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

science.org

286 points by XzetaU8 2 months ago


wnorris510 - 2 months 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.