[HN Gopher] People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a ...
___________________________________________________________________
People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for
dietary research
Author : XzetaU8
Score : 238 points
Date : 2025-01-21 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| f1shy wrote:
| Just a couple of days ago, I wrote I automatically flag any
| submission with any kind of "dietary" studies. I'm not saying
| there is no one study well done, but doing it well, is just
| (almost) impracticable. Not only the people have literally no
| idea what they eat, they forget and misreport, also a human
| living normal life in the society has just TOO MANY variables.
| There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social
| interaction, stress and such out of the study.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport,
| social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
|
| Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will
| usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but
| it's still an important field of study and we need to make
| progress in some way.
| echoangle wrote:
| It only averages out if the factors are unrelated though. If
| a lot of asians eat rice and don't have a high alcohol
| tolerance, your study would still show a correlation between
| eating rice and alcohol tolerance when looking at every
| single person on earth.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will
| usually average out.
|
| No they won't. If you have two correlated factors and only
| measure one of them you can easily get to totally wrong
| conclusions.
|
| If you have a food that is more often eaten by people doing a
| lot of sports, you will measure that eating that food is
| correlated with being more healthy. But it would obviously be
| fallacious to conclude that this food is more beneficial to
| health than other foods.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will
| usually average out.
|
| In the case of dietary studies, not really. There are a few
| factors which are known to have a big effect on your health--
| being wealthy, active, and moderate in particular--and a lot
| of the big studies are really just uncovering yet another
| proxy for those factors.
|
| Of course, you can turn that around and make the realization
| that your diet _doesn 't really matter_: there's no diet that
| will magically make up for being a couch potato. And outside
| the main well-known interventions (e.g., eating less
| calories), the solution is generally to just be more active
| and things like that rather than trying to tweak your diet.
| f1shy wrote:
| No if they correlate strongly: people eating more vegetables
| are more likely to do sport, and care about sleeping. Not to
| mention visiting a doctor much often. That is just one
| example.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Yeah this is a major issue. The first study that reports a
| link between some specific thing and health pollutes the
| data for all follow-up studies, because the folks that care
| the most about their health are going to change their
| behavior based on it. So after that you will always see a
| correlation with all the other things that have been
| reported to be healthy.
| skirge wrote:
| Compare people with vegetarian diet from India (over 1
| billion, a good sample!) with European meat eaters, what will
| be the conclusions? Do effects "average out"? Or people
| drinking alcohol with millions of muslims? There are some
| obvious criteria which should be used for example divide
| people in age, income and cultural groups (my grandfather
| used to eat and did different things I did, including
| avoiding doctors, despite living in same country and even
| same home).
| bluGill wrote:
| I have long said there are two kinds of diet studies: those
| that don't apply to you because you are not confined to a
| hospital bed or prison cell; and those that conclude despite
| our best effort we couldn't get people to eat their assigned
| diet.
| chikere232 wrote:
| So what you're saying there's a great business opportunity in
| people paying to get locked in a diet-cell?
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe, though I suspect there are probably a lot of laws
| around what you can and cannot do so better get several
| good lawyers to check what the laws really are around this.
| Drug treatment programs often work like this so that is the
| first place to look for laws to watch out for.
|
| I've heard of other attempts at things like this. Generally
| you are not locked into a cell, you are removed to a very
| remote location by bus so that if you want to leave you
| have to go through a formal withdrawal process - while
| waiting for the bus - during which they convince you to
| stay). They then not only control your diet they also give
| you exercise (often lead by military drill instructors)
| thus being a healthier environment than a diet cell. I have
| no idea how much money they make.
| f1shy wrote:
| But even if the people will be confined, you have to be
| careful to take a broad enough population. I can expect
| people willing to participate in such study maybe are
| already orthorexic diet freaks? Or very poor people
| (which have a diet deviated from "mean")
|
| Doing studies with humans ist just hard!
| bluGill wrote:
| The topic has changed from a study to a self selected set
| of people who want to lose weight badly enough they are
| willing to pay to be confined in some setting where they
| cannot access food outside of what is given to them, and
| they are forced to follow an exercise plan of your (not
| their) choosing.
|
| You can of course study these people, but the only study
| anyone is interesting in is how different changes in
| conditions affect how much people lose and how much money
| you can get out of them.
| moduspol wrote:
| Can't we just use literal prisoners?
|
| That's what I always thought about the kind of research
| RFK Jr is always talking about. Normally it's not ethical
| to do food / medicine trials with prisoners, but these
| would be trials like giving regular food to one set of
| prisoners and food without dyes or chemicals to the
| other. The "test group" would just be getting _healthier_
| food.
|
| Seems like just radically measuring portion sizes might
| fit into the same kind of thing. And you could probably
| measure activity level more easily, too.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can use prisoners and it has been done. However there
| are enough differences between prison and normal life
| that it is questionable if your results apply outside of
| prison.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| We decided that our analytic tech was good enough to figure out
| that smoking and pollution were bad for us despite infinite
| confounders.
|
| Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns
| their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from
| epidemiology everywhere else.
| BoxFour wrote:
| Does this actually pose an issue for most studies?
|
| This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying on
| absolute food consumption being accurate. Most studies I come
| across frame their findings in relative terms (likely for this
| very reason): Individuals who engage in more of X compared to
| their peers show a correlation with outcome Y.
|
| For example, if you're trying to determine whether morning coffee
| consumption correlates with longevity it doesn't seem
| particularly relevant if you believe _everyone_ is underreporting
| their food intake, as the article implies; it 's a relative
| comparison.
|
| Sure, those findings often get twisted into clickbait headlines
| like "X is the secret to a longer life!" but that's more a
| popular science problem than an issue with dietary research
| itself.
| bluGill wrote:
| most people are embarrassed about the truth. So they will over
| report vegetables while not mentioning how much alcohol or
| tobacco they had (or illegal drugs which the study probably
| legally must report to the police). Or a self proclaimed
| vegetarian will not report meat they ate despite their claim.
| fat people will report they skipped desert.
| graemep wrote:
| I came across a comment as a humorous rule of thumb for this.
|
| 1. If you ask someone who much the drink double the answer 2.
| If you ask them how much the smoke, multiply the answer by
| five 3. If you ask them how often they have sex, divide the
| answer by 10.
| BoxFour wrote:
| Why would that be a problem for reporting _relative_ results
| if the _entire population_ is doing that?
|
| If _everyone_ is under-reporting their alcohol consumption,
| that seems fine. The absolute numbers will be way off, the
| relative numbers to their peers won 't.
| bluGill wrote:
| Statistics can do a lot to find data from noise like this,
| but it is still noise. The biggest issue is nobody knows
| what variables are important, which are correlated, and so
| on.
|
| Edit: there is another issue I forget until now: time.
| Statistically I have several more decades of life left. So
| even if you get accurate results of my meals yesterday, you
| need to report when I died, and you probably won't have the
| meals for the rest of my life. Did some meal I at when I
| was 10 have a big effect on my life? For that matter if I
| know you are tracking just one day's meals I will probably
| eat what I think is better and that doesn't tell you
| anything about what I eat the rest of the time.
|
| It is easy to track people who have had a heart attack -
| they are likely to die of another heart attack in a few
| years so the study times are short. However does having had
| a heart attack mean either genetic difference such that
| your results only apply to a subset of the population, or
| perhaps some other factor of having had a heart attack.
| Turneyboy wrote:
| You are assuming that the underreporting will be uniform. In
| reality people may be underrporting things they are embarrassed
| about and maybe even overreporting the opposite.
|
| This is a flaw in the data that is much harder to account for.
| BoxFour wrote:
| Why would that be a problem for reporting _relative_ results
| if _everyone_ is under-reporting things they 're embarrassed
| about and over-reporting the opposite?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Different people are embarrassed by different things. A
| frat student's probably going to overstate their alcohol
| consumption, a Morman understate.
|
| People with bigger appetites underestimate their food
| consumption, people with smaller appetites overstate.
|
| Not to mention the degree of over/under statement will vary
| wildly. "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody
| with an eating disorder, or 3000+ for somebody on the
| opposite end of the spectrum.
| BoxFour wrote:
| Sure, but in a representative sample size this is largely
| irrelevant. The fraternity brothers and the Mormons
| cancel each other out, and regardless both are dwarfed by
| the large middle of the population that likely
| systematically and reliably under-reports their drinking
| by a few units.
|
| The idea of outliers and systematic biases isn't new to
| statistics, relative comparisons are still useful.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Sure, but in a representative sample size this is
| largely irrelevant.
|
| There is no way to know whether your sample size is
| representative. What amount of fraternity brothers and
| Mormons cancel each other out?
|
| >and regardless both are dwarfed by the large middle of
| the population that likely systematically and reliably
| under-reports their drinking by a few units.
|
| And? That does not prevent spurious correlations.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > "A big meal" might be 300 calories for somebody with an
| eating disorder
|
| I knew a guy that complained that he "ate like a lion"
| and yet couldn't gain weight.
|
| Turns out, his breakfast was typically a single egg and a
| slice of toast. Lunch would be half a sandwich and a bag
| of chips that he wouldn't finish. Dinner of course
| varied, but basically was like 4-6 oz of meat of some
| sort and a small side of veggies.
|
| Overall, his daily calorie intake was probably only
| around 1,000 calories.
|
| I don't know if this qualified as an eating disorder, or
| what, considering when we hear about someone undereating,
| it's because they're trying to lose weight. He was trying
| to GAIN weight and yet was still horrendously
| undereating.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| All of those headlines are based on meta-studies putting
| together 100 junk studies, based on bad data, which then
| informs actual medicine and health trends and American X
| Association and...
|
| For your specific example - "morning coffee" could be anything
| from plain espresso shot to full 600+ calorie starbucks
| "coffee" but the meta-study-machine will lump them together.
|
| It's kind of like feeding all of reddit's comments into
| chatgpt, asking it about stuff, and trusting its answers at a
| society-level with your health on the line.
| BoxFour wrote:
| > "morning coffee" could be anything from plain espresso shot
| to full 600+ calorie starbucks "coffee" but the meta-study-
| machine will lump them together.
|
| You're inadvertently proving my point, though.
|
| If morning caffeine is correlated with longevity, regardless
| of the vehicle/extra sugar/etc and controlling for the easy
| usual circumstances like income, that's pretty useful
| information!
| bluGill wrote:
| But if sugar is worse by more than caffeine is good your
| study is in trouble. Or maybe it works but it is harmful
| because people who don't like coffee are going to buy the
| bad sugar drinks trying to get the good coffee down.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It might be useful information for other researchers to try
| to figure it what is actually going on, but probably not.
| And it is not at all useful for you and I trying to make
| sense of what we should eat.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| But finding correlations is only the first and easiest step in
| determining causation. And almost nobody continues with the
| hard work that follows. So we have tons of studies showing
| correlations one way or the other, and tons of conflicting
| studies. And we are apparently satisfied with this. The state
| of nutrition research is abysmal.
| dkarl wrote:
| > This seems like it would be an issue for any studies relying
| on absolute food consumption being accurate.
|
| Exactly. Those studies either don't get done, or when they're
| done, they produce garbage results that get ignored or get
| interpreted as diminishing the importance of absolute food
| consumption.
|
| > it doesn't seem particularly relevant if you believe everyone
| is underreporting their food intake
|
| It says that virtually everyone underreports. It doesn't say
| that everyone underreports equally, and there are good reasons
| to expect this not to be the case. If embarrassment is a
| contributing factor, for example, you would expect people who
| are more embarrassed about how they eat to underreport more. If
| people remember meals better than they remember snacks, people
| who snack more will underreport more than people who snack
| less. If additional helpings are easier to forget than initial
| helpings, people will underreport moreish foods more than they
| underreport foods that are harder to binge on. With so many
| likely systematic distortions, it would be surprising if
| everyone underreported equally.
| Iulioh wrote:
| I'm basically tracking anything that i eat with...too much
| precision
|
| I always wondered if i could volunteer for this types of studies
| somehow
| guerrilla wrote:
| I just weight and scan erything. The only problem is eating out.
| Mobile apps make this very easy today. They should be using them
| and scales that automatically report, with photo documentation,
| etc. Skip self-reporting and go straight to self-measuring.
| XorNot wrote:
| Do you have scales which self-report because this has been on
| my wish list for a while now? It seems like it should exist:
| scales with a BLE read out that dumps out the value after a
| number has been stable, and flags it if I hit a button on the
| scale.
