat than I would get on a sandwich, typically. But... that is about it?
Maybe I got too used to some of the obscure burrito places around Atlanta that would put way too much on them?
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 states.
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.
I'm a big fan of European serving sizes compared to U.S. for food – but when it comes to beverages, particularly water, I can't believe how much they charge you for how little they give. I understand everything comes in bottles with VAT but even asking for tap water I found they'd only bring a very small glass.
In some European countries water is free. I am from Sweden where all places have free tap water and fancy places often have free sparkling water.
Along the mediterranian seemed like the only place to get free water were the ancient fountains that spittle out a stream. But then you’d have to wait for the inevitable old man to finish washing his head and arm pits in that fountain. Beer was usually substantially cheaper than the water offerings.
I'll be visiting France soon, so will be able to compare on that front. But I think it is an understatement to say that things are universally smaller.
And on the drinks, even places in Japan that had free refills still gave, at largest, an 8oz cup. Usually, I think they were even smaller. Even getting popcorn at Universal, the bags were large, but nothing compared to what I'd expect over here.
Some of this, I'm sure, is having gotten used to ordering the larges. For a time, it was not unheard of to get a 32oz soda at any given convenience store. May still be normal? I don't know.
(And, of course, this isn't getting in to the sizes of vehicles.)
>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.
I don’t see why it would be bad to get more water to drink
There's actually something of a stereotype that Japanese places will give you unreasonably small portions of water with meals. (Dogen plays off this in some of his videos.)
But then, I think it's only been Americans I heard this from, so.
Ha! I hadn't heard of this before, so it caught me completely off guard.
The coffee was the one that really surprised me. Order a coffee and get a 6-8oz cup. With nothing on the menu to indicate you can get a 12-16oz. Was surprising. (Not bad, mind. Just surprising.)
In both my trips to Japan (one recent, one 20yrs ago), I never noticed this, and I think I drink a lot of water in general, and especially as a tourist because I'm doing much more walking.
>and even trained professionals are still off by 40%
I find this very hard to believe, unless the term “trained professional” is quite broad. When I was much more into fitness and weighed every meal to the gram, I could tell if a bowl of cereal was a serving to within a gram or two.
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 on, some they were familiar with, some they were not.
The professionals were nutritionists who had trained in portion size estimation and were shown 2D images on a computer screen.
For what it's worth, we've had a lot of people who have claimed to be very accurate at portion size estimation from a long history of using a kitchen scale. We've paid many of them to do a quiz to see if they're above average accuracy and they have almost always ended up around 40% accuracy or worse.
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
Modern phones have LiDAR that give you the near exact volume and dimensions of everything on a plate. That's what we do:
We co-authored a paper on this with Google AI and showed it got about 2x the accuracy of a nutritionist because of it.
I'd love to do such a quiz -I might even be willing to pay for the privilege! I'm quite convinced I'm really accurate at calorie estimation without using a scale but would love to be proven wrong. Zero food industry experience here, just from reading hundreds of food labels per year since very young, maybe 8 years old.
Thinking about it again, I'll probably do a lot worse from a picture because I can't have a bite of the food! Just having a spoon makes it so much easier in terms of ratios.
If you read the paper it’s pretty easy to see what they mean by this. They tested “4 professional nutritionists”. I don’t know if nutritionists get any special training at estimating portion size but my guess would be they do not.
Some do, some do not. We put them through a standard portion size training course regardless to be sure.
Isn’t that a bit of a special case because you know your cereal and you know your bowls? What about some cooked foods like meats which can vary in density and shape when raw, and also vary even further due to inconsistency in cooking, with more or less moisture cooked off?
It’s possible to calibrate your estimates, but if you haven’t done that, it’s probably safe to assume you’re not particularly accurate.
There is definitely a lot of variation in density, moisture content, fat percentage between regions, cuts, cooking amounts and methods. IMO using an average number here is probably best because to some extent it's hopeless to account for all of these things.
Most people don't stay consistent in tracking long enough for any of this to matter, so really it's about what is the most accurate approach to achieve your goal and sustain longer term.
Oh I would only weigh things raw - if we’re talking about guessing the portion sizes at a restaurant for example, you might say I’m cooked.
I wonder how good an ML model might be at that task. Maybe given a photograph of the plate and the menu description.
I think they're suggesting that the portions you are judging have not been practiced hundreds of times.
There is no profession that would require you to estimate portion sizes up to grams visually. So, trained professional will be someone who was trained in something different - a doctor for example.
I guess, maybe cooks should have the best precision for this.
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 :(
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.
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.
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!
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. Anyone who asks we're very transparent about it. If there's somewhere else where you think we can list it to make it more clear I'm happy to add it, just not sure where that would be.
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).
Looks like we used to have it in the description on the app store along with the FAQ but a team member made the decision to remove it because of complaints about it being inconsistent with the way Apple was localizing pricing to different currencies and regions.
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.
I don't see any mention of the price in the FAQ[0], which I had to guess the url of because it doesn't have a link anywhere on the homepage. Trying to guess the url of the pricing page doesn't yield any results.
It doesn't seem like - it is
Which makes it par for the course in the scam that is mobile development
Thanks - just read this comment while it was downloading and installing, so uninstalled straight away.
Back to fitness pal and scanning barcodes (which is not really much of a hardship tbh)
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 would be ideal but given the amount you'd probably need to charge as a one off (or for major upgrades) most consumers would rather have the slow bleed of $10/mo than $25 one time.
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.
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 :)
This would often be a feature.
Except most app stores require future maintenance and compliance to keep publishing the app. Someone has to keep the lights on.
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.
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'.
As someone who takes a photo of every single meal I eat, I was very excited to try out Snapcalorie but it was completely wrong for all the pictures I tried giving it. I uploaded a picture of a recent meal of tomato egg, baked octopus tentacles, and shrimp, and it identified it as pasta, mushrooms, and chicken. Also, it doesn't work for typical home meals that are eaten family-style.
I'm currently dieting again, and the only way that I've been able to properly portion calories is to weigh nearly everything I eat and then add the numbers together in Google Sheets.
Eyeballing a portion of a lot of food can be nearly impossible to determine how much food you actually got, but weight is fairly straightforward and objective (at least to an ounce or so of granularity for most kitchen scales, which is good enough for dieting).
From the paper (https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Thames...):
> We asked them to estimate the mass of each ingredient present on the plate and subsequently converted these values into nutrition estimates using the same USDA [9] values we used to create our dataset
I get that there's a linear relationship between the mass of a food and its calories, but I'd expect that nutritionists would be better at estimating the calories in a plate of food than the mass of a food item. Most people aren't doing the math in their heads, they're using a frame of reference that recognizes calories. Did you have this in mind? Is there any research on this?
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.
Tracking takes more work and is less accurate. Bad trade.
The only use I see in tracking is to perhaps help one inform one's intuition. But that's as far as I'll go.
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.
> 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 complete questionnaires about their intake over the past 24 hours, a week, or even several months." I find that hard to believe. How could any study like that be taken seriously? That's like having someone stand at a street corner for an hour and observe the population to then come up with an average BMI for the neighbourhood.
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.
Yes, the mere act of monitoring (including self-monitoring) leads to behavioral change.
This alone can be sufficient for some people.
One factor is just the sheer volume of snacks and treats - outside of the portion size of any particular meal. If your were not self-aware of constant eating that can have a big impact - at least it did for a few friends of mine.
Yup, I discovered this 14 years ago and wrote a proposal to do barcode scanning to help, but left academia soon after.
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)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
As someone who has successfully tracked calories in the past with great effort, the trick is to be strict about measuring calorie-dense foods, but to be liberal with "lighter" foods where the calories are functionally de minimis. An ounce of olive oil has 250 kilocalories. An ounce of lean protein generally has 30-50 kilocalories. An ounce of green vegetables contains virtually no kilocalories.
As such, things like oils and miso can be heavily caloric, and need to be measured strictly. This is also true of most proteins and carbs.
Seeds and tomato sauce can have some caloric density, and should also be measured, but it is less of a priority.
Mustard, lemon juice, most spices (that don't contain sugar), onions, cucumbers (regardless of density) and parsley do not have any substantial caloric density and can be considered "free" unless used in great quantities. Nobody ever gained weight from mustard, lemons, onions, cucumbers and parsley.
As already mentioned, micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured in a home kitchen. If you're concerned about any decrease in micronutrients, simply use vitamin and mineral supplements. Macros like proteins, carbs and fats, on the other hand, can generally be measured using typical cups, spoons and scales, even with leftovers.
When making a meal shared with others if you are looking to strictly track calories, it is easier to break things into macronutrients and mix them on individual plates or bowls rather than cook as a total pot. It's much easier to measure a protein (say, 4oz chicken), a carb (say, a potato), a sauce and a fat individually portioned on a plate than an arbitrary stew. (As above, low-calorie vegetables likely do not need to be measured separately unless there are added macronutrients.)
That may sense. Most of the folks here seems to track calories and other macro. In the meantime...
> micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured
... my concern is micro: I'm engaging on a full vegetable diet (+shrooms +minerals!) and am concerned about thinks like iron, selenium, calcium... I (got-used-to) love vegetable and eat a lot of them so I'm probably fine with most micros, however may miss some selenium for exemple. Some research seems to show that too much vitamins is usually ok but too much minerals may not be. The more I read the more I'm scared! What makes me feel safe is the three long-time vegan I know seems healthy and don't take any supplement appart obvious B12. Perhaps I should just focus on other thinks that doing mad about micros...
Both supplementation and dietary strictness are scary because of the consistency. A quantity that is safe every day for a week or a month is not necessary safe every day for a year, and a quantity that is safe for a year is not necessarily safe for ten years. I've known two long-term vegetarians who were diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia in their thirties. One of them passed out while cycling home from work, which I'm guessing meant that she was suffering in small ways for a long time before she realized it. But if she took a mineral supplement every day for twenty years, how might she find out if she was getting too much of something? They sell the same supplements to people who are 5' 100 lbs and 6'4" 250 lbs.
