i do my thing It is best to eat well and stay in shape. But as a mother of three, it’s often difficult to remember what I ate today, or even how much water I drank.
Thankfully, new food tracking apps, often powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence, are emerging to fill in the gaps in my memory and guide me toward a healthier life. To better understand the details of my daily meals, I downloaded several food tracking apps, including BitePal, Hoot, Lose It!, and MyFitnessPal. We also spoke to nutrition experts to understand what insights these apps can provide and what their limitations are.
Meridan Zellner, a registered dietitian in Dallas, Texas, says the biggest benefit of food tracking apps is that they help us be aware of and responsible for what we’re eating. “We’re busy people, right? Let’s stop for a second, think about this for a second, and be intentional about what we’re eating,” says Zellner. “Oh, we didn’t have fiber or we didn’t have enough iron. Okay, well, tomorrow we’ll do it differently. We’ve gotten some good feedback, so we’ll take care of it.”
People tend to underestimate their food intake by 20 to 50 percent, so this kind of guidance is good for raising awareness, Zellner says.
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First, most apps required you to enter basic information such as your current weight and height and dietary goals. Every app I tried promised to help me lose weight, keep weight off, or gain weight, depending on what I wanted to accomplish.
Some apps required a subscription for basic features like food tracking, which cost about $35 per year. Other apps let you do basic food tracking for free, but additional services like nutrient tracking and detailed coaching advice require a subscription, which can run up to $80 per year.
Each app asked you to enter basic information about your body measurements. Some asked more specific questions about my habits, how active I am, what my diet is (vegan or meat eater), and the quality of my sleep. Once I entered all of this, each app calculated the approximate calories I needed each day.
I was excited to get that information, but I was surprised by the wide range of calories each app recommended based on my height and weight. This made it difficult to know exactly how many calories you actually needed each day.
“All of these apps, when making calorie or energy recommendations, have to base their recommendations on equations,” Zellner said. This equation likely doesn’t take into account individual differences such as hormones, bone size and genetics, she says.
“That’s one of the benefits of consulting with a certified dietitian,” she says. “You can actually do a resting metabolic rate test and say, ‘This is exactly your burn rate.’ Sometimes it follows the predicted equation, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
As the day progressed, I entered the type and amount of food I ate at each snack or meal, and each app counted my calories and told me how much protein and fiber I ate, the total calories I ate each day, and how many calories I had left until I reached my goal weight.
Some apps incorporated AI analysis from your phone’s camera, so you could take a photo of your meal and estimate the number of calories in each dish. While this may seem convenient, there were significant differences between the apps. For example, one app calculated the calories in a Mediterranean bowl to be around 1,000 calories, but another app calculated it to be much higher, so I had to check the ingredients and adjust the estimate myself.