|
| There's a whole range of products here which seem like they
| should exist but just don't (but I hardly want to do a hardware
| startup).
| the1HOknocks wrote:
| I do this with the Xiaomi Mi Scale 2. You can connect it to
| Home Assistant. Once it has a stable reading, it auto-
| submits, but there's no button for flagging, although you
| could potentially build this yourself. I never had to connect
| the scale to the internet; it just worked with Bluetooth
| TypingOutBugs wrote:
| I try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it's a lot
| of effort. Eat out and you're screwed (estimated at best). When
| you include sauces and oils etc it's really hard to be accurate
| in the best of times, and it's just a pain to keep on top of.
| Best option is to avoid any so you don't have to count.
|
| I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some
| point with the best of intentions.
| elektrolite wrote:
| I think being consistently inaccurate helps. If you always get
| the same thing at a certain restaurant, you can start by giving
| your best estimate of the calories in that meal. Then if your
| average weight doesn't move in the direction you want you can
| adjust your target calories to compensate.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an
| automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes
| (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash"
| or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean
| 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe
| the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got
| last week.
|
| I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very
| enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a
| personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for
| the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're
| better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits
| you best and how to correct if you're getting off course.
| Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months,
| but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for
| three decades and then three decades more.
| manfre wrote:
| Healthy foods are not healthy in an excessive quantity.
| Diets don't need to be tracked to the individual calorie.
| We don't burn the same amount l number of calories each day
| and food labels show an average of the nutritional value.
| If a person is consistent, they will achieve the desired
| result; either gaining or losing weight.
|
| I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's
| feasible.
| xnorswap wrote:
| > Best option is to avoid any so you don't have to count
|
| This is why one of the best ways to lose weight is to just keep
| a food diary / count calories. You don't need any special / fad
| diet, just the act of trying to keep a note of everything you
| eat will cause you to stop and think, "I don't need to eat
| this".
| lukan wrote:
| Consciouss eating.
|
| One can (and should) extend that concept to anything. Be
| conscious about what you do. Then you likely know, if you are
| not doing good - and can change it.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is what happened to me when I needed to lose weight. The
| act of counting calories more or less completely revamped my
| diet in a positive way.
|
| Turned out I was also stupidly deficient on protein day to
| day.
| TypingOutBugs wrote:
| Yeah I am doing 1g per lb of lean body weight and let's
| just say I have been eating a disturbing amount of egg
| white (I'm a big guy!)
|
| Getting protein in takes dedication & awareness
| xnorswap wrote:
| Isn't Whey powder a traditional "solution" for loading up
| on protein?
| nemomarx wrote:
| it's less than you'd hope. you need a fairly high volume
| of protein shake to get more than 40g of it in a sitting,
| and your target is probably like 100 or more grams of
| protein a day
|
| I did a daily shake for a while as an after gym recovery
| food and I still had more calories from carbs than
| protein. it's just difficult.
| TypingOutBugs wrote:
| If I take two protein shakes with double servings I am
| not halfway to my daily goal, but sure it helps! I tend
| to have protein powder and greek yogurt for breakfast
| (with peanut butter) and a double serving after the gym.
| That, with a protein dense lunch and dinner gets me to
| around 180g protein.
| IanCal wrote:
| (this tip works with finances too)
|
| You can give yourself an ability akin to time travel by
| writing things down first.
|
| If I write down the calories afterwards, I get the "oh, I
| shouldn't have done that" feeling at times. I'd like a little
| time travel button that takes me back to before I did, and
| let me adjust my behaviour and run through the situation
| again. If I write it down _first_ I get to have the "oh,
| that's not worth it" feeling up front and decide to do
| something else.
|
| This made a big difference for me, both lowering what I was
| eating _and_ making me happier about the choices I made.
| keybored wrote:
| Replace your diet fad with a journaling fad.
| switch007 wrote:
| Lean into that
|
| And even if you don't record with 100pc accuracy, there's still
| a lot of value
| pplonski86 wrote:
| It takes some effort, but there's a lot to gain. When I track
| what I eat and keep my daily calories in check, I feel much
| better. If I'm unsure of the exact calorie count, I'll estimate
| a bit higher - around 1.2x.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Yeah, I have tried a few times to keep track via Cronometer but
| I can never keep it up. Eating out is the killer, as you say. I
| find I often don't even have a frame of reference for
| estimating the amount of calories. With the amount of sauces
| and oil that go into a lot of stuff, I feel like a lot of
| things could as easily be 1,200 calories as 500 calories.
| parpfish wrote:
| one unintended side effect i had with myfitnesspal was that i
| ended up eating more prepackaged/highly-processed foods because
| i disliked estimating calories in home-cooked stuff so much
| (especially because i knew it'd be an inaccurate guess)
| TypingOutBugs wrote:
| Yeah I can get that - pre-packaged cooked chicken is easier
| than roasted rotisserie chicken from the counter even if it's
| probably worse (loads of additives and flavourings)
| rconti wrote:
| I've used it on and off for 7 or 8 years and it's the only
| thing that can consistently help me lose weight. Even just the
| mindfulness of knowing how much you're eating and how much
| you're exercising are helpful in the process. You don't have to
| be that accurate on exact calorie counts for this to work.
| porphyra wrote:
| These apps also lack stuff besides common American/European
| dishes. Most of my food is healthy homemade food and entering
| them is an absolute pain.
|
| Eating homemade stir fried celtuce [1]? Homemade steamed marble
| goby [2]? Nope, out of luck. They only have nutrition info for
| packaged mac and cheese.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtuce
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyeleotris_marmorata
| TypingOutBugs wrote:
| Interesting and valid issue! I assume it's crowdsourced data
| from a community and just isn't that popular where you are,
| but good points.
| porphyra wrote:
| I'm living in San Jose, California, where MyFitnessPal is
| quite popular --- but being an Asian person I eat a lot of
| Asian food.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I found it to be useless for my cooking style. I imagine if
| your meals were a chicken breast, a single veggie, and a single
| starch it's useful. However, I tend to do stir fries with lots
| of different veggies, spices, oils, etc... It was extremely
| difficult and even more cumbersome to try and enter those meals
| into that.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I thought this was generally known that people are bad at
| reporting most things about themselves. It's a good argument in
| favor of wearables or other smart monitors, if anyone expects to
| do actual rigorous research it needs to be objective.
| pards wrote:
| > many studies of nutritional epidemiology that try to link
| dietary exposures to disease outcomes are founded on really dodgy
| data
|
| I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction.
| For example, do people typically underreport junk food and
| overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| While far from being a potential silver bullet, I do wonder if
| continuous glucose monitoring could help with this. Your food
| log shows you didn't eat anything between noon and six in the
| evening but the glucose monitor shows a spike at 2PM? Your diet
| app could ask if you forgot to log something around that time.
| Maybe you want for a long walk aside while it was cold and that
| was the cause. Unless the question is asked, the tracking data
| for that time period will be questionable.
| thefz wrote:
| Everything needs to be weighted on a precise scale, every
| ingredient and not just the macros. On top of that the reported
| nutrition values on labels can be wrong by a large margin so for
| not whole foods, we introduce an error.
|
| This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a general
| idea, and not a precise science.
| oersted wrote:
| I find the way we measure calories very interesting: place the
| food in a metal box filled with oxygen, immerse the box in
| water, make the food explode so that it combusts completely,
| and finally measure how much the water heats up.
|
| Rather crude and fun, but that's it, see Bomb Calorimeter. I
| guess it makes sense in retrospect, how else would you do it?
|
| They usually just measure standard basic ingredients, then you
| roughly match them to your recipe and add it up. No wonder food
| labelling is just a ballpark.
| djtango wrote:
| I'm not convinced calorimetry is particularly useful for any
| nuanced diet planning.
|
| We can't eat wood (or coal) but they're very calorific when
| measured via bomb calorimetry.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I was thinking of methane as input. But what about it as
| output? How much does leave the system? And should this not
| be in calories "out" column, but I don't think that is
| usually counted there...
| djtango wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what you mean? What does methane
| have to do with this and what is the "out" column?
|
| Calorimetry is just measuring the heat transfer from
| combustion, usually by measuring the temperature change
| of a known quantity of water in the classical experiment.
| You perform versions of it in high school and undergrad
|
| Calories are just a unit of energy, and heat can be
| related back to energy (joules for people using SI)
| Ekaros wrote:
| Well some of the food we eat generates flatulence of
| which 7% can be methane. Meaning this leaves our system
| without burning. As such in calorimeter it would be
| unburned fuel. Meaning that some calories are not
| absorbed failing the calories in and out equation.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think it is an interesting and underappreciated aspect of
| calorie counting as well. I think calories are a decent first
| order approximation for foods that humans (and animals)
| evolved eating, because we are efficient extracting chemical
| energy.
|
| The alternative would be empirical animal studies that look
| directly at weight as a function of feed. You will note that
| agribusiness doesn't mess around with calories when money is
| on the line. Instead relies on empirical data for mass as a
| function of feed type.
| Pooge wrote:
| > This is why calorie counting is ballparking to get us a
| general idea, and not a precise science.
|
| This is true, because of "caloric availability".[1] If you took
| that into account, you would have a better idea of how many
| calories your body is absorbing.
|
| [1]: https://x.com/gilesyeo/status/1084463469997555717
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate?
| Scientists trying to answer these questions
|
| There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables,
| genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a
| 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll
| never be able to get your answers anyways.
|
| If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like
| shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and
| then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
| tomrod wrote:
| You reduce the uncertainty of the remaining 20 by substantially
| increasing sample size across a randomly selected sample.
|
| Unfortunately for these studies you have multiple selection
| criteria that are nonrandom:
|
| (1) interest in the study
|
| (2) adherence to protocol of the study
|
| (3) reporting back in
|
| If nutrition science wants to be serious, their N should not be
| in the 10s but rather the 10,000s.
|
| That has an expense, but for important things it is absolutely
| the right thing to do.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Until they track absolutely everything including each trial
| subject microbiome, hormone profile, &co over time, I still
| feel it just won't cut it.
|
| Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical
| average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes
| one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but
| absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one
| specific gene combination or one specific microbiome mix.
| Which means you'd have to go through the same regimen of
| analysing and tracking all the parameters for yourself for it
| to be applicable
| tomrod wrote:
| Actually, this is why stats exists in the first place.
| Larger samples (including metastudies) are so powerful --
| you can measure and predict causal impact of test factors
| even if you can't control for unobservables. The goal is to
| minimize type 1 and type 2 error. So long as those
| unobservables are not driving a selection bias, you get
| wonderful things like the central limit theorem coming to
| the rescue.
|
| No one can monitor or measure everything, whether
| philosophically (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) or
| prosaically (cost). But if something is true, we can often
| probe it enough to get at least a low-res idea of the
| nature of it. This moves us light years ahead of primarily
| using our personal experience, gut, and vibe to establish
| epistemologically sound assertions.
| leoc wrote:
| I suspect (I'm not an expert) that for subjects like
| nutrition, experimental psychology and so on the next big
| step forward isn't scientific but political: figuring out how
| to somehow get funders, researchers and others lined up
| behind a Big Science model where a very few organisations run
| experiments with those truly large participation numbers.
| There are obvious risks in switching to such a model, but if
| small or middling experiments simply can't answer the open
| questions then there may be no better alternative.
| agos wrote:
| or you're sleeping like shit. or you have an autoimmune
| disease. or you're depressed. or you have an ongoing
| inflammatory state from a lingering virus. etc
| aziaziazi wrote:
| For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you
| manage ?:
|
| - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils,
| mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices... but
| weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the
| sauce itself
|
| - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first,
| tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook
| a bit with residual heat)
|
| - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
|
| - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others,
| especially when you serves yourself multiple time
|
| - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and
| dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the
| supermarket in January
|
| I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my
| life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw
| vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal,
| cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to
| dose "by the eye" without recipes.
| yurishimo wrote:
| For sauces, I either use a bottled sauce if I really want to
| stick to macros, or I try to make the exact same recipe each
| time and then I can select my previously created logged item in
| the diet app.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's really key. I've had great success with calorie
| tracking, but the first few weeks always sucks until I have
| my regulars figured out, then it becomes a lot easier.
| Afterwards, it's just a matter of repetition and measuring.