I mean, in regards to iron specifically, I get bloodwork done in my yearly checkup and it will tell me my iron levels.
Historically mine have always been low but in September of 2023 I started a diet and started taking iron supplements, and when I got my bloodwork I was in the happy "green" range.
ETA:
I should point out that I'm a pretty tall dude (~6'5"), which might make it easier for me to avoid getting too much iron, but if I were getting too much iron I assume it would probably show up in my blood tests?
Brazil nuts are so high in selenium that you aren’t supposed to eat too many of them
Counting works for people because it quantifies their food intake. For many people, that's an effective way to overcome a learned idea that portions should be huge, or that feeling hungry has to be addressed immediately, or that feeling "full" has to be constant. It's not perfect, and I don't recommend it to people with an ED history; however, after about a month or 2 of doing it, it can really change how you look at your meals, and snacking in particular. I don't obsess over it.
> - sauces you make yourself?
I don't count them. I keep my sauces simple and use them sparingly. I'm not trying to get down to sub-10% bf.
> - 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 count them raw, or if my tracker has them, count them as cooked. I don't care about them being super accurate.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
I don't care. The calorie counts are basically just estimates anyway. It's less a science than a mental game to control your ballpark calories in.
> - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
If I'm making the meal, I count for the whole meal, then estimate for the share. See above for rationale (I don't care that much.) If my friend has cooked for me, I don't care at all, and just try to eat a "reasonable" portion.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences are probably not going to matter all that much. By weight, a cucumber is a cucumber is a cucumber; I'm not trying to be perfect, just get a general sense of calories.
This is it. There will always going to be impossibly unpredictable errors even if you measure everything perfectly.
The point of measuring is to be * as accurate as possible *, not 100% error-free. It helps to better estimate portion sizes, calorie / macro amounts. This is enough precision to control weight gain / loss correctly.
A lot of people also get their maintenance calories estimation wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can measure your food down to the molecules but still eat too much / too little.
A lot of people mess up more by doing a maintenance calorie estimation wrong and relying on it rather than counting calories coupled with weighing themselves and adjusting calorie intake up/down depending on whether they lose/add weight... If you use a feedback loop, then indeed it doesn't matter if your calorie estimate is anywhere near correct anyway, as long as you're reasonably consistent and the errors aren't too badly skewed toward the wrong foods.
I did this. I targeted 0.5kg loss per week, and since 1kg of fat is 7000 kcal that meant 500 kcal deficit per week was needed.
I measured my weight every morning (after peeing) and wrote it down, and used it to compute weekly average.
I did weigh ingredients for the first couple of weeks to get an idea, but after that just did rough estimates coupled with tuning based on feedback from the body weight every week.
Had a near perfect linear trend for the year I did this.
Yep, it doesn't particularly matter if something that's actually 212 or 198 is entered as 200. Sometimes you'll be slightly over, sometimes slightly below - just try to be accurate and these small mistakes average out.
Typically I figure out the actual weight/volume once or twice to get a sense of how much it is, then just eyeball it most of the time and go for the same amount as last time I measured.
I worked on calorie counting software in the 00's. We had desktop software that just used floats, meanwhile the Palm Pilot software was all integer math (counting things in 10ths and 100ths when that precision was needed.)
We'd get emails about people seeing 577 calories on the Palm Pilot and 578 calories on the desktop. "None of the numbers are that accurate anyway!" was a sensible answer but not very brand aligned.
And: I think it is very difficult to gain weight by eating to many cucumbers ;-)
> I don't recommend it to people with an ED history
Your daily reminder that ED means more than one thing.
The little blue pill is probably in MyFitnessPal if one really wants to track all their macros.
This won't be useful for you because you share food with others, but for people who do not share food and are interested in long term tracking rather than short term (e.g., they want to take off some weight at a healthy rate and keep it off, as opposed to people who just want to lose a few pounds rapidly for their class reunion and will make no effort after that to keep it off) there is a simple trick that can make it a lot easier.
That trick is to focus on months instead of days. Then count your calories when you buy the food instead of when you eat it. For example lets say you buy a loaf of bread. It is 100 calories per slice and there are 17 slices. Add 1700 to your calorie count for the month.
At the end of the month you can approximate your average daily calories as the amount of calories you bought that month divided by the number of days.
Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out. If you want you can smooth that out a bit by logically splitting those items when they have a lot of calories.
For example consider jar of mayonnaise that might last a few months and is 8000 calories. Instead of counting all 8000 in the month you buy it you can count it as 2000 that month and 2000 more each of the next 3 months.
>Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out.
Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from the container.
Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to figure out how many portions it typically provides; then, going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food accordingly.
A jar of mayonnaise?? you can measure by the spoonful (or better, by weight, since its nutritional value is in the package) whenever you eat.
A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats. Not so much problem if you do that with cucumber or spinach.
> A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats
Over several months the errors will average out. Unless you eat out a lot, then the above method doesn't work. However if you are single (this is the most unlikely factor!) and cook most meals at home then calories in the door - what you throw away = calories that you ate. That is good enough.
I did this for a few weeks when I was maintaining weight and did MyFitnessPal for a couple weeks a few years later and got pretty much the same calorie count each time. Very effective.
Even simpler if just looking after oneself: keep the receipts, make the accounting YEARLY.
I have a whole food, plant-based diet and I cook all my own food. I don't buy any processed food, anything with anything animal in it, refined sugar, refined oils (except olive oil for the air fryer), refined carbohydrates, things preserved with salt/vinegar/oil or any stimulants. For B12 I eat Marmite (UK). Most of what I eat is that rare thing: fresh vegetables.
Because I eat almost everything (sometimes there are bad apples), I throw very little away and that includes packaging too, where I am surprised at how little that amounts to. I have a small box for recycling and I only have to empty it ever two to three months.
I could cheat and not keep the receipt on a huge box of chocolates, beer and biscuits but I would only be fooling myself.
As for bread, I just buy flour and yeast, to put it in the breadmaking machine. I buy wholemeal flour which is white flour with some of the stripped off parts of the wheat thrown back in. I am happy with that compromise as it makes a very nice loaf.
Apart from Marmite, nothing I buy has much of an ingredients label, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and has no ingredients.
The receipts are my way of accounting, I could look at them all for the last year and buy everything I need that is shelf-stable for the year ahead.
Mayonnaise used to be something I did eat a lot of, but now that is on the banned list, and I have no idea why I would ever want to eat that stuff nowadays.
I eat to satiety and beyond, my physical activity consists of walking/cycling and I am fitter than I have ever been with a digestive tract that is rock solid. Bloating, constipation or the runs are alien conditions to me, I also get a 'long range bladder' into the deal.
I don't count calories, my goal is to get as many as possible from just vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, grains and fruit. I love cooking and my 'self care' routine. Since there are seasons, my food always changes, right now spring greens are floating my boat.
The idea of keeping the receipts is to have all of them with no banned items in them, and also to track my nutrition experiments. At the moment I am trying to do a year long streak of 'an apple a day' to see what that is about.
Regarding counting macronutrients, why bother? Nobody counts fibre, which is crucial for the lower gut, with protein we eat 2x in the West and nobody is counting phytochemicals in plants beyond the 'five a day' thing. With the exception of bread, everything I eat counts towards the 'five a day' so I am probably on twenty portions of fruit or veg a day, not that I am counting.
I don't mind people wanting to diet to fit into a dress for a special event, that is something that works for them, albeit with yoyoing. I want to be at my fittest during the summer months, to go cycling, and, during winter, I don't care. In this way I am embracing yoyoing, however, my weight does not go up over winter, I just lose some muscle, to get it back again during spring.
I am very diligent, and the truth is that it is hard and it changes how you eat to be more countable. On a cut, it matters more. On maintenance, it matters less.
But most of it is a guessing game and making an assumption that it will all even out later. Ignore spices - you can assume 25 calories a day and it’ll still be too much.
Be diligent about oils. 9 calories a gram bites you quickly.
But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And that’s the key - we know nutrition is variable. You won’t get it perfect. You just have to adjust for the imperfections.
>But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And the thing is, you'll need to do this anyway - because you can't be sure in advance how many calories represents a "500 calorie deficit" for you, in your specific current conditions.
I was quite underweight in my youth, but I successfully reversed these kinds of feedback techniques to gain weight, and currently maintain what seems to be a healthy level. John Walker (co-founder of Autodesk, who passed away early last year) wrote The Hacker's Diet describing the basic technique. It's still live at https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ .
If you're willing to spend money, Macrofactor basically is an automated version of this with a bit more refinement.
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 diet dramatically overnight will cause you to hate the process and give up.
Change your diet less than 10% per week, keep eating all of your favorite guilty pleasure foods, just incorporate more healthy foods you enjoy as well, ideally before you eat the less healthy items to give yourself time to start feeling full from them. Slowly find more dishes heavy in vegetables that you like. Try to eat them more often. If you're cooking for yourself or serving yourself, try to increase the ratio of vegetable to other items.
Getting pizza? Maybe do a side salad first or a get a veggie pizza. Don't try to cut the pizza entirely until you're further along in your journey.
Don't stress about it. If you're consistently finding ways to make small changes like this you'll start heading in the right direction over the long haul and your pallet will adapt to enjoy the foods you're not used to slowly.
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.
You are onto something. If you maximise fruit and veg then you are also maximising phytochemicals, and that means having a nice skin tone.
I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals that make them so.
I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so, as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in this way, to note the improvements to things like oral health, joint pain, digestion and so on.
You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.
I use Cronometer (www.cronometer.com) and a scale. It lets you create recipes with the weight of each item and the weight of the final result. I then weigh the portion I have with a meal. Why do I do this in the first place? I'm one of those people that eats too little vs too much, especially in the summers when I'm outside all day burning tons of energy: tracking calories helps me keep weight on. I have to eat so much food to maintain my target weight that it gets pretty uncomfortable some days. Yay for muffins and cookies.
