I’ve tried a few AI-powered calorie tracking tools too. At first it felt super convenient, just take a photo and get the numbers.
But over time I kept seeing mistakes. Sometimes it would even tag a salad as soup.
Eventually I went back to the old way. Fewer photos, more mindful eating. Honestly I feel better that way.
duskwuff · 1h ago
Funny, I was just discussing this on HN a few days ago:
There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
jaronheard · 1h ago
I like how in the article the author includes the instructions for Cal AI:
- Include a reference object (like a coin or your hand) for scale
And then the screenshots show just a pictures of bowls of food with no reference objects at all.
Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
PlunderBunny · 1h ago
I noticed that too - I wonder if the coin/hand was cropped out?
horsawlarway · 52m ago
I'm guessing yes. I think you can even see half a coin in the cropped photo of the tofu salad (lower right edge, under the metal bowl).
nvahalik · 34m ago
I work for a company that offers nutrition tracking on an app in the App Store.
We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.
We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.
We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.
Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
irrational · 6m ago
Does that work for homemade food as well? The vast majority of the food we eat is homemade with recipes that don’t have any sort of nutritional information. I’ve always wished there was a simple way to figure out the calories. Taking a picture would be ideal.
cowanon2222 · 28m ago
I've had pretty good results using the AI features in Macrofactor. It's certainly not perfect, but it does a pretty good job with mixed text and photos and allows you to easily fine-tune the results.
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
muratsu · 2h ago
These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.
AstroBen · 1h ago
What's going on with the google reviews of that app.. basically all 5 star with one word over and over again - 'good'
They're solicited, right?
No comments yet
asdev · 2h ago
I wouldn't trust the revenue numbers, plus the churn is probably insanely high. Flashes in the pan
tekla · 2h ago
They provide value in that they lie to you and you feel better about yourself.
muratsu · 52m ago
I don’t mind if the reality of their business is similar to gyms in the sense that they make money off of peoples desires but have low utilization.
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
klabb3 · 2h ago
That’s exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. ”Why are you thinking this is meant to work?”. But of course, normal trusting people will believe it if it’s on the ”trusted app stores”.
These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
TuringTourist · 1h ago
I suspect this might be because diet marketing before AI was one of the most fraught with misinformation subjects you could run across. This is because the "sale" of the idea has an effect on every salesman, so all of the salesmen are trying to sell every thing at once,since that's also selling their thing, and ground truth gets stampeded. Now when you combine diet marketing and AI, you get a multiplier. Both in the sellers and the buyers, since the desire to believe is stacked.
xnx · 2h ago
> CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr.
Source?
fullshark · 37m ago
Maybe in aggregate they are fine if the noise is unbiased and you do some things like correct it when it says an apple is tikka masala, but yeah, someone using this and lying to themselves about the calorie content of junk/comfort food seems pretty likely.
TeaVMFan · 1h ago
I prefer efficient manual entry to vibe-coding calories. I built my own Java-based SPA: https://frequal.com/cf/
It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
Terr_ · 58m ago
Also, a certain level of human involvement is what gets you to really care and change behavior.
I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.
tunesmith · 1h ago
Weird article, it mentions three apps at the beginning, doesn't even test two of them in favor of two others it didn't mention, and then declares all the apps failures.
dyauspitr · 2h ago
Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.
rahidz · 2h ago
>I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively.
Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
jvanderbot · 1h ago
Not OP, but I have verified, and it is accurate. At least accurate enough from images or descriptions when assuming average proportions. Where it's really accurate is when you have measurements, even rough. I took to having a 1/2 cup scoop around the house so I could get volume measurements.
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
I do this too and it's been spot on. I also have a very good idea of what I'm eating though: "2 oz of steel cut oats, 1 banana, probably about 4oz by weight, without the peal, about 12 ounces of coffee with 1 tsp of sugar and about 4oz of light no-sugar almond milk"
dyauspitr · 1h ago
Yes, a lot initially and now I’ve looked at them so much I can roughly tell without looking it up.
bigmadshoe · 1h ago
Tasks like summing a bunch of numbers from different parts of the input over a specific time period are still pretty error prone for LLMs. I would exercise caution if these results are important to you. A database or spreadsheet is going to be far more reliable – maybe you could have ChatGPT output a structured format and you could do the summation in a google sheet?
dyauspitr · 1h ago
Yeah I know, it’s not something I need do a lot.
tcoff91 · 1h ago
Read the article. What you are doing has nothing to do with the apps the article is talking about.
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.
dyauspitr · 1h ago
I actually think it’s quicker to just speak to the LLM about your diet than even taking a picture. But yes, I understand what you’re saying.
DontchaKnowit · 1h ago
This is different than the style of ai calorue app that extrapolates caloric content from pictures of your food. That kind is gimmicky BS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892
There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.
We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.
We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.
Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
They're solicited, right?
No comments yet
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
Source?
It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.
Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
I had predictive analytics and the whole 9 yards. Maybe I should have started a business! https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.