| jjj123 wrote:
| For me I mostly just try to log the high macro and/or calorie
| items. Like if I make a Caesar dressing I'm mostly counting the
| oil and if I'm being really meticulous I'll measure the
| Parmesan and anchovy content. But I'll ignore the 2tbsp lemon
| juice, garlic, mustard, etc. since it's counting so little
| towards the totals I care about.
|
| If you're trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not
| work for you, though.
| chikere232 wrote:
| For vitamins are probably easier to start in the other end
| and have a blood test to check how you're doing. I have no
| idea if that would involve selling your first born in the US
| though
| bluGill wrote:
| Depends on the vitamin.
|
| Many are water soluble and so any excess in the body is
| peed out by the end of the day and so all tests are
| useless. Fortunately you typically get more than enough as
| part of a typical balanced diet and so you shouldn't need
| to supplement in the first place if you are eating well.
| Though it is almost impossible to overdose so if it makes
| you feel good there is no harm in making the vitamin
| companies rich.
|
| The rest you can get blood tests. In general it isn't worth
| testing unless your doctor suspects something is wrong
| though. Just eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise
| and you will mostly be fine. Maybe take some vitamin D in
| winter, but ask your doctor (my doctor told me vitamin d in
| winter so that is what I do)
| valval wrote:
| Tracking and weighing everything is a massive waste of time and
| energy. There are no obese animals (humans included) in the
| wild. Just stop eating the wrong things.
|
| I maintain a muscular 225 by eating dairy, eggs, and meat. If I
| want to drop down to 215, I drop dairy.
| gadders wrote:
| How old are you?
| OscarDC wrote:
| Not him but because your answer surprised me I chose to
| reply: at 34 it is also something I always wondered.
|
| Becoming obese always seemed a little extreme to me and I
| fail to imagine how someone could reach that state without
| the accordingly extreme food-related habits - though maybe
| I'm just lucky to have the "right" metabolism and thus
| cannot relate.
|
| Though even if obesity was always linked to eating
| disorders, I understand that "just stop" is not an
| appropriate response to that issue.
| Drakim wrote:
| I bought myself a food weight to have at the kitchen but just
| like you I struggled with all the minor things that gets added
| in rapid succession. The trick is to get good enough at
| estimating within reason, and focus on one aspect such as
| calories.
|
| Figure out what one table spoon of oil contains, and when you
| make a sauce use a table spoon while pouring to count roughly
| how much oil you are putting in.
|
| For shared meals, or self-restricted portions, I just add the
| entire meal upfront to my book-keeping, and then after are are
| done eating I subtract what I didn't eat.
|
| You don't need to keep track of the family history of your
| cucumbers.
| chikere232 wrote:
| Macros are pretty stable though. A week old veggie has less
| vitamins than a fresh one, but the carbs are pretty unchanged.
| Trying to measure and weigh for micro nutrients seems doomed
| though.
|
| As a way of life, weighing and counting macros also seems
| pretty doomed to because it's just so much work, but it's very
| doable for a few days to realign your view of what an
| appropriate amount of food is, if you're diligent and mindful
| enough to not have a soda or a snack without thinking
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| adjusting seasoning/tasting as you go seems like it would
| complicate matters too, especially if you're in the heat of it
| and don't have time to stop and weigh that extra pinch of salt
| etc
| XorNot wrote:
| Salt has literally zero calories.
|
| Spices and everything else in general have so little in them
| it doesn't matter. Something like seeds or pepper more so,
| but you're hardly going to add so many it changes anything.
|
| Which is kind of the point: you look this stuff up _once_ in
| order to get a sense of what you 're actually doing, and
| quickly realize what is and isn't going to matter overall. If
| you're really concerned, you start from a fixed mass you'll
| season from, and then just use that up as you go.
|
| i.e. if you know you'll be adjusting added sugar, then
| estimate the total amount of sugar you're comfortable putting
| in the meal up front, and work from that pool. If it's less,
| great.
| jjcob wrote:
| I've done that for weight loss, so I focussed on calories only.
| That was pretty easy:
|
| - while cooking, you weigh every ingredient. Either I just take
| photos of the scale with my phone, or I write it on a sheet of
| paper.
|
| - when cooking is done, you weigh the total food (easiest if
| you know the weight of your pots)
|
| - when eating, you weigh your portions
|
| After some time, you realise that you need to be precise for
| some things (oil, butter) but can just guess or ignore some
| things (eg. onions and miso have so little calories that you
| really don't need to weigh them).
|
| If it's a dish like Lasagna, you don't even need to weigh it at
| the end, just estimate what fraction of the dish your serving
| is.
| varispeed wrote:
| How do you calculate calories?
| jjcob wrote:
| Some foods I know, eg. oil 9kcal/g, but mostly I just check
| the label. Every food in the EU has the calories/100g or
| calories/100ml on the label. If it's not packaged, I look
| it up it FDDB [1].
|
| [1]: https://fddb.info/db/de/produktgruppen/produkt_verzeic
| hnis/i...
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Keep in mind that I calculate enough to achieve caloric
| deficit. Not to reach an exact number.
|
| I also leave the nutrient part on just eating a varied
| diet, with lots of whole foods.
|
| I personally use MyFitnessPal, weigh the calorie
| significant food (e.g. the Protein, starches, fat-rich
| vegetables and fatty sauces) and establish a rough estimate
| about the calories.
|
| I try to maintain the error an order of magnitude lower
| than my estimate. That's why I don't bother weighing leafy
| and "watery" vegetables (e.g. spinach, letucce or
| cucurbits). Also, I try to keep an eye of sauces like
| Mayonnaise, but I usually relax on Mustard (I dunno where
| you live, but mustard here tends to be low-fat by default).
|
| That error can be easily burnt by the casual movement we do
| in the day.
| cies wrote:
| https://cronometer.com this is what nutritionists use.
|
| It tracks not only calories, but also macros and micros.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly this. You just weigh every ingredient. It doesn't
| matter if it's a sauce or what. If it's something premade
| (like tomato sauce) you use the calories on the packaging. If
| it's a raw ingredient you look it up.
|
| I never bothered with weighing the final result or portions,
| instead I just always divvied up the final product into equal
| individual portions and divided by the total number of
| portions. That works well if you freeze them.
|
| Of course, all the calculation is a tremendous amount of
| work. I did it when I needed to lose weight and only did it
| for a couple of months. But it definitely "calibrated" my
| understanding of calories -- e.g. non-starchy veggies have
| barely any at all, while cheese and butter and oil can easily
| double the calories in a dish.
| RUnconcerned wrote:
| Well, by weighing and logging everything. You are correct that
| it takes a lot longer when you do that. That's the cost of
| keeping track of your caloric intake. I also do not account for
| any nutrient loss or divergence from different cooking times,
| leftovers, or from different species.
|
| I only weigh everything I eat when I am actively trying to lose
| weight, however, and when I am doing so I deliberately restrict
| my diet to meals where I won't waste a lot of time weighing
| everything. If I'm trying to maintain or gain weight, I don't
| really bother with it.
| ebiester wrote:
| I am very diligent, and the truth is that it is hard and it
| changes how you eat to be more countable. On a cut, it matters
| more. On maintenance, it matters less.
|
| But most of it is a guessing game and making an assumption that
| it will all even out later. Ignore spices - you can assume 25
| calories a day and it'll still be too much.
|
| Be diligent about oils. 9 calories a gram bites you quickly.
|
| But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a
| 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8
| pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions
| and be fine with how you record.
|
| And that's the key - we know nutrition is variable. You won't
| get it perfect. You just have to adjust for the imperfections.
| zahlman wrote:
| >But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a
| 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8
| pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your
| portions and be fine with how you record.
|
| And the thing is, _you 'll need to do this anyway_ - because
| you can't be sure in advance how many calories represents a
| "500 calorie deficit" for you, in your specific current
| conditions.
|
| I was quite underweight in my youth, but I successfully
| reversed these kinds of feedback techniques to gain weight,
| and currently maintain what seems to be a healthy level. John
| Walker (co-founder of Autodesk, who passed away early last
| year) wrote _The Hacker 's Diet_ describing the basic
| technique. It's still live at
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ .
| ebiester wrote:
| If you're willing to spend money, Macrofactor basically is
| an automated version of this with a bit more refinement.
| Azerty9999 wrote:
| It's really just focused on a keto diet, but using the app at
| https://www.carbmanager.com you can look up low-carb foods
| really well and enter units in all kinds of ways. I know
| someone who successfully used it for about 2 months a while
| ago, but then they went off keto and the app DB didn't have
| many non-carb heavy foods.
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean I eat very close to the same thing every day, so I am
| perhaps not the best example, but for example:
|
| > - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils,
| mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices... but
| weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do
| the sauce itself
|
| You weigh all this out once, store it as a recipe and just
| weigh how much sauce you're putting on things. Oils are so high
| calorie they're basically all the same, and the only other
| contributor is really if the seed mass is substantial. Log your
| upper end, and just assume the sauce comes out as that value.
| Your sauce recipe is hardly going to vary by an enormous
| amount, just provided you bias it towards the upper end for the
| purposes of tracking.
|
| EDIT: Also since people have been dropping app links -
| https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline this is what I use on
| Android. Libre with nice integrations, works great.
| krisoft wrote:
| I'm not tracking right now, but used to. So I can answer your
| question with the caveat that yes it is a pain and I stopped
| doing it. :)
|
| > sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils,
| mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices... but
| weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do
| the sauce itself
|
| Yes. The thing is that it also makes you aware of how much
| everything "costs" you in terms of calories. You become a lot
| more aware of how big a glug you give of that oil.
|
| > different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first,
| tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still
| cook a bit with residual heat)
|
| I don't understand this part of your question.
|
| > Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
|
| My goal was not to be "accurate", but to lose weight.
| Overestimating slightly was in fact preferred. So this is not
| an effect I would have worried about.
|
| > counting how much you take of a meal shared with others,
| especially when you serves yourself multiple time
|
| You estimate. You know that the whole thing was X so if you eat
| a quarter of it that is 0.25*X.
|
| > different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small
| and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from
| the supermarket in January
|
| Cucumber is flavoured water. Whatever is the variability in
| calories you can probably just ignore it.
| IanCal wrote:
| It depends why you're tracking things, and what level of
| "everything" you care about.
|
| Starting with pretty much everything can be a good idea for
| people to get a sense of what's in what foods. How much does an
| onion typically weigh? What's that actually adding? What's the
| difference between getting lean and fattier meat? How much oil
| are you _really_ adding?
|
| After that it's easier to start dropping things - if I'm trying
| to lose weight I simply do not care precisely how much celery
| I've added for the sofrito. I _do_ care about the amount of
| butter, oil, rice, bread, pasta though.
|
| I'm not concerned about getting fat adding paprika, so I'm not
| weighing spices. Even if I'm trying to track macros that's just
| not going to be a considerable contributor to anything.
|
| > - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going
| first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but
| still cook a bit with residual heat)
|
| Prep/measure things first.
|
| Last three things that smooth things over for me
|
| 1. Meal prep on a different day. I'm not in as much of a rush
| at night, it's proportionally less time involved measuring
| something for a larger number of meals/sauces/components.
|
| 2. Having measuring spoons and fast scales nearby.
|
| 3. Measuring before & after amounts rather than exactly what to
| add. If I need to add butter to a sauce until it's the right
| consistency, or flour to a dough, or whatever then weighing as
| I go is a nightmare. Instead just weigh it before and after and
| you'll see what you used. This tip works pretty well for oil
| too.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| On the first point, you only need to do it once and then you
| can reuse the information in future (assuming you stick to the
| same recipe).
|
| For the other points, I think with any kind of data measurement
| there is a balance between precision and convenience. Trying to
| consistently track calories is hard enough, trying to track
| nutrients at the level of precision you are suggesting sounds
| technically challenging and frankly exhausting. I think a lot
| of people will take "average" values for a cucumber, an onion,
| etc. Like others have said, consistency in measurement is
| probably more important than finding the absolute truth.
| sycren wrote:
| I would imagine that having a camera videoing your preparation
| of ingredients and cooking would give enough data to classify
| the ingredients and the used volumes. From the video it should
| be easier to track the weight of everything... and perhaps
| depending on how the ingredients are used, determine/predict
| how the macronutrients are altered during the process.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Counting works for people because it quantifies their food
| intake. For many people, that's an effective way to overcome a
| learned idea that portions should be huge, or that feeling
| hungry has to be addressed immediately, or that feeling "full"
| has to be constant. It's not perfect, and I don't recommend it
| to people with an ED history; however, after about a month or 2
| of doing it, it can really change how you look at your meals,
| and snacking in particular. I don't obsess over it.