Don't worry about how leftover nutrients decrease over time: you'll get enough nutrients in a well balanced diet without having to worry about the minutia. If you're really worried about it, pop a multivitamin for cheap insurance.
Also don't worry about the variation in calories between one type of cucumber / apple / whatever vs. another. Those variations aren't significant and they probably average out anyway. Realize too that the sources aren't exact in the first place: once source is likely to give a different caloric value for something like dried beans vs another.
If you're going to track, don't get too caught up worrying about if the absolute value of the calories you're recording is 100% accurate because even if they were, you can't track your energy expenditure 100% accurately. If the bathroom scale goes in the wrong direction for you, adjust your caloric intake to compensate. Look at trends over the week and over the month vs day to day variations and it won't take long to zero in on the right number for you.
For weighing things, I have a kitchen scale that lets me tare it with something on it. I find it easier to tare a container of an ingredient, then dose some of that ingredient out, then reweigh it to get the delta I put in. For things which have a dash of an ingredient I'll just guess. A few grams here and there won't really matter much.
For partitioning a meal: Sometimes I weigh my portion. Over time I've trained myself to estimate the weight of what I take such that my visual estimates are reasonable. Eventually my visual estimates have gotten better.
A lot of your other challenges are just not that important: If you're off by a few calories in either direction, it's not a big deal. It'll average out in the long run. If you're systematically off, you'll eventually recalibrate your goals anyway based on how you feel and/or your weight patterns vs what the calorie counts tell you.
> - sauces you make yourself?… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
> - 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)
Cooking time doesn't matter for macronutrients.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
They don't for macronutrients.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences don't really matter for calorie purposes. High-caloric things don't vary in density meaningfully.
You seem to be confusing tracking macronutrients (carbs, fats, protein) with micronutrients (vitamin C etc.). People track macros, generally to lose weight. I've never heard of anyone tracking micros. I don't think it's even possible.
> Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
well, many say it's "easy" (it's not)
tbh it's "easy" if you're also doing a pretty specific focused diet. (maybe simple would be a better phrase - it can be reduced to very simple steps. mentally choosing to do this and enduring it is difficult, but the process itself is straightforward.)
like the worry about sauces is true but if you eat mostly chicken and rice and one slice of bread a day you can really get that variability down. when I was heavily restricting I would only cook very simple things like that and otherwise eat packaged food, and it certainly worked to lose weight. but you sacrifice variety and flavor and you'll feel kinda stressed and hungry for months at a time.
the last factor is living with people who are not dieting - I personally think this makes the required willpower basically impossible. if there is food in the house you will eventually succumb to the temptation of eating it in my experience. it's much easier if you live alone and only have the diet food in the house at all, buying nothing else, etc.
One insidious thing is that it's incredibly easy to do food tracking if you eat mostly single-serving prepared foods, but those are, by nature of being incredibly palatable and digestible, the most psychologically and metabolically challenging foods to maintain a calorie deficit with.
yeah, although there's a variety there and you can find some lower and higher ones. (bags of anything starchy are difficult, sandwiches are very variable.. I leaned on wraps and stuff like Chicken salad without toppings a lot.)
some prepared foods are basically the "empty calories" that people always talk about, like chips. high calorie (and usually like 3-4 servings per bag, not single serving really at all) and also low satiation so they almost make you hungrier to eat.
I don't, but what I did do was track everything obsessively in a spreadsheet for about a week, while exercising and eating and sleeping a nominally correct amount. As you indicate, it's a lot of manual effort to track everything like that, and I couldn't see myself doing it long term.
But over that week, I "calibrated" myself. I know, vibe-wise, how it feels to be eating the correct amount of food. And now I just keep doing that.
I don’t do this anymore, but when I was, the answers are as follows:
I didn’t make a ton of sauces myself, but if it was then I would round spices down to zero and weigh the main caloric components (think mayo, soy sauce, sugar, oil, tomato paste, etc)
I always weighed the uncooked food, so different cooking times was a non factor.
As for nutrients decreasing, I dealt with this by not believing in it. Seriously though, I was tracking fats, carbs, and proteins which to my knowledge do not meaningfully decay in non negligible amounts.
I lived alone so I didn’t often have to cook for multiple people. When I did I would just make 2 omelets or waffles or whatever and weigh mine.
As far as different species/cultivation methods, I realized there was an absolute edge to my ability to track. For example: bread is often listed at 70 calories per slice, but if you weigh each slice, you’ll find it deviates from what the package considers a “slice” of bread substantially. Further, you’ll often find packages that are inconsistent. For example, you might see a box that claims 14g of a food is 5 calories but the entire 28g container is also listed at 15 calories.
In what you listed under making a sauce, only mayo and the oils need to be weighed (unless it's some ridiculous amount of seeds). If you don't already know whats high calorie you learn quickly, in reality the average person gets the bulk of their calories from probably less than 10 items (flour/rice/chicken/etc).
I suppose it depends what goals you're pursuing with your tracking. If it's simply losing weight, you can focus on the things with lots of calories in them. Oil, sugar, processed foods. Tomatoes, cucumber and lemon juice shouldn't be an issue.
I bought myself a food weight to have at the kitchen but just like you I struggled with all the minor things that gets added in rapid succession. The trick is to get good enough at estimating within reason, and focus on one aspect such as calories.
Figure out what one table spoon of oil contains, and when you make a sauce use a table spoon while pouring to count roughly how much oil you are putting in.
For shared meals, or self-restricted portions, I just add the entire meal upfront to my book-keeping, and then after are are done eating I subtract what I didn't eat.
You don't need to keep track of the family history of your cucumbers.
I live by myself and "charge" calories to an account whenever I buy raw foods at the store or eat out. Then, whatever is in my house, I have already "accounted" for in my caloric budget. The strategy comes in figuring out what foods / combinations of foods leave me feeling satisfied. Beans (another great living-alone food, haha) are an allstar. I weigh ingredients for a lot of cooking only so I pace the consumption of rice, beans, etc.
The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.
> 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
I can't speak for anyone else, and I actually do try and weigh everything, but if I forget to weigh or the portions are too small to measure with my cheap kitchen scale: I weigh out my serving of the finished product, and Google either the restaurant or premade-grocery-version of what I made and look at their nutrition labels.
Obviously it's not going to be perfect, but I figure that my homemade pizza sauce will have roughly the same ingredients as the Ragu pizza sauce at the grocery store and thus roughly the same calories and nutrition at a per-ounce level. I always assume that my homemade stuff is 20% higher in calories more just to compensate for uncertainty, but doing this I did manage to lose about 60lbs.
I'm not tracking right now, but used to. So I can answer your question with the caveat that yes it is a pain and I stopped doing it. :)
> 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
Yes. The thing is that it also makes you aware of how much everything "costs" you in terms of calories. You become a lot more aware of how big a glug you give of that oil.
> 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 don't understand this part of your question.
> Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
My goal was not to be "accurate", but to lose weight. Overestimating slightly was in fact preferred. So this is not an effect I would have worried about.
> counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
You estimate. You know that the whole thing was X so if you eat a quarter of it that is 0.25*X.
> different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
Cucumber is flavoured water. Whatever is the variability in calories you can probably just ignore it.
I've only done this on occasion when cooking for my spouse when she was counting.
The measuring of ingredients is much easier if you use a scale. A case like cold sauces where you can put the mixing vessel on the scale is the easiest case.
On sharing with others: I'd always calculate the total calories and total weight of the entire dish and then simply place the serving plate on the scale and calculate the taken calories based on the weight.
It depends why you're tracking things, and what level of "everything" you care about.
Starting with pretty much everything can be a good idea for people to get a sense of what's in what foods. How much does an onion typically weigh? What's that actually adding? What's the difference between getting lean and fattier meat? How much oil are you really adding?
After that it's easier to start dropping things - if I'm trying to lose weight I simply do not care precisely how much celery I've added for the sofrito. I do care about the amount of butter, oil, rice, bread, pasta though.
I'm not concerned about getting fat adding paprika, so I'm not weighing spices. Even if I'm trying to track macros that's just not going to be a considerable contributor to anything.
> - 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)
Prep/measure things first.
Last three things that smooth things over for me
1. Meal prep on a different day. I'm not in as much of a rush at night, it's proportionally less time involved measuring something for a larger number of meals/sauces/components.
2. Having measuring spoons and fast scales nearby.
3. Measuring before & after amounts rather than exactly what to add. If I need to add butter to a sauce until it's the right consistency, or flour to a dough, or whatever then weighing as I go is a nightmare. Instead just weigh it before and after and you'll see what you used. This tip works pretty well for oil too.
It's really just focused on a keto diet, but using the app at https://www.carbmanager.com you can look up low-carb foods really well and enter units in all kinds of ways. I know someone who successfully used it for about 2 months a while ago, but then they went off keto and the app DB didn't have many non-carb heavy foods.
For me I mostly just try to log the high macro and/or calorie items. Like if I make a Caesar dressing I’m mostly counting the oil and if I’m being really meticulous I’ll measure the Parmesan and anchovy content. But I’ll ignore the 2tbsp lemon juice, garlic, mustard, etc. since it’s counting so little towards the totals I care about.
If you’re trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not work for you, though.
For vitamins are probably easier to start in the other end and have a blood test to check how you're doing. I have no idea if that would involve selling your first born in the US though
Depends on the vitamin.
Many are water soluble and so any excess in the body is peed out by the end of the day and so all tests are useless. Fortunately you typically get more than enough as part of a typical balanced diet and so you shouldn't need to supplement in the first place if you are eating well. Though it is almost impossible to overdose so if it makes you feel good there is no harm in making the vitamin companies rich.
The rest you can get blood tests. In general it isn't worth testing unless your doctor suspects something is wrong though. Just eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise and you will mostly be fine. Maybe take some vitamin D in winter, but ask your doctor (my doctor told me vitamin d in winter so that is what I do)
I track everything. (with caveats below)
It's less important to get the calorie numbers perfect, and more important to be consistent in your under/over reporting. To me, it's a tool to track the consistency of my diet. No amount of over/under reporting is hiding 2 slices of pizza on a graph.
