People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research
science.org286 points by XzetaU8 2 months ago
286 points by XzetaU8 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.
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.