|
| > - sauces you make yourself?
|
| I don't count them. I keep my sauces simple and use them
| sparingly. I'm not trying to get down to sub-10% bf.
|
| > - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going
| first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but
| still cook a bit with residual heat)
|
| I count them raw, or if my tracker has them, count them as
| cooked. I don't care about them being super accurate.
|
| > - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
|
| I don't care. The calorie counts are basically just estimates
| anyway. It's less a science than a mental game to control your
| ballpark calories in.
|
| > - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others,
| especially when you serves yourself multiple time
|
| If I'm making the meal, I count for the whole meal, then
| estimate for the share. See above for rationale (I don't care
| that much.) If my friend has cooked for me, I don't care at
| all, and just try to eat a "reasonable" portion.
|
| > - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small
| and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from
| the supermarket in January
|
| The differences are probably not going to matter all that much.
| By weight, a cucumber is a cucumber is a cucumber; I'm not
| trying to be perfect, just get a general sense of calories.
| plank wrote:
| And: I think it is very difficult to gain weight by eating to
| many cucumbers ;-)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Cucumber is everywhere
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7arlFeaGX4U
|
| :)
| Izkata wrote:
| Yep, it doesn't particularly matter if something that's
| actually 212 or 198 is entered as 200. Sometimes you'll be
| slightly over, sometimes slightly below - just try to be
| accurate and these small mistakes average out.
|
| Typically I figure out the actual weight/volume once or twice
| to get a sense of how much it is, then just eyeball it most
| of the time and go for the same amount as last time I
| measured.
| andrewf wrote:
| I worked on calorie counting software in the 00's. We had
| desktop software that just used floats, meanwhile the Palm
| Pilot software was all integer math (counting things in
| 10ths and 100ths when that precision was needed.)
|
| We'd get emails about people seeing 577 calories on the
| Palm Pilot and 578 calories on the desktop. "None of the
| numbers are that accurate anyway!" was a sensible answer
| but not very brand aligned.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I don't recommend it to people with an ED history
|
| Your daily reminder that ED means more than one thing.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| The little blue pill is probably in MyFitnessPal if one
| really wants to track _all_ their macros.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I wonder if any fitness watches can tell when their
| wearer's had one.
| dnpls wrote:
| This is it. There will always going to be impossibly
| unpredictable errors even if you measure everything
| perfectly.
|
| The point of measuring is to be * as accurate as possible *,
| not 100% error-free. It helps to better estimate portion
| sizes, calorie / macro amounts. This is enough precision to
| control weight gain / loss correctly.
|
| A lot of people also get their maintenance calories
| estimation wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can measure
| your food down to the molecules but still eat too much / too
| little.
| vidarh wrote:
| A lot of people mess up more by doing a maintenance calorie
| estimation wrong _and relying on it_ rather than counting
| calories coupled with _weighing themselves_ and adjusting
| calorie intake up /down depending on whether they lose/add
| weight... If you use a feedback loop, then indeed it
| doesn't matter if your calorie estimate is anywhere near
| correct anyway, as long as you're reasonably consistent and
| the errors aren't too badly skewed toward the wrong foods.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I did this. I targeted 0.5kg loss per week, and since 1kg
| of fat is 7000 kcal that meant 500 kcal deficit per week
| was needed.
|
| I measured my weight every morning (after peeing) and
| wrote it down, and used it to compute weekly average.
|
| I did weigh ingredients for the first couple of weeks to
| get an idea, but after that just did rough estimates
| coupled with tuning based on feedback from the body
| weight every week.
|
| Had a near perfect linear trend for the year I did this.
| jona-f wrote:
| Well, caloric value isn't that exact to begin with, so there is
| no point in being overly exact. Afaik it's derived by burning
| the food and measuring the heat it produces, but your body
| doesn't burn it (like pyrolysis), it uses specialized proteins.
| So the energy conversion varies, some can't be digested at all.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| What I did is just get a rough estimate of calories of things
| I'm eating. Along with tracking weight every day. Then over a
| couple of weeks, calibrated calorie estimates with recorded
| weight changes. Developed an intuition.
|
| After that, I never looked up another calorie, and counted
| based on how the food felt, and basically lost exactly 0.5
| kg/week over a period of 5 months. (500 kcal deficit/day).
|
| Even if I'm wrong for a particular meal, the over/under-
| estimates must be cancelling out. My food situation makes it
| extremely hard to actually calculate calories, so I had to
| develop this skill.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I don't, but what I _did_ do was track everything obsessively
| in a spreadsheet for about a week, while exercising and eating
| and sleeping a nominally correct amount. As you indicate, it 's
| a lot of manual effort to track everything like that, and I
| couldn't see myself doing it long term.
|
| But over that week, I "calibrated" myself. I know, vibe-wise,
| how it feels to be eating the correct amount of food. And now I
| just keep doing that.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I've only done this on occasion when cooking for my spouse when
| she was counting.
|
| The measuring of ingredients is much easier if you use a scale.
| A case like cold sauces where you can put the mixing vessel on
| the scale is the easiest case.
|
| On sharing with others: I'd always calculate the total calories
| and total weight of the entire dish and then simply place the
| serving plate on the scale and calculate the taken calories
| based on the weight.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Eventually you learn recipes and their values. I memorised a
| lot of basics. But mostly I cut out non-vegetable carbohydrates
| and ate a ton of salads with nonfat Greek yogurt and hot sauce
| as a dressing, and whey protein.
| gadders wrote:
| You're never going to be 100% precise for every day, but you
| should be able to be roughly correct in aggregate and the fact
| of recording what you eat makes you more conscious of what you
| put in your mouth.
| yuliyp wrote:
| For weighing things, I have a kitchen scale that lets me tare
| it with something on it. I find it easier to tare a container
| of an ingredient, then dose some of that ingredient out, then
| reweigh it to get the delta I put in. For things which have a
| dash of an ingredient I'll just guess. A few grams here and
| there won't really matter much.
|
| For partitioning a meal: Sometimes I weigh my portion. Over
| time I've trained myself to estimate the weight of what I take
| such that my visual estimates are reasonable. Eventually my
| visual estimates have gotten better.
|
| A lot of your other challenges are just not that important: If
| you're off by a few calories in either direction, it's not a
| big deal. It'll average out in the long run. If you're
| systematically off, you'll eventually recalibrate your goals
| anyway based on how you feel and/or your weight patterns vs
| what the calorie counts tell you.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I suppose it depends what goals you're pursuing with your
| tracking. If it's simply losing weight, you can focus on the
| things with lots of calories in them. Oil, sugar, processed
| foods. Tomatoes, cucumber and lemon juice shouldn't be an
| issue.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > - sauces you make yourself?... but weighting and logging
| everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
|
| Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
|
| > _- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going
| first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but
| still cook a bit with residual heat)_
|
| Cooking time doesn't matter for macronutrients.
|
| > _- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time_
|
| They don't for macronutrients.
|
| > _- different species /cultivation methods like the rustic
| small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one
| from the supermarket in January_
|
| The differences don't really matter for calorie purposes. High-
| caloric things don't vary in density meaningfully.
|
| You seem to be confusing tracking macronutrients (carbs, fats,
| protein) with micronutrients (vitamin C etc.). People track
| macros, generally to lose weight. I've never heard of anyone
| tracking micros. I don't think it's even possible.
| agos wrote:
| > Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
|
| well, many say it's "easy" (it's not)
| nemomarx wrote:
| tbh it's "easy" if you're also doing a pretty specific
| focused diet. (maybe simple would be a better phrase - it
| can be reduced to very simple steps. mentally choosing to
| do this and enduring it is difficult, but the process
| itself is straightforward.)
|
| like the worry about sauces is true but if you eat mostly
| chicken and rice and one slice of bread a day you can
| really get that variability down. when I was heavily
| restricting I would only cook very simple things like that
| and otherwise eat packaged food, and it certainly worked to
| lose weight. but you sacrifice variety and flavor and
| you'll feel kinda stressed and hungry for months at a time.
|
| the last factor is living with people who are not dieting -
| I personally think this makes the required willpower
| basically impossible. if there is food in the house you
| will eventually succumb to the temptation of eating it in
| my experience. it's much easier if you live alone and only
| have the diet food in the house at all, buying nothing
| else, etc.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| One insidious thing is that it's incredibly easy to do
| food tracking if you eat mostly single-serving prepared
| foods, but those are, by nature of being incredibly
| palatable and digestible, the most psychologically and
| metabolically challenging foods to maintain a calorie
| deficit with.
| nemomarx wrote:
| yeah, although there's a variety there and you can find
| some lower and higher ones. (bags of anything starchy are
| difficult, sandwiches are very variable.. I leaned on
| wraps and stuff like Chicken salad without toppings a
| lot.)
|
| some prepared foods are basically the "empty calories"
| that people always talk about, like chips. high calorie
| (and usually like 3-4 servings per bag, not single
| serving really at all) and also low satiation so they
| almost make you hungrier to eat.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| In what you listed under making a sauce, only mayo and the oils
| need to be weighed (unless it's some ridiculous amount of
| seeds). If you don't already know whats high calorie you learn
| quickly, in reality the average person gets the bulk of their
| calories from probably less than 10 items
| (flour/rice/chicken/etc).
| ochoseis wrote:
| For things I prepare in bulk myself (eg perhaps sauce in your
| case), I usually just get stats on the whole batch. Then just
| approximate per serving or average it over the whole batch.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have been obese for many years and also now if I do not pay
| attention to what I eat I gain weight immediately.
|
| Eventually I have learned to control exactly what I eat, in
| order to control my weight, but I no longer find this
| difficult, mainly because normally I eat only what I cook
| myself (with the exception of trips away from home).
|
| When I experiment how to cook something that I have never
| cooked before, after I reach a stable recipe with which I am
| content, I measure carefully every ingredient, either with
| digital kitchen scales or with a set of volumetric spoons. Then
| I compute the relevant nutrient content, e.g. calories, protein
| content, fatty acid profile, possibly some vitamin and mineral
| content, in the cases when there exists a significant content
| of that.
|
| While I do this carefully the first time and I record the
| results, whenever I cook the same later I do not need to pay
| attention to this, because I already know the nutrient content,
| so summing for all the portions of food that I plan to eat in
| that day I can easily estimate the daily intake for everything.
|
| The essential change in my habits that enabled me to lose the
| excessive weight was that in the past I was eating without
| paying attention to quantity, until I was satiated, while now I
| always plan what amount of food I will eat during a day and I
| always cook the food in portions of the size that I intend to
| eat, which is always the same for a given kind of food, so I no
| longer have to repeat any of the computations that I have made
| when I have determined for the first time a recipe.
|
| In a recipe, things like spices can be ignored, because they
| add negligible nutrients. Even many vegetable parts, like
| leaves or stalks, or even some of the roots or of the non-sweet
| non-fatty fruits, may be ignored even when used in relatively
| great quantities, because their nutrient content is low. So
| such ingredients may be added while cooking without measuring
| them.
|
| For many vegetables and fruits, which are added to food as a
| number of pieces, I do not measure them when cooking, but when
| buying. I typically buy an amount sufficient for next week,
| which is weighed during buying. Then I add every day a n
| approximate fraction of what I have bought, e.g. 1/7 if used
| for cooking every day. Then for estimating the average daily
| intake, I divide by 7 what I have bought for the week.
|
| What cannot be ignored and must always be measured during
| cooking, to be sure that you add the right amount, are any
| kinds of seeds or nuts or meat or dairy or eggs, anything
| containing non-negligible amounts of starch or sugar, any kind
| of fat or oil or protein extracts. Any such ingredients must
| always be measured by weight or by volume, to be sure that you
| add the right amount to food.
|
| Nevertheless, measuring the important ingredients adds
| negligible time to cooking and ensures perfectly reproducible
| results.
|
| I eat only what I cook myself and I measure carefully
| everything that matters, but the total time spent daily with
| measurements is extremely small. I doubt that summing all the
| times spent with measuring food ingredients during a whole day
| can give a total of more than one minute or two. Paring and
| peeling vegetables or washing dishes takes much more time.