In sweet dishes, 2 TBSP sugar is 120 calories. In savory dishes, 1 TBSP oil is 100 calories. None of the other minor ingredients have any appreciable calories. You should be able to predict quantities within a 1 TBSP tolerance range. The rest of your calories come from foods with visible volume, and chatgpt does a good job of predicting their calories from screenshots. With that, hopefully, you don't under-report any meal by more than 200 calories. If you're following a recipe, dump the whole thing into chatgpt, voila.
Over 2 meals, under-reporting by 200 calories feels like a lot. But wait to have 1 milkshake, beer or 1 tiny baklava and see the graph shoot beyond any of these pesky concerns. The goal is to track and be accountable for the latter: the ultra-palatable foods. The extra onions and parsley are not making you fat.
For outside food, you can find official numbers reported by fast food places. Add 20% to their estimate. Actually, add 10% to all estimates. Every your own food. If a full meal randomly lands under 500 calories. I look at it with scrutiny. It takes careful effort to stay under 500 and feel full. If it happens consistently and you don't lose weight, then you're tracking something wrong.
PSA: NUTS HAVE A SH*T TON OF CALORIES. ALWAYS REPORT THEM. YOU WILL BE SHOCKED. _____
The system has worked quite well for me.
In all cases, my weight gain has corresponded to long periods of door dashing, liquid calories & dessert binges. On these days, my daily calorie consumption jumps by ~800 calories. Getting your oil intake wrong by 1 TBSP makes no difference to that number. Focus on the main culprits.
____
P.S: ofc, if you care about micros, my comment is irrelevant.
Getting the grams right goes a long way. At the end of the day, you're trying to approximately measure the caloric density per gram, and maybe macros (proportion protein / fat / carbs). You're thinking in way too fine detail for it to be sustainable. Even with a lax approach, it is pretty tedious.
I wouldn't really recommend tracking long-term, but doing it for a week or so just to get a sense of how much you're currently consuming is a good idea.
Eventually you learn recipes and their values. I memorised a lot of basics. But mostly I cut out non-vegetable carbohydrates and ate a ton of salads with nonfat Greek yogurt and hot sauce as a dressing, and whey protein.
What I did is just get a rough estimate of calories of things I'm eating. Along with tracking weight every day. Then over a couple of weeks, calibrated calorie estimates with recorded weight changes. Developed an intuition.
After that, I never looked up another calorie, and counted based on how the food felt, and basically lost exactly 0.5 kg/week over a period of 5 months. (500 kcal deficit/day).
Even if I'm wrong for a particular meal, the over/under-estimates must be cancelling out. My food situation makes it extremely hard to actually calculate calories, so I had to develop this skill.
You're never going to be 100% precise for every day, but you should be able to be roughly correct in aggregate and the fact of recording what you eat makes you more conscious of what you put in your mouth.
This probably doesn't count, but I pretty much eat the same thing every day. I think being pretty far along the autistic spectrum makes this easier for me than most.
Macros are pretty stable though. A week old veggie has less vitamins than a fresh one, but the carbs are pretty unchanged. Trying to measure and weigh for micro nutrients seems doomed though.
As a way of life, weighing and counting macros also seems pretty doomed to because it's just so much work, but it's very doable for a few days to realign your view of what an appropriate amount of food is, if you're diligent and mindful enough to not have a soda or a snack without thinking
I would imagine that having a camera videoing your preparation of ingredients and cooking would give enough data to classify the ingredients and the used volumes. From the video it should be easier to track the weight of everything... and perhaps depending on how the ingredients are used, determine/predict how the macronutrients are altered during the process.
Well, caloric value isn't that exact to begin with, so there is no point in being overly exact. Afaik it's derived by burning the food and measuring the heat it produces, but your body doesn't burn it (like pyrolysis), it uses specialized proteins. So the energy conversion varies, some can't be digested at all.
On the first point, you only need to do it once and then you can reuse the information in future (assuming you stick to the same recipe).
For the other points, I think with any kind of data measurement there is a balance between precision and convenience. Trying to consistently track calories is hard enough, trying to track nutrients at the level of precision you are suggesting sounds technically challenging and frankly exhausting. I think a lot of people will take "average" values for a cucumber, an onion, etc. Like others have said, consistency in measurement is probably more important than finding the absolute truth.
For sauces, I either use a bottled sauce if I really want to stick to macros, or I try to make the exact same recipe each time and then I can select my previously created logged item in the diet app.
That's really key. I've had great success with calorie tracking, but the first few weeks always sucks until I have my regulars figured out, then it becomes a lot easier. Afterwards, it's just a matter of repetition and measuring.
For things I prepare in bulk myself (eg perhaps sauce in your case), I usually just get stats on the whole batch. Then just approximate per serving or average it over the whole batch.
I use myfitnesspal and try to get close. There is a lot of data in the database. It is a tool like anything else it just helps me eat more intentionally.
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.
Sauces are quite easy in practice. Usually you can measure in table spoons or whatever.
I overestimate on some things because it is safer than underestimating.
adjusting seasoning/tasting as you go seems like it would complicate matters too, especially if you're in the heat of it and don't have time to stop and weigh that extra pinch of salt etc
Salt has literally zero calories.
Spices and everything else in general have so little in them it doesn't matter. Something like seeds or pepper more so, but you're hardly going to add so many it changes anything.
Which is kind of the point: you look this stuff up once in order to get a sense of what you're actually doing, and quickly realize what is and isn't going to matter overall. If you're really concerned, you start from a fixed mass you'll season from, and then just use that up as you go.
i.e. if you know you'll be adjusting added sugar, then estimate the total amount of sugar you're comfortable putting in the meal up front, and work from that pool. If it's less, great.
Well, by weighing and logging everything. You are correct that it takes a lot longer when you do that. That's the cost of keeping track of your caloric intake. I also do not account for any nutrient loss or divergence from different cooking times, leftovers, or from different species.
I only weigh everything I eat when I am actively trying to lose weight, however, and when I am doing so I deliberately restrict my diet to meals where I won't waste a lot of time weighing everything. If I'm trying to maintain or gain weight, I don't really bother with it.
90%+ of the effort is just weighing everything and writing it down. If you make a lot of custom dishes that's fine - just save the recipe and measure out the ingredients consistently. Weigh out your portions and it's not a big deal...
People who are tracking everything are usually doing it because they're trying to achieve a particular goal that involves cutting or bulking. I don't know too many people who do rigorous calorie tracking to achieve maintenance unless their body is their profession.
I have been obese for many years and also now if I do not pay attention to what I eat I gain weight immediately.
Eventually I have learned to control exactly what I eat, in order to control my weight, but I no longer find this difficult, mainly because normally I eat only what I cook myself (with the exception of trips away from home).
When I experiment how to cook something that I have never cooked before, after I reach a stable recipe with which I am content, I measure carefully every ingredient, either with digital kitchen scales or with a set of volumetric spoons. Then I compute the relevant nutrient content, e.g. calories, protein content, fatty acid profile, possibly some vitamin and mineral content, in the cases when there exists a significant content of that.
While I do this carefully the first time and I record the results, whenever I cook the same later I do not need to pay attention to this, because I already know the nutrient content, so summing for all the portions of food that I plan to eat in that day I can easily estimate the daily intake for everything.
The essential change in my habits that enabled me to lose the excessive weight was that in the past I was eating without paying attention to quantity, until I was satiated, while now I always plan what amount of food I will eat during a day and I always cook the food in portions of the size that I intend to eat, which is always the same for a given kind of food, so I no longer have to repeat any of the computations that I have made when I have determined for the first time a recipe.
In a recipe, things like spices can be ignored, because they add negligible nutrients. Even many vegetable parts, like leaves or stalks, or even some of the roots or of the non-sweet non-fatty fruits, may be ignored even when used in relatively great quantities, because their nutrient content is low. So such ingredients may be added while cooking without measuring them.
For many vegetables and fruits, which are added to food as a number of pieces, I do not measure them when cooking, but when buying. I typically buy an amount sufficient for next week, which is weighed during buying. Then I add every day a n approximate fraction of what I have bought, e.g. 1/7 if used for cooking every day. Then for estimating the average daily intake, I divide by 7 what I have bought for the week.
What cannot be ignored and must always be measured during cooking, to be sure that you add the right amount, are any kinds of seeds or nuts or meat or dairy or eggs, anything containing non-negligible amounts of starch or sugar, any kind of fat or oil or protein extracts. Any such ingredients must always be measured by weight or by volume, to be sure that you add the right amount to food.
Nevertheless, measuring the important ingredients adds negligible time to cooking and ensures perfectly reproducible results.
I eat only what I cook myself and I measure carefully everything that matters, but the total time spent daily with measurements is extremely small. I doubt that summing all the times spent with measuring food ingredients during a whole day can give a total of more than one minute or two. Paring and peeling vegetables or washing dishes takes much more time.
I mean I eat very close to the same thing every day, so I am perhaps not the best example, but for example:
> - 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
You weigh all this out once, store it as a recipe and just weigh how much sauce you're putting on things. Oils are so high calorie they're basically all the same, and the only other contributor is really if the seed mass is substantial. Log your upper end, and just assume the sauce comes out as that value. Your sauce recipe is hardly going to vary by an enormous amount, just provided you bias it towards the upper end for the purposes of tracking.
EDIT: Also since people have been dropping app links - https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline this is what I use on Android. Libre with nice integrations, works great.
I've done that for weight loss, so I focussed on calories only. That was pretty easy:
- while cooking, you weigh every ingredient. Either I just take photos of the scale with my phone, or I write it on a sheet of paper.
- when cooking is done, you weigh the total food (easiest if you know the weight of your pots)
- when eating, you weigh your portions
After some time, you realise that you need to be precise for some things (oil, butter) but can just guess or ignore some things (eg. onions and miso have so little calories that you really don't need to weigh them).
