Magic! Pure Magic!” reads the promotional puff for Meal Snap, an app that “automagically” estimates the calories in your meals from photos you’ve taken.
It is one of a number of smartphone apps that claim to analyse pictures of the food you eat and then feed back calorific and crowd-sourced opinion so that you can build up charts and patterns of consumption and adjust your eating habits accordingly.
Do they work? I hit a few snags when I trialled Meal Snap and The Eatery, an app that allows you and others to snap and rate the food you eat on a scale from “fit to fat”.
On Meal Snap, when I didn’t caption the meals the app took a guess. At breakfast, it managed to recognise a banana and oats but classified green tea as “soup” and omitted my pineapple smoothie.
The next day, when I simply labelled my breakfast as “porridge with berries” it estimated between 228 to 343 calories. Magic? I don’t think so. More like hedging its bets — after all it didn’t know whether I’d made the porridge with double cream, whisky or water.
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At dinner, especially if I was eating out, the app was taking a stab in the dark to guess and rate what I’d eaten. Because of the lack of light, my pics looked like debris at the bottom of a pond. A shadowy starter of walnut and spinach tart with a side salad became “a plate of curry with leaves” while beef carpaccio with rocket and Parmesan was identified, bizarrely, as “a dog”.
On a real (not virtual) social level, the whole process began to irritate friends who had to wait patiently while I snapped and documented each course.
I warmed to The Eatery’s health barometer which, based on my own analysis and that of other users, allowed me to track how well I’d been eating, at a glance. It also rated my best (that is, healthiest meal — a satsuma scoring 91 points), and worst meal of the week (a delicious ham hock, kale and mustard casserole with sourdough toast — 48 points). It’s all a bit random and analysis by broad strokes but entertaining and mildly addictive if you’re not a serious dieter. A blurb for The Eatery app says studies show that simply recording your meals can help people to lose more weight.
Nutritional therapist Karen Stevenson has her doubts: “It’s difficult for the app to know exactly what’s in the food and to give any accurate nutritional breakdown. But as a way to keep a food diary it’s potentially useful.”
As for the magic, turns out it’s a blend of “Mechanical Turks” — freelancers paid a few cents per photo — advanced algorithms and a vast calorie-counting database. Proof in the pudding? Not until it’s better photographed, correctly identified and calories are counted more accurately.