| tzs wrote:
| This won't be useful for you because you share food with
| others, but for people who do not share food and are interested
| in long term tracking rather than short term (e.g., they want
| to take off some weight at a healthy rate and keep it off, as
| opposed to people who just want to lose a few pounds rapidly
| for their class reunion and will make no effort after that to
| keep it off) there is a simple trick that can make it a lot
| easier.
|
| That trick is to focus on months instead of days. Then count
| your calories when you buy the food instead of when you eat it.
| For example lets say you buy a loaf of bread. It is 100
| calories per slice and there are 17 slices. Add 1700 to your
| calorie count for the month.
|
| At the end of the month you can approximate your average daily
| calories as the amount of calories you bought that month
| divided by the number of days.
|
| Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month.
| That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it
| should cancel out. If you want you can smooth that out a bit by
| logically splitting those items when they have a lot of
| calories.
|
| For example consider jar of mayonnaise that might last a few
| months and is 8000 calories. Instead of counting all 8000 in
| the month you buy it you can count it as 2000 that month and
| 2000 more each of the next 3 months.
| dnpls wrote:
| A jar of mayonnaise?? you can measure by the spoonful (or
| better, by weight, since its nutritional value is in the
| package) whenever you eat.
|
| A month is a long time and the measurement error will
| accumulate every day, especially with fats. Not so much
| problem if you do that with cucumber or spinach.
| bluGill wrote:
| > A month is a long time and the measurement error will
| accumulate every day, especially with fats
|
| Over several months the errors will average out. Unless you
| eat out a lot, then the above method doesn't work. However
| if you are single (this is the most unlikely factor!) and
| cook most meals at home then calories in the door - what
| you throw away = calories that you ate. That is good
| enough.
| zahlman wrote:
| >Some things you buy in a month might last into the next
| month. That will introduce some variation but over longer
| periods it should cancel out.
|
| Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from
| the container.
|
| Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to
| figure out how many portions it typically provides; then,
| going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food
| accordingly.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I did this for a few weeks when I was maintaining weight and
| did MyFitnessPal for a couple weeks a few years later and got
| pretty much the same calorie count each time. Very effective.
| Theodores wrote:
| Even simpler if just looking after oneself: keep the
| receipts, make the accounting YEARLY.
|
| I have a whole food, plant-based diet and I cook all my own
| food. I don't buy any processed food, anything with anything
| animal in it, refined sugar, refined oils (except olive oil
| for the air fryer), refined carbohydrates, things preserved
| with salt/vinegar/oil or any stimulants. For B12 I eat
| Marmite (UK). Most of what I eat is that rare thing: fresh
| vegetables.
|
| Because I eat almost everything (sometimes there are bad
| apples), I throw very little away and that includes packaging
| too, where I am surprised at how little that amounts to. I
| have a small box for recycling and I only have to empty it
| ever two to three months.
|
| I could cheat and not keep the receipt on a huge box of
| chocolates, beer and biscuits but I would only be fooling
| myself.
|
| As for bread, I just buy flour and yeast, to put it in the
| breadmaking machine. I buy wholemeal flour which is white
| flour with some of the stripped off parts of the wheat thrown
| back in. I am happy with that compromise as it makes a very
| nice loaf.
|
| Apart from Marmite, nothing I buy has much of an ingredients
| label, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and has no ingredients.
|
| The receipts are my way of accounting, I could look at them
| all for the last year and buy everything I need that is
| shelf-stable for the year ahead.
|
| Mayonnaise used to be something I did eat a lot of, but now
| that is on the banned list, and I have no idea why I would
| ever want to eat that stuff nowadays.
|
| I eat to satiety and beyond, my physical activity consists of
| walking/cycling and I am fitter than I have ever been with a
| digestive tract that is rock solid. Bloating, constipation or
| the runs are alien conditions to me, I also get a 'long range
| bladder' into the deal.
|
| I don't count calories, my goal is to get as many as possible
| from just vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, grains and fruit.
| I love cooking and my 'self care' routine. Since there are
| seasons, my food always changes, right now spring greens are
| floating my boat.
|
| The idea of keeping the receipts is to have all of them with
| no banned items in them, and also to track my nutrition
| experiments. At the moment I am trying to do a year long
| streak of 'an apple a day' to see what that is about.
|
| Regarding counting macronutrients, why bother? Nobody counts
| fibre, which is crucial for the lower gut, with protein we
| eat 2x in the West and nobody is counting phytochemicals in
| plants beyond the 'five a day' thing. With the exception of
| bread, everything I eat counts towards the 'five a day' so I
| am probably on twenty portions of fruit or veg a day, not
| that I am counting.
|
| I don't mind people wanting to diet to fit into a dress for a
| special event, that is something that works for them, albeit
| with yoyoing. I want to be at my fittest during the summer
| months, to go cycling, and, during winter, I don't care. In
| this way I am embracing yoyoing, however, my weight does not
| go up over winter, I just lose some muscle, to get it back
| again during spring.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| As someone who has successfully tracked calories in the past
| with great effort, the trick is to be strict about measuring
| calorie-dense foods, but to be liberal with "lighter" foods
| where the calories are functionally de minimis. An ounce of
| olive oil has 250 kilocalories. An ounce of lean protein
| generally has 30-50 kilocalories. An ounce of green vegetables
| contains virtually no kilocalories.
|
| As such, things like oils and miso can be heavily caloric, and
| need to be measured strictly. This is also true of most
| proteins and carbs.
|
| Seeds and tomato sauce can have some caloric density, and
| should also be measured, but it is less of a priority.
|
| Mustard, lemon juice, most spices (that don't contain sugar),
| onions, cucumbers (regardless of density) and parsley do not
| have any substantial caloric density and can be considered
| "free" unless used in great quantities. Nobody ever gained
| weight from mustard, lemons, onions, cucumbers and parsley.
|
| As already mentioned, micronutrients like vitamins are not
| functionally possible to be measured in a home kitchen. If
| you're concerned about any decrease in micronutrients, simply
| use vitamin and mineral supplements. Macros like proteins,
| carbs and fats, on the other hand, can generally be measured
| using typical cups, spoons and scales, even with leftovers.
|
| When making a meal shared with others if you are looking to
| strictly track calories, it is easier to break things into
| macronutrients and mix them on individual plates or bowls
| rather than cook as a total pot. It's much easier to measure a
| protein (say, 4oz chicken), a carb (say, a potato), a sauce and
| a fat individually portioned on a plate than an arbitrary stew.
| (As above, low-calorie vegetables likely do not need to be
| measured separately unless there are added macronutrients.)
| aziaziazi wrote:
| That may sense. Most of the folks here seems to track
| calories and other macro. In the meantime...
|
| > micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible
| to be measured
|
| ... my concern is _micro_ : I'm engaging on a full vegetable
| diet (+shrooms +minerals!) and am concerned about thinks like
| iron, selenium, calcium... I (got-used-to) love vegetable and
| eat a lot of them so I'm probably fine with most micros,
| however may miss some selenium for exemple. Some research
| seems to show that too much vitamins is usually ok but too
| much minerals may not be. The more I read the more I'm
| scared! What makes me feel safe is the three long-time vegan
| I know seems healthy and don't take any supplement appart
| obvious B12. Perhaps I should just focus on other thinks that
| doing mad about micros...
| dkarl wrote:
| Both supplementation and dietary strictness are scary
| because of the consistency. A quantity that is safe every
| day for a week or a month is not necessary safe every day
| for a year, and a quantity that is safe for a year is not
| necessarily safe for ten years. I've known two long-term
| vegetarians who were diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia
| in their thirties. One of them passed out while cycling
| home from work, which I'm guessing meant that she was
| suffering in small ways for a long time before she realized
| it. But if she took a mineral supplement every day for
| twenty years, how might she find out if she was getting too
| much of something? They sell the same supplements to people
| who are 5' 100 lbs and 6'4" 250 lbs.
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, in regards to iron specifically, I get bloodwork
| done in my yearly checkup and it will tell me my iron
| levels.
|
| Historically mine have always been low but in September
| of 2023 I started a diet and started taking iron
| supplements, and when I got my bloodwork I was in the
| happy "green" range.
|
| ETA:
|
| I should point out that I'm a pretty tall dude (~6'5"),
| which might make it easier for me to avoid getting too
| much iron, but if I were getting too much iron I assume
| it would probably show up in my blood tests?
| broof wrote:
| Brazil nuts are so high in selenium that you aren't
| supposed to eat too many of them
| myheartisinohio wrote:
| I use myfitnesspal and try to get close. There is a lot of data
| in the database. It is a tool like anything else it just helps
| me eat more intentionally.
| acuozzo wrote:
| This probably doesn't count, but I pretty much eat the same
| thing every day. I think being pretty far along the autistic
| spectrum makes this easier for me than most.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| I use Cronometer (www.cronometer.com) and a scale. It lets you
| create recipes with the weight of each item and the weight of
| the final result. I then weigh the portion I have with a meal.
| Why do I do this in the first place? I'm one of those people
| that eats too little vs too much, especially in the summers
| when I'm outside all day burning tons of energy: tracking
| calories helps me keep weight on. I have to eat so much food to
| maintain my target weight that it gets pretty uncomfortable
| some days. Yay for muffins and cookies.
|
| Don't worry about how leftover nutrients decrease over time:
| you'll get enough nutrients in a well balanced diet without
| having to worry about the minutia. If you're really worried
| about it, pop a multivitamin for cheap insurance.
|
| Also don't worry about the variation in calories between one
| type of cucumber / apple / whatever vs. another. Those
| variations aren't significant and they probably average out
| anyway. Realize too that the sources aren't exact in the first
| place: once source is likely to give a different caloric value
| for something like dried beans vs another.
|
| If you're going to track, don't get too caught up worrying
| about if the absolute value of the calories you're recording is
| 100% accurate because even if they were, you can't track your
| energy expenditure 100% accurately. If the bathroom scale goes
| in the wrong direction for you, adjust your caloric intake to
| compensate. Look at trends over the week and over the month vs
| day to day variations and it won't take long to zero in on the
| right number for you.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Sauces are quite easy in practice. Usually you can measure in
| table spoons or whatever.
| LPisGood wrote:
| I don't do this anymore, but when I was, the answers are as
| follows:
|
| I didn't make a ton of sauces myself, but if it was then I
| would round spices down to zero and weigh the main caloric
| components (think mayo, soy sauce, sugar, oil, tomato paste,
| etc)
|
| I always weighed the uncooked food, so different cooking times
| was a non factor.
|
| As for nutrients decreasing, I dealt with this by not believing
| in it. Seriously though, I was tracking fats, carbs, and
| proteins which to my knowledge do not meaningfully decay in non
| negligible amounts.
|
| I lived alone so I didn't often have to cook for multiple
| people. When I did I would just make 2 omelets or waffles or
| whatever and weigh mine.
|
| As far as different species/cultivation methods, I realized
| there was an absolute edge to my ability to track. For example:
| bread is often listed at 70 calories per slice, but if you
| weigh each slice, you'll find it deviates from what the package
| considers a "slice" of bread substantially. Further, you'll
| often find packages that are inconsistent. For example, you
| might see a box that claims 14g of a food is 5 calories but the
| entire 28g container is also listed at 15 calories.
| wnorris510 wrote:
| Depends what your goal is. My suggestion is if your goal is
| weight loss, don't think about calorie tracking at all.
|
| Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE
| these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight.
|
| It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you
| are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full
| and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing
| your diet dramatically overnight will cause you to hate the
| process and give up.
|
| Change your diet less than 10% per week, keep eating all of
| your favorite guilty pleasure foods, just incorporate more
| healthy foods you enjoy as well, ideally before you eat the
| less healthy items to give yourself time to start feeling full
| from them. Slowly find more dishes heavy in vegetables that you
| like. Try to eat them more often. If you're cooking for
| yourself or serving yourself, try to increase the ratio of
| vegetable to other items.
|
| Getting pizza? Maybe do a side salad first or a get a veggie
| pizza. Don't try to cut the pizza entirely until you're further
| along in your journey.
|
| Don't stress about it. If you're _consistently_ finding ways to
| make _small_ changes like this you 'll start heading in the
| right direction over the long haul and your pallet will adapt
| to enjoy the foods you're not used to slowly.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Maximize might be a little overkill. The government
| recommends 5-9 servings of fruit and vegetables a day and I
| found that getting to that range involves putting so many
| vegetables in every meal that you feel full naturally.