If it's a dish like Lasagna, you don't even need to weigh it at the end, just estimate what fraction of the dish your serving is.
Exactly this. You just weigh every ingredient. It doesn't matter if it's a sauce or what. If it's something premade (like tomato sauce) you use the calories on the packaging. If it's a raw ingredient you look it up.
I never bothered with weighing the final result or portions, instead I just always divvied up the final product into equal individual portions and divided by the total number of portions. That works well if you freeze them.
Of course, all the calculation is a tremendous amount of work. I did it when I needed to lose weight and only did it for a couple of months. But it definitely "calibrated" my understanding of calories -- e.g. non-starchy veggies have barely any at all, while cheese and butter and oil can easily double the calories in a dish.
How do you calculate calories?
Keep in mind that I calculate enough to achieve caloric deficit. Not to reach an exact number.
I also leave the nutrient part on just eating a varied diet, with lots of whole foods.
I personally use MyFitnessPal, weigh the calorie significant food (e.g. the Protein, starches, fat-rich vegetables and fatty sauces) and establish a rough estimate about the calories.
I try to maintain the error an order of magnitude lower than my estimate. That's why I don't bother weighing leafy and "watery" vegetables (e.g. spinach, letucce or cucurbits). Also, I try to keep an eye of sauces like Mayonnaise, but I usually relax on Mustard (I dunno where you live, but mustard here tends to be low-fat by default).
That error can be easily burnt by the casual movement we do in the day.
Some foods I know, eg. oil 9kcal/g, but mostly I just check the label. Every food in the EU has the calories/100g or calories/100ml on the label. If it's not packaged, I look it up it FDDB [1].
[1]: https://fddb.info/db/de/produktgruppen/produkt_verzeichnis/i...
https://cronometer.com this is what nutritionists use.
It tracks not only calories, but also macros and micros.
Tracking and weighing everything is a massive waste of time and energy. There are no obese animals (humans included) in the wild. Just stop eating the wrong things.
I maintain a muscular 225 by eating dairy, eggs, and meat. If I want to drop down to 215, I drop dairy.
How old are you?
Not him but because your answer surprised me I chose to reply: at 34 it is also something I always wondered.
Becoming obese always seemed a little extreme to me and I fail to imagine how someone could reach that state without the accordingly extreme food-related habits - though maybe I'm just lucky to have the "right" metabolism and thus cannot relate.
Though even if obesity was always linked to eating disorders, I understand that "just stop" is not an appropriate response to that issue.
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 never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs.
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight.
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
My opinion is the only reliable way to lose weight (other than ozempic) is to eat in such a way that regulates satiety such that you don't feel hungry when losing weight.
Intermittent fasting + lower carb + whole foods can do this. But the trick is satiety in any one person is regulated by multiple processes. I doubt there's a one size fits all and probably the problem gets harder the more satiety is dysregulated.
But I think any approach aimed at undereating in the sense of being hungry is not likely what people who lose weight successfully are doing. Or at least those who avoid rebounds. You'd instead want to find something that is highly satiating and satisfying and that also can't be overeaten.
Example: almonds may be high satiety by some technical definition. But is is very very possible to eat past hunger with them.
In my own experience it is very difficult to eat too much steak. I find it delicious but simply couldn't past a certain point. Others have reported similar results by adding lots of potatoes.
I don't guarantee success by targeting satiety but I think it's worth trying rather than calories or weight directly. At some level you need to roughly figure out macronutrients to know where you can err but anytime I've lost weight it's been by focussing on type of food rather than amount. But strictly so.
Re potatoes: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/lose-10-6-pounds-in...
Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less, and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body thinking it's starving.
On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.
This is so dismissive it's almost condescending.
I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry.
Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later.
I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.
How much protein were you getting on the high protein diet? For a long time I heard about "get lots of protein, it helps with satiety" and I thought I had enough protein. When I went to a nutritionist and she made me do a food journal, her first feedback was that I needed to up the proteins even more. And then indeed, I stopped feeling as hungry.
I'm kinda convinced that something has changed (prescription meds ending up in the water supply? micro plastics?) that makes people hungrier than they were in the mid 20th century. the effort required to eat less seems higher than ever, and you can't totally explain the gap and rise in obesity with just lifestyle and food availability.
if some unknown element was making everyone's internal thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.
Our genes are heavily evolved to live in calorie scarce environments. In those environments, high calorie foods are amazing. Our biology is built to find them incredibly rewarding.
Science and capitalism have created incredibly delicious foods that are nutritionally lacking, hyper optimized for (against?) our now mis-aligned reward system. In the west, calories are not scarce and the most delcious foods are far from the most nutritious. It will take a long time for our genes to catchup.
Mass producing delicious, cheap, but low nutrition food is profitable. Companies have gotten very good at it. That's the real big change.
that's the macro change, yeah, but the rate of increase in obesity in the us got sharper after the 80s, so it doesn't feel like the complete picture to me.
we got the abundant food and the largely car bound live cycles and it still kept getting worse for decades after that point. I suppose it could be generations growing up only knowing this and so habituated to it more?
The ability to experience endorphins from things unrelated to food has gotten more expensive. Would you rather buy a $13 dollar move ticket and go hungry, or just buy a $13 McDonald's meal and go home to watch a movie? Buy a $75 dollar ticket to a special event? Buy several thousands of dollars in travel? Food is much easier to fill the gaps in feeling good.
The "public presence" of society has diminished due to the internet. You no longer need to put effort into constantly looking your best because social media helps curate your appearance. Going to Walmart is now so relaxed that you can wear pajamas. Putting on your "best appearance" occurs elsewhere in curated ways (i.e. facebook/instagram posts and careful selfies). You can "partition" your social life so that the people shopping at walmart see pajama-you while the Tinder matches see someone totally different.
Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake.
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
What happens if I ingest 0 calories for 3 months?
To parents point your metabolism will drastically change over those 3 months and the rate at which you lose weight will change.
Additionally the distribution of your muscles and fat will also change.
> For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss.
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
The body can compensate at the margins. Eat 5 fewer calories per day and you will see zero change. Eat 500 fewer calories per day, consistently every day, and you will absolutely see changes. (I'm not actually suggesting that it would be _healthy_ or advisable to drop your diet by 500 calories -- just pointing out that the body cannot compensate indefinitely.)
The compensation is often lower energy levels. Your body compensates by keeping you from doing as much.
yeah, you want to force yourself to do some activities that keep your metabolism up along with the restrictions
you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is draining.
One of the traps is mental health. People focus on their body when dieting, but there are far more aspects to manage, and forcing themselves to do things they utterly hate will have wider impacts.
At the end of the day they'll blame will power or motivation or whatever else on why the diet failed, but still won't account for these same factors when trying the next diet involving basically the same mechanics.
>you can't exercise out of a bad diet
You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach.
I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.
I really can't imagine having the energy to burn 10k a day - what kinda workload were they doing?
If you have a real chance to win the gold in the Olympics in most events you have to be working out that much. Even if you end up coming in last of the serious competitors just the workload to be a serious competitor will be 10k+ per day.
At that level training is your full time job though.
Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
[deleted]
Not Society and its Discontents (1930), it's been going on as long as we have written records of anything spanning the history of civilization.
Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements.
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
I think this also summarizes the issues a lot for people on HN face.
Oversimplification and over confidence in estimation.
Engineers tend to do this a lot.
To your credit, our approach never worked :)
I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind, this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy math problem was defeated by human psychology.
> This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
> they struggle with actually putting it into action [...] conceding to their cravings
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
They're just acceding to an even greater emotional pressure; they're certainly not taking a purely sober and intellectual view of calories and health.
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.
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)
This theory is not scientific (food is not energy, the body is not a machine, measurements are not precise etc.) so there is nothing rationale you can say that will convince people who believe in it to switch to something else
cico is true, but you can't measure calories in accurately and you can't be sure of calories out accurately. isn't that fun?
(in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)
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".
(this tip works with finances too)
You can give yourself an ability akin to time travel by writing things down first.
If I write down the calories afterwards, I get the "oh, I shouldn't have done that" feeling at times. I'd like a little time travel button that takes me back to before I did, and let me adjust my behaviour and run through the situation again. If I write it down first I get to have the "oh, that's not worth it" feeling up front and decide to do something else.
This made a big difference for me, both lowering what I was eating and making me happier about the choices I made.
Consciouss eating.
One can (and should) extend that concept to anything. Be conscious about what you do. Then you likely know, if you are not doing good - and can change it.
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?
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.
it's less than you'd hope. you need a fairly high volume of protein shake to get more than 40g of it in a sitting, and your target is probably like 100 or more grams of protein a day
I did a daily shake for a while as an after gym recovery food and I still had more calories from carbs than protein. it's just difficult.
These apps also lack stuff besides common American/European dishes. Most of my food is healthy homemade food and entering them is an absolute pain.
Eating homemade stir fried celtuce [1]? Homemade steamed marble goby [2]? Nope, out of luck. They only have nutrition info for packaged mac and cheese.
Interesting and valid issue! I assume it's crowdsourced data from a community and just isn't that popular where you are, but good points.
I'm living in San Jose, California, where MyFitnessPal is quite popular --- but being an Asian person I eat a lot of Asian food.
I think being consistently inaccurate helps. If you always get the same thing at a certain restaurant, you can start by giving your best estimate of the calories in that meal. Then if your average weight doesn't move in the direction you want you can adjust your target calories to compensate.
That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week.
I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.
Healthy foods are not healthy in an excessive quantity. Diets don't need to be tracked to the individual calorie. We don't burn the same amount l number of calories each day and food labels show an average of the nutritional value. If a person is consistent, they will achieve the desired result; either gaining or losing weight.
I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's feasible.
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)
I found it to be useless for my cooking style. I imagine if your meals were a chicken breast, a single veggie, and a single starch it's useful. However, I tend to do stir fries with lots of different veggies, spices, oils, etc... It was extremely difficult and even more cumbersome to try and enter those meals into that.
