I Learned More Than I Thought I Would From Using Food-Tracking Apps
I do my It’s better to eat well and stay in shape. But as a mom of three, it’s often difficult to remember what I ate today, or even how much water I ingested.
Luckily, a new crop of food tracking apps, often powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence, has arrived to fill the blank spaces in my memory and nudge me toward a healthier existence. I downloaded a few food tracking apps, such as BitePal, Hoot, Lose It! and MyFitnessPal, to better understand the ins and outs of my daily meals. I also spoke to nutrition experts to understand what information these apps can provide and what their limitations are.
The overarching benefit of food-tracking apps is that they contribute to awareness and responsibility for what we eat, says Meridan Zerner, a registered dietitian in Dallas, Texas. “We’re busy humans, right? Let me pause for a second and think about this and be intentional about what I eat,” Zerner says. “Oh my God, I didn’t have fiber, or I didn’t have enough iron. OK, well, let me do it differently tomorrow. Let me adjust because now I have good feedback.”
Zerner says this type of advice is helpful in increasing awareness because people tend to underestimate their food intake by 20 to 50 percent.
Tracking time
To start, most apps had me grasp the basics: my current weight and height, and my food intake goals. Every app I tried promised to help me either lose weight, maintain weight, or even gain weight, depending on what I was hoping to accomplish.
Some apps required a subscription for basic features like food logging, and the fee was around $35 per year. Other apps let me do basic food logging for free, but additional services like nutrient tracking or granular coaching advice required a subscription, with prices as high as $80 per year.
The apps each asked me to enter basic information about my measurements. Some got more specific, asking about my habits, my activity level, the type of diet I maintain (vegan or meat-eater), and the quality of my sleep. Once I entered all of that, each app calculated the approximate calories I need each day.
Although I was excited to get this information, I was surprised by the range of calorie recommendations in the apps based on my height and weight, making it difficult to know exactly how many calories I actually needed each day.
“All of these apps, when they make calorie and energy recommendations, will have to make them based on an equation,” Zerner says. The equations probably aren’t capable of accounting for things that vary between individuals, such as hormones, bone size and genetics, she says.
“That’s one of the benefits of seeing a registered dietitian,” she says. “We can actually do a resting metabolic rate test to determine, ‘Hey, this is exactly what your burn rate is.’ » Sometimes it follows the predicted equation, and sometimes it doesn’t.
As my day progressed, I entered the types and amounts of food I ate at each snack or meal, and each app counted calories and told me how much protein versus fiber I was consuming, how many total calories I ate each day, and how many calories I had left to reach my goal weight.
A few of the apps incorporated AI analysis through the phone’s camera, allowing me to take a photo of my meal and estimate the number of calories per dish. This sounds convenient, but there are significant differences from app to app. For example, one app calculated a Mediterranean bowl at around 1,000 calories, while another was much higher, so I had to confirm the ingredients and adjust the estimates myself.