| Theodores wrote:
| You are onto something. If you maximise fruit and veg then
| you are also maximising phytochemicals, and that means having
| a nice skin tone.
|
| I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I
| now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl
| of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need
| green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals
| that make them so.
|
| I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so,
| as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as
| well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be
| for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in
| this way, to note the improvements to things like oral
| health, joint pain, digestion and so on.
|
| You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes
| about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I overestimate on some things because it is safer than
| underestimating.
| screye wrote:
| I track everything. (with caveats below)
|
| It's less important to get the calorie numbers perfect, and
| more important to be consistent in your under/over reporting.
| To me, it's a tool to track the consistency of my diet. No
| amount of over/under reporting is hiding 2 slices of pizza on a
| graph.
|
| In sweet dishes, 2 TBSP sugar is 120 calories. In savory
| dishes, 1 TBSP oil is 100 calories. None of the other minor
| ingredients have any appreciable calories. You should be able
| to predict quantities within a 1 TBSP tolerance range. The rest
| of your calories come from foods with visible volume, and
| chatgpt does a good job of predicting their calories from
| screenshots. With that, hopefully, you don't under-report any
| meal by more than 200 calories. If you're following a recipe,
| dump the whole thing into chatgpt, voila.
|
| Over 2 meals, under-reporting by 200 calories feels like a lot.
| But wait to have 1 milkshake, beer or 1 tiny baklava and see
| the graph shoot beyond any of these pesky concerns. The goal is
| to track and be accountable for the latter: the ultra-palatable
| foods. The extra onions and parsley are not making you fat.
|
| For outside food, you can find official numbers reported by
| fast food places. Add 20% to their estimate. Actually, add 10%
| to all estimates. Every your own food. If a full meal randomly
| lands under 500 calories. I look at it with scrutiny. It takes
| careful effort to stay under 500 and feel full. If it happens
| consistently and you don't lose weight, then you're tracking
| something wrong.
|
| PSA: NUTS HAVE A SH*T TON OF CALORIES. ALWAYS REPORT THEM. YOU
| WILL BE SHOCKED. _____
|
| The system has worked quite well for me.
|
| In all cases, my weight gain has corresponded to long periods
| of door dashing, liquid calories & dessert binges. On these
| days, my daily calorie consumption jumps by ~800 calories.
| Getting your oil intake wrong by 1 TBSP makes no difference to
| that number. Focus on the main culprits.
|
| ____
|
| P.S: ofc, if you care about micros, my comment is irrelevant.
| bradlys wrote:
| 90%+ of the effort is just weighing everything and writing it
| down. If you make a lot of custom dishes that's fine - just
| save the recipe and measure out the ingredients consistently.
| Weigh out your portions and it's not a big deal...
|
| People who are tracking everything are _usually_ doing it
| because they 're trying to achieve a particular goal that
| involves cutting or bulking. I don't know too many people who
| do rigorous calorie tracking to achieve maintenance unless
| their body is their profession.
| loeg wrote:
| Getting the grams right goes a long way. At the end of the day,
| you're trying to approximately measure the caloric density per
| gram, and maybe macros (proportion protein / fat / carbs).
| You're thinking in way too fine detail for it to be
| sustainable. Even with a lax approach, it is pretty tedious.
|
| I wouldn't really recommend tracking long-term, but doing it
| for a week or so just to get a sense of how much you're
| currently consuming is a good idea.
| tombert wrote:
| > sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils,
| mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices... but
| weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do
| the sauce itself
|
| I can't speak for anyone else, and I actually do try and weigh
| everything, but if I forget to weigh or the portions are too
| small to measure with my cheap kitchen scale: I weigh out my
| serving of the finished product, and Google either the
| restaurant or premade-grocery-version of what I made and look
| at their nutrition labels.
|
| Obviously it's not going to be perfect, but I figure that my
| homemade pizza sauce will have roughly the same ingredients as
| the Ragu pizza sauce at the grocery store and thus roughly the
| same calories and nutrition at a per-ounce level. I always
| assume that my homemade stuff is 20% higher in calories more
| just to compensate for uncertainty, but doing this I did manage
| to lose about 60lbs.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I just measure the ingredients "roughly" and same with serving
| I try to eye-ball halving or quartering etc and don't worry too
| much about being super precise. 5g is enough precision for me,
| unless it is something like cheese or other high-fat things.
| And I don't count vegetables at all (apart from potato)
|
| Some days you'll go over, others go under etc.
|
| It helps a lot of your partner is also weighing etc
|
| Where it is really hard though is at a BigCo office where food
| is free and self-served. I have no idea what I am loading onto
| my plate - I try to search for something similar in the app and
| deliberately over-estimate the quantity knowing that there is a
| tendency to under estimate.
|
| Really though weighing things is almost beside the point. It's
| about being aware/mindful of what you are eating. Without
| tracking it, it is easy to absent mindedly just snack on things
| and then entirely forget about that brownie you had with your
| morning coffee, or that ice cream you had at lunch time. You
| start to make choices like "Hmm I wont have that chocolate now
| because it would be a disappointment not to have some for
| dessert at dinner time" etc, whereas without tracking you'd
| probably just eat everything and not even realise/remember/be-
| aware of it.
| matwood wrote:
| I'm boring and cook roughly the same few meals over and over.
| pc2g4d wrote:
| I live by myself and "charge" calories to an account whenever I
| buy raw foods at the store or eat out. Then, whatever is in my
| house, I have already "accounted" for in my caloric budget. The
| strategy comes in figuring out what foods / combinations of
| foods leave me feeling satisfied. Beans (another great living-
| alone food, haha) are an allstar. I weigh ingredients for a lot
| of cooking only so I pace the consumption of rice, beans, etc.
|
| The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a
| constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm
| gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e.
| rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than
| anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own
| estimation error, then adjusting.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The benefits of the Minnesota Starvation Study were that both
| food intake and physical activity could be accurately tracked. If
| we had a draft and there were conscientious objectors, would
| similar studies be possible as alternative service? I suspect
| that our ethical concerns now are greater than they were back
| then, so maybe it wouldn't be possible to conduct.
| damnesian wrote:
| This is why sleep studies are conducted in clinics, not left to
| patients to self-report. they want accurate data? They will need
| to conduct a real study, portion the meals out themselves, give
| people a schedule.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Such studies do exist - randomized feeding trials. In these
| studies the participants are provided all meals and snacks, and
| sometimes are under constant surveillance for weeks and
| sometimes months on end.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39134209/
|
| Obviously such studies are far more invasive and expensive to
| run than the classic "fill out of a survey" observational study
| [1], so they tend to be the outliers. But they exist and have
| incredibly useful results.
|
| [1] There is a widely cited nutritional survey vehicle called
| the Nurses' Health Study, and it is the foundation of countless
| largely disposable nutrition clickbait results. This survey-
| based observation has been used to prove that meat is bad for
| you, and good for you. That artificial sweeteners make you
| thinner, and fatter. And on and on. That single "every now and
| then try to remember the kinds of things you ate over the past
| period of time" survey is the root of an incredible amount of
| noise in nutrition science.
| augustk wrote:
| Prisons seem like good places to make these kind of studies.
| bluGill wrote:
| Prisons give you the control needed, but prisons generally
| are not realistic to how people could live their lives.
| When you are locked in a cell most of the day that limits
| movement (in ways different from an office where people get
| up to go to meetings and the like). Prisons will get you
| your 20 minutes a day of exercise, but it isn't
| representative of how most people will exercise (even
| counting only those who go to the gym). As such you can get
| a lot of data but it is unknown which data applies to
| normal people who live lives in ways that are likely
| different in ways that matter.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| New study reveals fad diet increases risk of being stabbed
| by 73%!
| mmooss wrote:
| How about just pointing a camera at the bed and fast-
| forwarding to the few significant events each night?
| andrewla wrote:
| The study you point to here is a guideline on conducting
| studies. It was unfortunately not available online so I can't
| evaluate their recommended methodology. Looking for actual
| studies that tried to do randomized feeding trials, I found
| "A randomized controlled-feeding trial based on the Dietary
| Guidelines for Americans on cardiometabolic health
| indexes"[1] as a top hit, which fortunately had the full text
| [2] available.
|
| Randomized controlled-feeding sounds good, let's check it
| out. After trudging through this for a bit I came to the meat
| of the methodology:
|
| > Participants were provided a daily meal checklist
| (Supplemental Figure 1) that included each menu item with
| space for documenting the amount consumed; the time each item
| was consumed; a checkbox to confirm having only eaten study
| foods; a checkbox to confirm not taking any medications,
| supplements, or other remedies; space for documenting any
| adverse events related to eating the meals; and space for
| documenting any nonstudy foods, drinks, medications,
| supplements, or other remedies. They were also instructed to
| return all unwashed packaging; visual inspection was
| documented by the metabolic kitchen. In addition to the
| checklists and returned packaging, participants were educated
| on food safety as well as provided tips on managing
| challenging social situations while participating in a
| feeding study. Repeated reinforcement of the value of honesty
| over perfection was provided. Study coordinators reviewed the
| returned checklists with the participants to verify
| completeness.
|
| So ... self reported with some extra steps.
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30101333/
|
| [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291
| 652...
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I'm not sure what the intention of your comment is. Yes, I
| linked to the guidelines on feeding studies because that is
| entirely the point of my comment.
|
| You linked to a study where food was provided to the
| subjects, and the subjects obviously are assumed to stick
| to the provided food and to accurate report what they ate
| among that reported food (with the study counting
| packaging, remainders, etc). This is a *UNIVERSE* better
| than the classic "tell us if you ate eggs over the past two
| months" type nutrition studies, which are by far the most
| common (e.g. the Nurses' Health Survey).
|
| Are you expecting the people to be inprisoned? I mean,
| there are in-patient studies but they are obviously
| massively more difficult to carry out.
| drchiu wrote:
| Another way to look at it is that tracking what you eat is very
| difficult. Currently trying to lose a few pounds and doing
| calorie tracking. Practically carry a scale and a calorie
| tracking app with me. About once a day there's still some
| "estimation" involved due to the fact that all the ingredients
| are mixed together.
| skerit wrote:
| Indeed. I also tracked everything I ate for a long time, many
| years ago. As soon as you eat something made by someone else
| you're basically guessing.
| XorNot wrote:
| Statistics work in your favor here though: at 2,000 kcal a
| day over a month, you'll consume 56,000 kcal total. So the
| question isn't whether any given thing was or wasn't some
| value - it's how much of a buffer is in your "unknown" chunk
| of that month that you're not winding up way out.
|
| Like if you just tracked the things you can track, and noted
| the number of occurrences you didn't, then your end of the
| month weight will tell you whether you're overshooting or
| not, and you can estimate what proportion the "unknowns"
| might represent (and whether you should put a conscious
| effort into reducing them.
| nraf wrote:
| The estimating is often enough to make better choices.
|
| I know I'm not going to be able to eat my main, a couple
| slices of pizza, one or two entrees and a dessert with only
| 800 calories left in my budget.
|
| Sure, I might be somewhat off in my estimate, but in
| practice, I might forgo the entrees and dessert (or share a
| bite from someone else), set some of my main aside to take
| home, and have a slice of pizza.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Then write it down as x2-x2.5 of what you'd expect. Better to
| eat less the following day than overeat.
| Refusing23 wrote:
| thats a problem for research that relies on food questionaires
| and thats been known for a while, and probably why there's even a
| thing called 'the french paradox' and so on.
|
| but i get it
|
| it's expensive to do properly, and so its not really done that
| often, and when it happens there's usually only a few
| participants.
| amelius wrote:
| Can't this be solved with camera plus AI? I'd be surprised if
| some startup isn't already working on it.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| There are apps, but they are incredibly inaccurate. For
| starters, they don't recognize the food right. Usually you have
| to pick from a menu of 10 items. Then they have to estimate a
| 3D quantity (volume) from a 2D image, then they have to
| estimate the density... the amazing thing though is despite all
| this, they are still more accurate than recall diaries.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| There is no problem with dietary research. The 'problem' is by
| design.
|
| Both people doing the research and people funding the research
| know very well that what the flaw of this approach is, but just
| chose to do the shoddy job that they do because it brings in
| money. If it's not by design then there is a worse conclusion -
| the researchers/funders are incompetent. It's most likely a mix
| of incompetence/corruption.