It takes some effort, but there’s a lot to gain. When I track what I eat and keep my daily calories in check, I feel much better. If I’m unsure of the exact calorie count, I’ll estimate a bit higher - around 1.2x.
I've used it on and off for 7 or 8 years and it's the only thing that can consistently help me lose weight. Even just the mindfulness of knowing how much you're eating and how much you're exercising are helpful in the process. You don't have to be that accurate on exact calorie counts for this to work.
Lean into that
And even if you don't record with 100pc accuracy, there's still a lot of value
Yeah the best option is to meal plan and follow the plan vs letting your mind make on-the-fly decisions. But ofc, that isn't always feasible.
Yeah, I have tried a few times to keep track via Cronometer but I can never keep it up. Eating out is the killer, as you say. I find I often don't even have a frame of reference for estimating the amount of calories. With the amount of sauces and oil that go into a lot of stuff, I feel like a lot of things could as easily be 1,200 calories as 500 calories.
People are bad at reporting ANYTHING. Exercise, food, sex, grooming. Just ask a lawyer or anybody trying to get a story out of somebody.
This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.
Generalising, this is one of the lessons of the past ~2 centuries in which we've had for the first time reasonably objective analogic recording capabilities: photography, phonography, cinema, and the like. Until their emergence, human testimony across a wide range of phenomena was the only way to transmit information and, due to its low fidelity, low information density, unreliable interpretation and unreliable reproduction, that was at best only modestly reliable. A fantastic example of this (in numerous senses) is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), made from second-hand reports and sketches. On the one hand, it doesn't look true to life, but on the other, specific features of the animal are recorded with remarkable accuracy --- the segmentation of body plates, horns, toes, and aspect of the eyes for example. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros>.
And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert.
Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.
>breathtaking naivete of scientists.
Crows are never whiter by washing.
You cannot dispense common sense through the educational system. Most career scientists are mediocre, and/or they are trying to survive in a rigged system.
Yeah the problem seem to be the researchers in the first place here, they're probably in a hurry to produce papers with supposedly real data.
Or maybe the researchers know all this from years working in this field, the problem might be from those simplifying the research for the public
> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions
There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways.
If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
You reduce the uncertainty of the remaining 20 by substantially increasing sample size across a randomly selected sample.
Unfortunately for these studies you have multiple selection criteria that are nonrandom:
(1) interest in the study
(2) adherence to protocol of the study
(3) reporting back in
If nutrition science wants to be serious, their N should not be in the 10s but rather the 10,000s.
That has an expense, but for important things it is absolutely the right thing to do.
Until they track absolutely everything including each trial subject microbiome, hormone profile, &co over time, I still feel it just won't cut it.
Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one specific gene combination or one specific microbiome mix. Which means you'd have to go through the same regimen of analysing and tracking all the parameters for yourself for it to be applicable
Actually, this is why stats exists in the first place. Larger samples (including metastudies) are so powerful -- you can measure and predict causal impact of test factors even if you can't control for unobservables. The goal is to minimize type 1 and type 2 error. So long as those unobservables are not driving a selection bias, you get wonderful things like the central limit theorem coming to the rescue.
No one can monitor or measure everything, whether philosophically (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) or prosaically (cost). But if something is true, we can often probe it enough to get at least a low-res idea of the nature of it. This moves us light years ahead of primarily using our personal experience, gut, and vibe to establish epistemologically sound assertions.
This somewhat feels like 2 layer neural networks are a universal predictor.
It is true in the limit but not useful in practice.
When it comes to studying food / diet studies really do need to be a lot more careful about trying to control their variables.
Nutrition science as a field seems to have few absolute truths and many many overturned papers / results.
I suspect (I'm not an expert) that for subjects like nutrition, experimental psychology and so on the next big step forward isn't scientific but political: figuring out how to somehow get funders, researchers and others lined up behind a Big Science model where a very few organisations run experiments with those truly large participation numbers. There are obvious risks in switching to such a model, but if small or middling experiments simply can't answer the open questions then there may be no better alternative.
or you're sleeping like shit. or you have an autoimmune disease. or you're depressed. or you have an ongoing inflammatory state from a lingering virus. etc
Does this actually pose an issue for most studies?
This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to their peers show a correlation with outcome Y.
For example, if you’re trying to determine whether morning coffee consumption correlates with longevity it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake, as the article implies; it's a relative comparison.
Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines like “X is the secret to a longer life!” but that’s more a popular science problem than an issue with dietary research itself.
You are assuming that the underreporting will be uniform. In reality people may be underrporting things they are embarrassed about and maybe even overreporting the opposite.
This is a flaw in the data that is much harder to account for.
Why would that be a problem for reporting relative results if everyone is under-reporting things they're embarrassed about and over-reporting the opposite?
Different people are embarrassed by different things. A frat student's probably going to overstate their alcohol consumption, a Morman understate.
People with bigger appetites underestimate their food consumption, people with smaller appetites overstate.
Not to mention the degree of over/under statement will vary wildly. "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody with an eating disorder, or 3000+ for somebody on the opposite end of the spectrum.
> "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody with an eating disorder
I knew a guy that complained that he "ate like a lion" and yet couldn't gain weight.
Turns out, his breakfast was typically a single egg and a slice of toast. Lunch would be half a sandwich and a bag of chips that he wouldn't finish. Dinner of course varied, but basically was like 4-6 oz of meat of some sort and a small side of veggies.
Overall, his daily calorie intake was probably only around 1,000 calories.
I don't know if this qualified as an eating disorder, or what, considering when we hear about someone undereating, it's because they're trying to lose weight. He was trying to GAIN weight and yet was still horrendously undereating.
Sure, but in a representative sample size this is largely irrelevant. The fraternity brothers and the Mormons cancel each other out, and regardless both are dwarfed by the large middle of the population that likely systematically and reliably under-reports their drinking by a few units.
The idea of outliers and systematic biases isn’t new to statistics, relative comparisons are still useful.
>Sure, but in a representative sample size this is largely irrelevant.
There is no way to know whether your sample size is representative. What amount of fraternity brothers and Mormons cancel each other out?
>and regardless both are dwarfed by the large middle of the population that likely systematically and reliably under-reports their drinking by a few units.
And? That does not prevent spurious correlations.
All of those headlines are based on meta-studies putting together 100 junk studies, based on bad data, which then informs actual medicine and health trends and American X Association and...
For your specific example - "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
It's kind of like feeding all of reddit's comments into chatgpt, asking it about stuff, and trusting its answers at a society-level with your health on the line.
> "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
You're inadvertently proving my point, though.
If morning caffeine is correlated with longevity, regardless of the vehicle/extra sugar/etc and controlling for the easy usual circumstances like income, that's pretty useful information!
But if sugar is worse by more than caffeine is good your study is in trouble. Or maybe it works but it is harmful because people who don't like coffee are going to buy the bad sugar drinks trying to get the good coffee down.
It might be useful information for other researchers to try to figure it what is actually going on, but probably not. And it is not at all useful for you and I trying to make sense of what we should eat.
> This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on absolute food consumption being accurate.
Exactly. Those studies either don't get done, or when they're done, they produce garbage results that get ignored or get interpreted as diminishing the importance of absolute food consumption.
> it doesn’t seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone is underreporting their food intake
It says that virtually everyone underreports. It doesn't say that everyone underreports equally, and there are good reasons to expect this not to be the case. If embarrassment is a contributing factor, for example, you would expect people who are more embarrassed about how they eat to underreport more. If people remember meals better than they remember snacks, people who snack more will underreport more than people who snack less. If additional helpings are easier to forget than initial helpings, people will underreport moreish foods more than they underreport foods that are harder to binge on. With so many likely systematic distortions, it would be surprising if everyone underreported equally.
But finding correlations is only the first and easiest step in determining causation. And almost nobody continues with the hard work that follows. So we have tons of studies showing correlations one way or the other, and tons of conflicting studies. And we are apparently satisfied with this. The state of nutrition research is abysmal.
most people are embarrassed about the truth. So they will over report vegetables while not mentioning how much alcohol or tobacco they had (or illegal drugs which the study probably legally must report to the police). Or a self proclaimed vegetarian will not report meat they ate despite their claim. fat people will report they skipped desert.
Why would that be a problem for reporting relative results if the entire population is doing that?
If everyone is under-reporting their alcohol consumption, that seems fine. The absolute numbers will be way off, the relative numbers to their peers won't.
Statistics can do a lot to find data from noise like this, but it is still noise. The biggest issue is nobody knows what variables are important, which are correlated, and so on.
Edit: there is another issue I forget until now: time. Statistically I have several more decades of life left. So even if you get accurate results of my meals yesterday, you need to report when I died, and you probably won't have the meals for the rest of my life. Did some meal I at when I was 10 have a big effect on my life? For that matter if I know you are tracking just one day's meals I will probably eat what I think is better and that doesn't tell you anything about what I eat the rest of the time.
It is easy to track people who have had a heart attack - they are likely to die of another heart attack in a few years so the study times are short. However does having had a heart attack mean either genetic difference such that your results only apply to a subset of the population, or perhaps some other factor of having had a heart attack.
I came across a comment as a humorous rule of thumb for this.
1. If you ask someone who much the drink double the answer 2. If you ask them how much the smoke, multiply the answer by five 3. If you ask them how often they have sex, divide the answer by 10.
This 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.
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 exist and have incredibly useful results.
[1] There is a widely cited nutritional survey vehicle called the Nurses' Health Study, and it is the foundation of countless largely disposable nutrition clickbait results. This survey-based observation has been used to prove that meat is bad for you, and good for you. That artificial sweeteners make you thinner, and fatter. And on and on. That single "every now and then try to remember the kinds of things you ate over the past period of time" survey is the root of an incredible amount of noise in nutrition science.
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] available.