| varispeed wrote:
| Ideally we should find where in the brain is the calorie counter
| and just expose its value through an endpoint and have an app to
| call it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Seems like a decent use of AI if we could use something like
| Glass to scan the label and plate to estimate calories and stuff.
| You could even record those portions to be used for audit.
| jjcob wrote:
| ChatGPT does a surprisingly good job of estimating calories
| from a picture of your plate. Especially if you add details
| that are hard to tell from the picture.
| FredPret wrote:
| We're far too generous with what we allow to be called "science".
|
| There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an
| unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time.
| Practical and ethical problems abound.
|
| Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down
| for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of
| them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a
| simulation and that only from the neck down.
|
| Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys
| from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science
| tutorials with more statistical rigor.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| There are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on.
| Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and
| more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here
| is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop
| more and better causal inference models that improve over time.
| FredPret wrote:
| OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already
| fall under regular biology.
|
| The reason we can do science on _some_ things without doing
| experiments is that there 's lots of hard, unambiguous data
| about relatively much simpler systems.
|
| Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo
| sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific
| chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an
| extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary
| recommendation.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| It sounds like your describing models. Yes we have small
| models. Yes we have big models. We have rat models, we have
| matching models, we have twin models. We have lots of
| models I don't know about.
|
| I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get
| better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly
| uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge
| about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Maybe we should indeed develop different words and taxonomy
| to differentiate the methods in different fields. Calling
| anything a "Science" brings an aura of seriousness, which
| doesn't necessarily exists, it's a way to manipulate our
| minds to make us believe it is as rigorous as physics and
| maths
| jfbaro wrote:
| I was wondering if there's a way to automatically measure calorie
| intake--like some kind of biosensor that could be worn on the
| body. Companies are investigating this I bet!
| Ekaros wrote:
| Camera monitoring what goes to mouth combined with AI?
| ttoinou wrote:
| you don't put energy into your body
| everdrive wrote:
| A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with
| resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food
| and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife
| to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for
| all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But
| we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't
| _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success
| sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me
| working towards better paying jobs.
|
| This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out
| is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle
| with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they
| struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it
| into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into
| philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their
| cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it
| should probably be no surprise that people struggle to
| intellectualize it.
|
| (as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that
| calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all
| people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal.
| Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the
| premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category
| of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It
| may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you
| to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all
| areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your
| calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it
| also does not negate the premise.)
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got
| my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we
| are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really
| helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource
| hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of
| everything everywhere at all times.
| keybored wrote:
| [deleted]
| colechristensen wrote:
| Not Society and its Discontents (1930), it's been going on
| as long as we have written records of anything spanning the
| history of civilization.
| derbOac wrote:
| It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat,
| which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to
| lose weight.
|
| Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of
| value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and
| everything to do with sociopsychological value.
|
| I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or
| misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it
| plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people
| realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to
| suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully
| rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it
| consciously.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less,
| and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do
| it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body
| thinking it's starving.
|
| On top of that though is you have to get over your
| intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to
| eat.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| This is so dismissive it's almost condescending.
|
| I know how much food I _need_ to eat in order to survive
| and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of
| food, _I 'm still hungry_.
|
| Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein
| and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches,
| which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without
| eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak
| paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and
| I still get the munchies just 2 hours later.
|
| I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or
| something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing
| keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn
| near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've
| gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic
| symptoms again.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I'm kinda convinced that something has changed
| (prescription meds ending up in the water supply? micro
| plastics?) that makes people hungrier than they were in
| the mid 20th century. the effort required to eat less
| seems higher than ever, and you can't totally explain the
| gap and rise in obesity with just lifestyle and food
| availability.
|
| if some unknown element was making everyone's internal
| thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.
| robrenaud wrote:
| Our genes are heavily evolved to live in calorie scarce
| environments. In those environments, high calorie foods
| are amazing. Our biology is built to find them incredibly
| rewarding.
|
| Science and capitalism have created incredibly delicious
| foods that are nutritionally lacking, hyper optimized for
| (against?) our now mis-aligned reward system. In the
| west, calories are not scarce and the most delcious foods
| are far from the most nutritious. It will take a long
| time for our genes to catchup.
|
| Mass producing delicious, cheap, but low nutrition food
| is profitable. Companies have gotten very good at it.
| That's the real big change.
| nemomarx wrote:
| that's the macro change, yeah, but the rate of increase
| in obesity in the us got sharper after the 80s, so it
| doesn't feel like the complete picture to me.
|
| we got the abundant food and the largely car bound live
| cycles and it still kept getting worse for decades after
| that point. I suppose it could be generations growing up
| only knowing this and so habituated to it more?
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| The ability to experience endorphins from things
| unrelated to food has gotten more expensive. Would you
| rather buy a $13 dollar move ticket and go hungry, or
| just buy a $13 McDonald's meal and go home to watch a
| movie? Buy a $75 dollar ticket to a special event? Buy
| several thousands of dollars in travel? Food is much
| easier to fill the gaps in feeling good.
|
| The "public presence" of society has diminished due to
| the internet. You no longer need to put effort into
| constantly looking your best because social media helps
| curate your appearance. Going to Walmart is now so
| relaxed that you can wear pajamas. Putting on your "best
| appearance" occurs elsewhere in curated ways (i.e.
| facebook/instagram posts and careful selfies). You can
| "partition" your social life so that the people shopping
| at walmart see pajama-you while the Tinder matches see
| someone totally different.
| mmooss wrote:
| > For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of
| calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss.
|
| I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and
| burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that
| our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or
| caloric stores at a certain level.
| everdrive wrote:
| The body can compensate at the margins. Eat 5 fewer calories
| per day and you will see zero change. Eat 500 fewer calories
| per day, consistently every day, and you will absolutely see
| changes. (I'm not actually suggesting that it would be
| _healthy_ or advisable to drop your diet by 500 calories --
| just pointing out that the body cannot compensate
| indefinitely.)
| bluGill wrote:
| The compensation is often lower energy levels. Your body
| compensates by keeping you from doing as much.
| nemomarx wrote:
| yeah, you want to force yourself to do some activities
| that keep your metabolism up along with the restrictions
|
| you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a
| helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that
| making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is
| draining.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >you can't exercise out of a bad diet
|
| You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_
| often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to
| 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of
| reach.
|
| I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a
| day for a while to try to maintain weight.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I really can't imagine having the energy to burn 10k a
| day - what kinda workload were they doing?
| bluGill wrote:
| If you have a real chance to win the gold in the Olympics
| in most events you have to be working out that much. Even
| if you end up coming in last of the serious competitors
| just the workload to be a serious competitor will be 10k+
| per day.
|
| At that level training is your full time job though.
| watwut wrote:
| > they struggle with actually putting it into action [...]
| conceding to their cravings
|
| The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ...
| are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that
| make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
| everdrive wrote:
| They're just acceding to an even greater emotional pressure;
| they're certainly not taking a purely sober and intellectual
| view of calories and health.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| That's just a healthy relationship with food, not a risk for
| anorexia.
| watwut wrote:
| Healthy relationship with food does not involve restriction
| or conscious attempts to loose weight. You eat when hungry
| and stop when not hungry.
|
| The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things)
| is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will
| instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The
| instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override
| behavior and diet ends.
| Spivak wrote:
| Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month
| budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from
| the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all
| kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and
| changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-
| optimally plan around price movements.
|
| An attainable goal is to reduce the _average_ amount of monthly
| grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you
| 're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace
| for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale
| clubs.
|
| It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people
| driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up
| the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as
| you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her
| "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible
| ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or
| not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every
| month and have spikey cost patterns.
| everdrive wrote:
| To your credit, our approach never worked :)
|
| I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average
| weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind,
| this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost
| that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just
| never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept
| raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes
| meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it
| felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy
| math problem was defeated by human psychology.
| landtuna wrote:
| I never understood why calories in == calories out was relevant
| when we can't know how many unprocessed calories are remaining
| undigested. Here's what the bots had to say:
| https://www.perplexity.ai/search/weight-loss-gurus-often-say...
|
| (FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree
| that fewer calories causes weight loss)
| ttoinou wrote:
| This theory is not scientific (food is not energy, the body
| is not a machine, measurements are not precise etc.) so there
| is nothing rationale you can say that will convince people
| who believe in it to switch to something else
| nemomarx wrote:
| cico is true, but you can't measure calories in accurately
| and you can't be sure of calories out accurately. isn't that
| fun?
|
| (in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and
| end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own
| intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my
| estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)
| keybored wrote:
| > This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories
| out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people
| struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that
| they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually
| putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting
| themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often,
| conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out
| more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that
| people struggle to intellectualize it.
|
| Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in -------->
| skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and
| complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull,
| experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting
| to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals
| skill out. What is so hard to understand?
|
| That's what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is
| the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is
| even treated as a valid argument at all.
|
| Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in
| order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I
| don't think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of
| energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to
| cows to humans) is terribly large.
|
| If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn
| the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don't repeat a
| truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting?
| Counting calories? Anything that works. You don't sheepishly
| point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last
| week without even asking why didn't follow through.
|
| The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing
| this simple concept.
| wrfrmers wrote:
| Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful)
| because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial
| process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and
| when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you
| feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist
| impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your
| physiology, per nutrient intake.
|
| CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively,
| but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for
| maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight
| management goal.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| What happens if I ingest 0 calories for 3 months?
| DannyBee wrote:
| "> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate?
| Scientists trying to answer these questions"
|
| These are dumb questions to ask in the first place, because the
| "you" and "good" here are too personal for any general answer to
| be useful to most people. Unfortunately, this is not just lazy
| writing that took complex questions and simplified them to the
| point of uselessness - we really are asking these kinds of
| questions :(
|
| Most of this doesn't generalize to populations the size of the
| world in the way something like "physics" does, because, for
| starters, we aren't very deterministic or very homogeneous at
| large scale.
|
| Instead, you end up with millions to tens of millions of people
| in a subgroup particularly affected or unaffected by something
| because of genetic variation, etc.
|
| Any reasonable scientist knows this. Instead, the main reason to
| try to answer these questions framed like this seems to be either
| to get funding, or to make headlines.
|
| Sometimes we can answer extreme versions of this question (IE it
| seems data suggests alcohol is fairly universally bad for almost
| any person, definition of bad, and amount), but that's pretty
| rare. This then gets used as a "success" to do more poorly
| designed and thought out studies.
|
| Just because we want to know things doesn't mean we should use
| mechanisms that we know don't work and produce mostly useless
| results. This is true even when we don't have lots of mechanisms
| that _do work_ or produce _useful_ results.
|
| It's much slower and much more expensive, but what we learn is at
| least more useful.
|
| It's really hard, slow, and expensive to answer questions about
| particle physics - this doesn't mean we revert to asking atoms to
| self-report their energy levels and publishing headlines about
| how "larger atoms that move around more live longer" or whatever
| based on the results. Instead, we accept that it will hard, slow,
| and expensive, and therefore, we better get started if we want to
| ever get somewhere.
| bluGill wrote:
| It is an important question because people want to think
| whatever their vice is, it is good for them. Thus you can make
| lots of money if you can get a headline showing something is
| good, no matter how bad the study is.
| fortran77 wrote:
| There's have been several studies, well researched and cited,
| where people who claim to be "diet resistant" are given metabolic
| markers "double labeled water" that will accurately show caloric
| intake.
|
| For example:
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701
|
| and
|
| https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.200...
|
| In the NEJM article they note that every single person who
| claimed to be "diet resistant" was lying about food intake.
|
| > The main finding of this study is that failure to lose weight
| despite a self-reported low caloric intake can be explained by
| substantial misreporting of food intake and physical activity.
| The underreporting of food intake by the subjects in group 1 even
| occurred 24 hours after a test meal eaten under standardized
| conditions. In contrast, values for total energy expenditure,
| resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, and thermic
| response to exercise were comparable with those of obese subjects
| in group 2 who did not report a history of diet resistance.
|
| and
|
| > In addition to their greater degree of misreporting, the
| subjects in group 1 used thyroid medication more often, had a
| stronger belief that their obesity was caused by genetic and
| metabolic factors and not by overeating, and reported less hunger
| and disinhibition and more cognitive restraint than did the
| subjects in group 2. Subjects presenting for weight-control
| therapy who had these findings in association with a history of
| self-reported diet resistance would clearly convey the impression
| that a low metabolic rate caused their obesity.