Randomized controlled-feeding sounds good, let's check it out. After trudging through this for a bit I came to the meat of the methodology:
> Participants were provided a daily meal checklist (Supplemental Figure 1) that included each menu item with space for documenting the amount consumed; the time each item was consumed; a checkbox to confirm having only eaten study foods; a checkbox to confirm not taking any medications, supplements, or other remedies; space for documenting any adverse events related to eating the meals; and space for documenting any nonstudy foods, drinks, medications, supplements, or other remedies. They were also instructed to return all unwashed packaging; visual inspection was documented by the metabolic kitchen. In addition to the checklists and returned packaging, participants were educated on food safety as well as provided tips on managing challenging social situations while participating in a feeding study. Repeated reinforcement of the value of honesty over perfection was provided. Study coordinators reviewed the returned checklists with the participants to verify completeness.
So ... self reported with some extra steps.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30101333/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
I'm not sure what the intention of your comment is. Yes, I linked to the guidelines on feeding studies because that is entirely the point of my comment.
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.
How about just pointing a camera at the bed and fast-forwarding to the few significant events each night?
Prisons seem like good places to make these kind of studies.
Prisons give you the control needed, but prisons generally are not realistic to how people could live their lives. When you are locked in a cell most of the day that limits movement (in ways different from an office where people get up to go to meetings and the like). Prisons will get you your 20 minutes a day of exercise, but it isn't representative of how most people will exercise (even counting only those who go to the gym). As such you can get a lot of data but it is unknown which data applies to normal people who live lives in ways that are likely different in ways that matter.
take-home sleep studies are common for sleep apnea, are they not? I did one...
In my experience, people are especially bad at understanding how calorific alcohol is. Carbs and protein are generally 4 calories per gram. Alcohol is 7 calories per gram. Only fat is more energy dense at 9 calories per gram.
I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter option for people watching their weight -- even though all unflavored hard liquor has no carbs and is still incredibly calorific.
Alcohol is a tricky one, because its calories are an especially bad way of measuring impact on energy and weight.
It is kind of like measuring the calories of wood. It burns well, so it has a high calories, but metabolizes poorly. A block of wood is about 400 kCal/100g.
Ethanol has 1325 kJ/mol of energy. If the reaction stops part way through the metabolic pathways, which happens because acetic acid is excreted in the urine after drinking, then not nearly as much energy can be derived from alcohol, only 215.1 kJ/mol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabo...
It's why you don't really see any beer below like 90-100 Calories, despite all the "low calorie" beer marketing there is out there.
I thought this was generally known that people are bad at reporting most things about themselves. It's a good argument in favor of wearables or other smart monitors, if anyone expects to do actual rigorous research it needs to be objective.
Just a couple of days ago, I wrote I automatically flag any submission with any kind of "dietary" studies. I'm not saying there is no one study well done, but doing it well, is just (almost) impracticable. Not only the people have literally no idea what they eat, they forget and misreport, also a human living normal life in the society has just TOO MANY variables. There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
I have long said there are two kinds of diet studies: those that don't apply to you because you are not confined to a hospital bed or prison cell; and those that conclude despite our best effort we couldn't get people to eat their assigned diet.
So what you're saying there's a great business opportunity in people paying to get locked in a diet-cell?
Maybe, though I suspect there are probably a lot of laws around what you can and cannot do so better get several good lawyers to check what the laws really are around this. Drug treatment programs often work like this so that is the first place to look for laws to watch out for.
I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very remote location by bus so that if you want to leave you have to go through a formal withdrawal process - while waiting for the bus - during which they convince you to stay). They then not only control your diet they also give you exercise (often lead by military drill instructors) thus being a healthier environment than a diet cell. I have no idea how much money they make.
Can't we just use literal prisoners?
That's what I always thought about the kind of research RFK Jr is always talking about. Normally it's not ethical to do food / medicine trials with prisoners, but these would be trials like giving regular food to one set of prisoners and food without dyes or chemicals to the other. The "test group" would just be getting healthier food.
Seems like just radically measuring portion sizes might fit into the same kind of thing. And you could probably measure activity level more easily, too.
You can use prisoners and it has been done. However there are enough differences between prison and normal life that it is questionable if your results apply outside of prison.
But even if the people will be confined, you have to be careful to take a broad enough population. I can expect people willing to participate in such study maybe are already orthorexic diet freaks? Or very poor people (which have a diet deviated from “mean”)
Doing studies with humans ist just hard!
The topic has changed from a study to a self selected set of people who want to lose weight badly enough they are willing to pay to be confined in some setting where they cannot access food outside of what is given to them, and they are forced to follow an exercise plan of your (not their) choosing.
You can of course study these people, but the only study anyone is interesting in is how different changes in conditions affect how much people lose and how much money you can get out of them.
> There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but it's still an important field of study and we need to make progress in some way.
> Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out.
In the case of dietary studies, not really. There are a few factors which are known to have a big effect on your health--being wealthy, active, and moderate in particular--and a lot of the big studies are really just uncovering yet another proxy for those factors.
Of course, you can turn that around and make the realization that your diet doesn't really matter: there's no diet that will magically make up for being a couch potato. And outside the main well-known interventions (e.g., eating less calories), the solution is generally to just be more active and things like that rather than trying to tweak your diet.
It only averages out if the factors are unrelated though. If a lot of asians eat rice and don’t have a high alcohol tolerance, your study would still show a correlation between eating rice and alcohol tolerance when looking at every single person on earth.
Compare people with vegetarian diet from India (over 1 billion, a good sample!) with European meat eaters, what will be the conclusions? Do effects "average out"? Or people drinking alcohol with millions of muslims? There are some obvious criteria which should be used for example divide people in age, income and cultural groups (my grandfather used to eat and did different things I did, including avoiding doctors, despite living in same country and even same home).
>Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out.
No they won't. If you have two correlated factors and only measure one of them you can easily get to totally wrong conclusions.
If you have a food that is more often eaten by people doing a lot of sports, you will measure that eating that food is correlated with being more healthy. But it would obviously be fallacious to conclude that this food is more beneficial to health than other foods.
No if they correlate strongly: people eating more vegetables are more likely to do sport, and care about sleeping. Not to mention visiting a doctor much often. That is just one example.
Yeah this is a major issue. The first study that reports a link between some specific thing and health pollutes the data for all follow-up studies, because the folks that care the most about their health are going to change their behavior based on it. So after that you will always see a correlation with all the other things that have been reported to be healthy.
We decided that our analytic tech was good enough to figure out that smoking and pollution were bad for us despite infinite confounders.
Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.
Another way to look at it is that tracking what you eat is very difficult. Currently trying to lose a few pounds and doing calorie tracking. Practically carry a scale and a calorie tracking app with me. About once a day there's still some "estimation" involved due to the fact that all the ingredients are mixed together.
Indeed. I also tracked everything I ate for a long time, many years ago. As soon as you eat something made by someone else you're basically guessing.
The estimating is often enough to make better choices.
I know I’m not going to be able to eat my main, a couple slices of pizza, one or two entrees and a dessert with only 800 calories left in my budget.
Sure, I might be somewhat off in my estimate, but in practice, I might forgo the entrees and dessert (or share a bite from someone else), set some of my main aside to take home, and have a slice of pizza.
Then write it down as x2-x2.5 of what you'd expect. Better to eat less the following day than overeat.
Statistics work in your favor here though: at 2,000 kcal a day over a month, you'll consume 56,000 kcal total. So the question isn't whether any given thing was or wasn't some value - it's how much of a buffer is in your "unknown" chunk of that month that you're not winding up way out.
Like if you just tracked the things you can track, and noted the number of occurrences you didn't, then your end of the month weight will tell you whether you're overshooting or not, and you can estimate what proportion the "unknowns" might represent (and whether you should put a conscious effort into reducing them.
Have you ever wondered why it’s such a struggle for a diabetic to manage blood sugar levels in a sensible way? Here’s the answer. I assure you that anyone with diabetes is forced (and the word "forced" doesn’t fully convey the mental burden involved) to maintain an almost obsessive level of awareness about what they eat. There’s no comparison to someone simply “on a diet.”
I guarantee you, it’s an incredibly complex task. Unless one adopts a monastic approach of always eating exactly the same carefully measured meals at home, the challenge is constant.
If one day a system based on vision and AI could accomplish this task (and it can't, it’s impossible), it could charge any price and have millions of users.
"> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions"
These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of questions :(
Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at large scale.
Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something because of genetic variation, etc.
Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either to get funding, or to make headlines.
Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly designed and thought out studies.
Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms that do work or produce useful results.
It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at least more useful.
It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow, and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to ever get somewhere.
It is an important question because people want to think whatever their vice is, it is good for them. Thus you can make lots of money if you can get a headline showing something is good, no matter how bad the study is.
Points of measurement are a challenging issue.
One 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.
It's an open secret that most nutrition research is of extremely low quality - almost all relying on decades old self reported nutritional questionnaires.
Sometimes dozens of these studies get wrapped up and analyzed together, and we headlines that THING IS BAD with a hazard ratio of like 1.05 (we figured out smoking was bad with a hazard ratio that was like 3! - you need a really good signal when you are analyzing such low quality data)
This could be the reason why nutrition "science" is so fragmented. There is no way to ensure the process is being conducted correctly.
It’s also just really hard unless you live off packaged meals or only eat thing that are isolated.
Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories. Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
For an individual trying to lose weight this isn't a problem - if you are not losing then you just need to eat less. For population level trying to figure out if curry is healthy in the first place this matters though (is it curry itself that is good/bad, one of the spices, or how much sweetener added - if all we know is curry that isn't helpful)
No, you get a food scale and weight every single ingredient before adding it to the meal. As for who got how many calories, weighing of the portions should provide that information given the ingredients and how much of each there is.
Your metabolism is a system. Like any system, data about its inputs and outputs can be gathered if you would but measure it. Make getting accurate portion sizes a part of your daily routine.
Everything needs to be weighted on a precise scale, every ingredient and not just the macros. On top of that the reported nutrition values on labels can be wrong by a large margin so for not whole foods, we introduce an error.
This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
I find the way we measure calories very interesting: place the food in a metal box filled with oxygen, immerse the box in water, make the food explode so that it combusts completely, and finally measure how much the water heats up.
Rather crude and fun, but that's it, see Bomb Calorimeter. I guess it makes sense in retrospect, how else would you do it?
They usually just measure standard basic ingredients, then you roughly match them to your recipe and add it up. No wonder food labelling is just a ballpark.
I'm not convinced calorimetry is particularly useful for any nuanced diet planning.
We can't eat wood (or coal) but they're very calorific when measured via bomb calorimetry.
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 people using SI)
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.
Yes absolutely. Not only that but plenty of our food passes through undigested whatsoever. In theory we can't control that so we can only measure calories ingested, not calories absorbed but it hopefully sheds light on the fact that this is more complicated than just a number
I think it is an interesting and underappreciated aspect of calorie counting as well. I think calories are a decent first order approximation for foods that humans (and animals) evolved eating, because we are efficient extracting chemical energy.
The alternative would be empirical animal studies that look directly at weight as a function of feed. You will note that agribusiness doesn't mess around with calories when money is on the line. Instead relies on empirical data for mass as a function of feed type.
> This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general idea, and not a precise science.
This is true, because of "caloric availability".[1] If you took that into account, you would have a better idea of how many calories your body is absorbing.
I tried to use some dietary research as data examples in machine learning training courses. After running into self reporting (which I naively thought would be the exception, not the rule) I changed the my use of such sources to class discussions around reporting such as the following: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/br...
We're far too generous with what we allow to be called "science".
There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time. Practical and ethical problems abound.
Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a simulation and that only from the neck down.
Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science tutorials with more statistical rigor.
There are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on. Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop more and better causal inference models that improve over time.
OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already fall under regular biology.
The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems.
Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
It sounds like your describing models. Yes we have small models. Yes we have big models. We have rat models, we have matching models, we have twin models. We have lots of models I don't know about.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
Maybe we should indeed develop different words and taxonomy to differentiate the methods in different fields. Calling anything a "Science" brings an aura of seriousness, which doesn't necessarily exists, it's a way to manipulate our minds to make us believe it is as rigorous as physics and maths
I feel bad for suggesting this, but what about using prison population for researching dietary science? Every single part of their life is controlled. As long as it's humane (stuff like coffee vs no coffee).
This has been done. However prisoners have very different activity levels - they are confined to a cell for 20 hours a day. Office works get up a lot more often and generally are in the office less hours.
They're not guaranteed to eat what they are served - unless you're going to do force feeding as well.
So it's still not great.
I've heard about using food tracking apps as a planner instead. Instead of logging what you ate, you add what you PLAN to eat for the day, and adjust accordingly to fulfill the nutrition requirements.
While the article may have been published today, putting "self-reported food intake" into a search engine shows me that this is not at all a new finding. I would have considered it common knowledge, even. The entire reason people can conjure the mental image of a stereotypical obsessed dieter, weighing every morsel of food and looking it up in tables, is because everyone else has barely any idea what their intake looks like.
Seems like a decent use of AI if we could use something like Glass to scan the label and plate to estimate calories and stuff. You could even record those portions to be used for audit.
ChatGPT does a surprisingly good job of estimating calories from a picture of your plate. Especially if you add details that are hard to tell from the picture.
I remember when I was researching illegal medical experimentation on prisoners in the USA, I found a quote from a researcher saying "one of the reasons we prefer to use prisoners is because we know exactly what they do and what they eat every single day."
There is no problem with dietary research. The 'problem' is by design.
Both people doing the research and people funding the research know very well that what the flaw of this approach is, but just chose to do the shoddy job that they do because it brings in money. If it's not by design then there is a worse conclusion - the researchers/funders are incompetent. It's most likely a mix of incompetence/corruption.
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.
Any research or studies based on self-reporting or interviews should be very suspect. Most people will answer or report what they think the researcher wants to hear, or what they think will make them "look good" even if the responses are anonymous.
> many studies of nutritional epidemiology that try to link dietary exposures to disease outcomes are founded on really dodgy data
I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction. For example, do people typically underreport junk food and overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?
While far from being a potential silver bullet, I do wonder if continuous glucose monitoring could help with this. Your food log shows you didn't eat anything between noon and six in the evening but the glucose monitor shows a spike at 2PM? Your diet app could ask if you forgot to log something around that time. Maybe you want for a long walk aside while it was cold and that was the cause. Unless the question is asked, the tracking data for that time period will be questionable.
I had some success here by gamifying the reporting process and breaking it into sessions of compliance .. "just do this for ever".
I was wondering if there’s a way to automatically measure calorie intake—like some kind of biosensor that could be worn on the body. Companies are investigating this I bet!
This reminds me, out of the one app I *actually want* to be addictive, food tracking apps NEVER are.
Can't this be solved with camera plus AI? I'd be surprised if some startup isn't already working on it.
There are apps, but they are incredibly inaccurate. For starters, they don't recognize the food right. Usually you have to pick from a menu of 10 items. Then they have to estimate a 3D quantity (volume) from a 2D image, then they have to estimate the density... the amazing thing though is despite all this, they are still more accurate than recall diaries.
thats a problem for research that relies on food questionaires and thats been known for a while, and probably why there's even a thing called 'the french paradox' and so on.
but i get it
it's expensive to do properly, and so its not really done that often, and when it happens there's usually only a few participants.
My wife takes pictures of -everything- she eats, I'm sure she's not alone in this behavior. I can't eat until the photo is taken, and its a good one.
They just need to tap these people.
Its a real problem when I'm hungry.
and let's not forget the garbage data you find in the database used by all the calorie counting apps, which make it a chore and a challenge even when you weigh everything
The benefits of the Minnesota Starvation Study were that both food intake and physical activity could be accurately tracked. If we had a draft and there were conscientious objectors, would similar studies be possible as alternative service? I suspect that our ethical concerns now are greater than they were back then, so maybe it wouldn't be possible to conduct.
I'm basically tracking anything that i eat with...too much precision
I always wondered if i could volunteer for this types of studies somehow
My successful weight loss approach is to give up on counting calories and focus entirely on my own weight.
I set a goal weight for the week, and if I weigh more than that, I don’t eat (or eat just vegetables). I’ve lost 5 kg so far and I maintained the weight loss between thanksgiving and new year’s despite spikes on the holidays.
It’s taught me what proper portions feel like so I don’t have a desire to rebound as soon as I take a break.
As someone who just lost 35 pounds through clean dieting:
All calorie/portion numbers on packaged food are off by 10-20%. I set MyFitnessTracker to 1.5k calories (deficit for my build) and for weeks nothing would budge - even with strict portion control and weighing everything, plus 800 extra cals spent through exercise.
Once I went to "1250" calories, I started losing weight. Went from to 205 to 175 pounds.
With packaged food I mean anything like cream cheese, various sides, etc. - not pre-built meals (I assume those would be off by 50%).
What weighing your food really does, is reveal how shockingly little you actually should be eating. I switched to small plates for all meals, as using the normal large ones was pointless and slightly de-motivating.
But yeah, it's just calories. No matter what you eat.
Another more sensible explanation is that the calorie theory is fully wrong and unscientific, despite using numbers and measurements (it sounds very mathy though)
Have used chatGPT for about a year to count my daily calorie in-take .
Since I eat out daily at fairly healthy places (Cava, Panera, chic fil a only grilled nuggets & fruit cups, Jersey Mikes number 7 mini, noodles & company, MOD pizza) GPT knows their menu & each items calories. Upon getting the food I just tell GPT what I'm about to eat each time and it counts & retains and calculates through the day.
In doing so as adult male (late 40s) 5'10 175 my body has gotten used to eating 1500 to 2k calories a day. Do weigh myself daily to ensure I'm not gaining as I do have a cheat day once a week.
I understand the sodium content is higher then if I cooked at home but I'm focused on maintaining a fit look & counting calories along with a few weekly gym visits I think keeps me as I seek.
The bigger problem with dietary research is that it does not take human diversity and genetics into account.
See : Genetics, Nutrition, and Health: A New Frontier in Disease Prevention
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27697061.2023.22...
There's have been several studies, well researched and cited, where people who claim to be "diet resistant" are given metabolic markers "double labeled water" that will accurately show caloric intake.
For example:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701
and
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.200...
In the NEJM article they note that every single person who claimed to be "diet resistant" was lying about food intake.
> The main finding of this study is that failure to lose weight despite a self-reported low caloric intake can be explained by substantial misreporting of food intake and physical activity. The underreporting of food intake by the subjects in group 1 even occurred 24 hours after a test meal eaten under standardized conditions. In contrast, values for total energy expenditure, resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, and thermic response to exercise were comparable with those of obese subjects in group 2 who did not report a history of diet resistance.
and
> In addition to their greater degree of misreporting, the subjects in group 1 used thyroid medication more often, had a stronger belief that their obesity was caused by genetic and metabolic factors and not by overeating, and reported less hunger and disinhibition and more cognitive restraint than did the subjects in group 2. Subjects presenting for weight-control therapy who had these findings in association with a history of self-reported diet resistance would clearly convey the impression that a low metabolic rate caused their obesity.
Calories-in/Calories-out is true for everyone, and everyone can lose weight by putting down his fork.
Ideally we should find where in the brain is the calorie counter and just expose its value through an endpoint and have an app to call it.
I just weight and scan erything. The only problem is eating out. Mobile apps make this very easy today. They should be using them and scales that automatically report, with photo documentation, etc. Skip self-reporting and go straight to self-measuring.
Do you have scales which self-report because this has been on my wish list for a while now? It seems like it should exist: scales with a BLE read out that dumps out the value after a number has been stable, and flags it if I hit a button on the scale.
There's a whole range of products here which seem like they should exist but just don't (but I hardly want to do a hardware startup).
I do this with the Xiaomi Mi Scale 2. You can connect it to Home Assistant. Once it has a stable reading, it auto-submits, but there's no button for flagging, although you could potentially build this yourself. I never had to connect the scale to the internet; it just worked with Bluetooth