|
| Calories-in/Calories-out is true for everyone, and everyone can
| lose weight by putting down his fork.
| throw78311 wrote:
| I've heard about using food tracking apps as a planner instead.
| Instead of logging what you ate, you add what you PLAN to eat for
| the day, and adjust accordingly to fulfill the nutrition
| requirements.
| Havoc wrote:
| It's also just really hard unless you live off packaged meals or
| only eat thing that are isolated.
|
| Something like a curry cooked in kitchen and shared among a
| family is a complete black box as to who got how many calories.
| Maybe one person got a different ratio of rice to curry. Or this
| family likes a sweeter type of curry etc
| bluGill wrote:
| For an individual trying to lose weight this isn't a problem -
| if you are not losing then you just need to eat less. For
| population level trying to figure out if curry is healthy in
| the first place this matters though (is it curry itself that is
| good/bad, one of the spices, or how much sweetener added - if
| all we know is curry that isn't helpful)
| bitwize wrote:
| No, you get a food scale and weight every single ingredient
| before adding it to the meal. As for who got how many calories,
| weighing of the portions should provide that information given
| the ingredients and how much of each there is.
|
| Your metabolism is a system. Like any system, data about its
| inputs and outputs can be gathered if you would but measure it.
| Make getting accurate portion sizes a part of your daily
| routine.
| lt_snuffles wrote:
| I feel bad for suggesting this, but what about using prison
| population for researching dietary science? Every single part of
| their life is controlled. As long as it's humane (stuff like
| coffee vs no coffee).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| They're not guaranteed to eat what they are served - unless
| you're going to do force feeding as well.
|
| So it's still not great.
| bluGill wrote:
| This has been done. However prisoners have very different
| activity levels - they are confined to a cell for 20 hours a
| day. Office works get up a lot more often and generally are in
| the office less hours.
| keybored wrote:
| A certain prison industrial complex does not need more
| incentives.
| agos wrote:
| and let's not forget the garbage data you find in the database
| used by all the calorie counting apps, which make it a chore and
| a challenge even when you weigh everything
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| The bigger problem with dietary research is that it does not take
| human diversity and genetics into account.
|
| See : Genetics, Nutrition, and Health: A New Frontier in Disease
| Prevention
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27697061.2023.22...
| wnorris510 wrote:
| 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.
| LPisGood wrote:
| >and even trained professionals are still off by 40%
|
| I find this very hard to believe, unless the term "trained
| professional" is quite broad. When I was much more into fitness
| and weighed every meal to the gram, I could tell if a bowl of
| cereal was a serving to within a gram or two.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Isn't that a bit of a special case because you know your
| cereal and you know your bowls? What about some cooked foods
| like meats which can vary in density and shape when raw, and
| also vary even further due to inconsistency in cooking, with
| more or less moisture cooked off?
|
| It's possible to calibrate your estimates, but if you haven't
| done that, it's probably safe to assume you're not
| particularly accurate.
| wnorris510 wrote:
| There is definitely a lot of variation in density, moisture
| content, fat percentage between regions, cuts, cooking
| amounts and methods. IMO using an average number here is
| probably best because to some extent it's hopeless to
| account for all of these things.
|
| Most people don't stay consistent in tracking long enough
| for any of this to matter, so really it's about what is the
| most accurate approach to achieve your goal and sustain
| longer term.
| LPisGood wrote:
| Oh I would only weigh things raw - if we're talking about
| guessing the portion sizes at a restaurant for example, you
| might say I'm cooked.
|
| I wonder how good an ML model might be at that task. Maybe
| given a photograph of the plate and the menu description.
| watwut wrote:
| There is no profession that would require you to estimate
| portion sizes up to grams visually. So, trained professional
| will be someone who was trained in something different - a
| doctor for example.
|
| I guess, maybe cooks should have the best precision for this.
| acomms wrote:
| I think they're suggesting that the portions you are judging
| have not been practiced hundreds of times.
| wnorris510 wrote:
| If you have a known bowl and fill it to a known position
| every day with the same type of food, then you can probably
| do better than the average for that specific meal. In our
| research we've found a majority of calories for most people
| come from when they're eating out and consuming new dishes
| where they don't know the ingredients or portion sizes.
|
| In the study we gave people a variety of dishes to make their
| estimate on, some they were familiar with, some they were
| not.
|
| The professionals were nutritionists who had trained in
| portion size estimation and were shown 2D images on a
| computer screen.
|
| For what it's worth, we've had a lot of people who have
| claimed to be very accurate at portion size estimation from a
| long history of using a kitchen scale. We've paid many of
| them to do a quiz to see if they're above average accuracy
| and they have almost always ended up around 40% accuracy or
| worse.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| estimating from a photograph is always going to have huge
| error because you just cannot know e.g. the size of the
| plate without some external reference
| maeil wrote:
| I'd love to do such a quiz -I might even be willing to pay
| for the privilege! I'm quite convinced I'm really accurate
| at calorie estimation without using a scale but would love
| to be proven wrong. Zero food industry experience here,
| just from reading hundreds of food labels per year since
| very young, maybe 8 years old.
|
| Thinking about it again, I'll probably do a lot worse from
| a picture because I can't have a bite of the food! Just
| having a spoon makes it so much easier in terms of ratios.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| If you read the paper it's pretty easy to see what they mean
| by this. They tested "4 professional nutritionists". I don't
| know if nutritionists get any special training at estimating
| portion size but my guess would be they do not.
| wnorris510 wrote:
| Some do, some do not. We put them through a standard
| portion size training course regardless to be sure.
| m_ke wrote:
| At Bitesnap we were surprised at how much interest there was
| from researchers to use our app for diet tracking. It turns out
| giving people a piece of paper to write "grilled cheese
| sandwich for lunch" is not a scalable and reliable way to
| collect research quality data.
|
| We even worked with USDA on putting together a food logging
| dataset:
| https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A...
| wnorris510 wrote:
| We've also been surprised at SnapCalorie how many researchers
| have approached us to use the app for more accurate diet
| tracking for medical study participants. The LiDAR based
| portion size has been a huge draw for them.
|
| If anyone wants to check out our app or research its on our
| site: https://www.snapcalorie.com/
|
| PS: Bitesnap was an awesome app!
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Feels kind of incredible that something as advanced as
| laser imaging is being used to measure sandwich size.
| mtntreks wrote:
| This doesn't surprise me.
|
| Just trying to keep track of calories for myself stupid
| things like supersized slices of bread becoming common in
| stores can really throw off my expected calorie counts.
|
| It seems like this can completely throw off any attempt at
| figuring out nutrition from an app or research perspective.
| felideon wrote:
| What happened to your app? I was on such a research team
| (Scripps) that used your app for the study (PROGRESS).
| m_ke wrote:
| Unfortunately it was shut down after I sold the company to
| MyFitnessPal.
|
| I was a shitty business person who thought it made sense to
| try and build a free consumer product on a bootstrapped
| budget. We had some traction on the B2B side that paid the
| bills but COVID took a dent in it and it would have taken a
| long time to build back the revenue stream selling to
| healthcare companies (tip for others, it can take
| 6-18months to close healthcare deals and another 6-18months
| to integrate)
|
| We had a few offers to sell the company and took the one
| that seemed to make the most sense.
|
| If there's anything I can do to help out my email is
| michalwols at the Google email provider domain
| felideon wrote:
| The study ended so no worries. In any case, congrats on
| the exit!
| taeric wrote:
| This goes a long way to further convince me that it is portion
| sizes in the US. Having traveled, it is quite absurd to see the
| difference in standard order sizes.
|
| Even for zero calorie things like water and unsweetened
| teas/coffees. You just get smaller cups. I'm not even sure you
| can get a US large in Japan for most drinks?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't see why it would be bad to get more water to drink
| taeric wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply it was. My point was that everything
| is smaller.
| zahlman wrote:
| There's actually something of a stereotype that Japanese
| places will give you unreasonably small portions of water
| with meals. (Dogen plays off this in some of his videos.)
|
| But then, I think it's only been Americans I heard this
| from, so.
| taeric wrote:
| Ha! I hadn't heard of this before, so it caught me
| completely off guard.
|
| The coffee was the one that really surprised me. Order a
| coffee and get a 6-8oz cup. With nothing on the menu to
| indicate you can get a 12-16oz. Was surprising. (Not bad,
| mind. Just surprising.)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| In both my trips to Japan (one recent, one 20yrs ago), I
| never noticed this, and I think I drink a lot of water in
| general, and especially as a tourist because I'm doing
| much more walking.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The free water cup in a lot of places in the US is like a
| 6oz slosh now.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Probably depends on where you go.
|
| I don't know about "the US", but as a "European" I thought
| serving sizes were comparable to what I get in restaurants at
| home. Drinks were an exception, since basically all
| restaurants had unlimited soda for next to nothing. This was
| actually great, since I was riding a motorbike in the desert
| in July.
|
| For reference, I live in France and visited LA and random
| towns in the western states.
| taeric wrote:
| I'll be visiting France soon, so will be able to compare on
| that front. But I think it is an understatement to say that
| things are universally smaller.
|
| And on the drinks, even places in Japan that had free
| refills still gave, at largest, an 8oz cup. Usually, I
| think they were even smaller. Even getting popcorn at
| Universal, the bags were large, but nothing compared to
| what I'd expect over here.
|
| Some of this, I'm sure, is having gotten used to ordering
| the larges. For a time, it was not unheard of to get a 32oz
| soda at any given convenience store. May still be normal? I
| don't know.
|
| (And, of course, this isn't getting in to the sizes of
| vehicles.)
| vidarh wrote:
| It absolutely varies a lot within Europe too, but my
| feeling at least is that the difference between European
| and US portion sizes gets bigger as you move towards low-
| end places. High-end restaurants are pretty similar in
| portion sizes almost everywhere I've been, presumably
| because they're not competing on portion sizes, while
| lower-end places are much more susceptible to local
| expectations of what is good value.
| ellisv wrote:
| I'm a big fan of European serving sizes compared to U.S.
| for food - but when it comes to beverages, particularly
| water, I can't believe how much they charge you for how
| little they give. I understand everything comes in bottles
| with VAT but even asking for tap water I found they'd only
| bring a very small glass.
| jeltz wrote:
| In some European countries water is free. I am from
| Sweden where all places have free tap water and fancy
| places often have free sparkling water.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Along the mediterranian seemed like the only place to get
| free water were the ancient fountains that spittle out a
| stream. But then you'd have to wait for the inevitable
| old man to finish washing his head and arm pits in that
| fountain. Beer was usually substantially cheaper than the
| water offerings.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| Portion sizes in the US are ridiculous... often 2-3x larger
| than here in Europe.
|
| When I regularly visited New York for work, and we'd get
| takeaway sandwiches, I'd have to open them and remove half
| the filling. I just couldn't physically eat that volume of
| meat, cheese or especially mayonnaise. For all drinks, I'd
| order small.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| New York deli sandwiches are certainly not representative
| of what you get everywhere in the US. They are famously
| large.
| taeric wrote:
| They may be famously large, but I don't think they are
| abnormally large for most of the US nowadays? I certainly
| didn't think they were particularly big when I visited.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Katz serves roughly 3/4 lbs of meat. That is particularly
| big. You can get triple hamburgers which would be similar
| is size - but most people are ordering singles or
| doubles. And you can find other kinds of large sandwiches
| around the country ... but it is not the most common of
| sizes.
| taeric wrote:
| I think what made them not seem excessively large to me,
| is that it didn't really come with much else? Yes, it was
| more meat than I would get on a sandwich, typically.
| But... that is about it?
|
| Maybe I got too used to some of the obscure burrito
| places around Atlanta that would put way too much on
| them?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| And expensive to match the size! A pastrami sandwich at
| Katz's is ~$30. A croque madame at a similar place in
| Paris is ~EUR15.
|
| People generally split a Pastrami sandwich over a couple
| meals or with someone else.
| bityard wrote:
| Where in Europe? I haven't toured the _whole_ continent but
| I've been to restaurants in Germany, the UK, and Ireland
| and did not find their portions to be any different than
| what you'd get at the average corner restaurant in the US.
|
| Now, there are plenty of food vendors and restaurants in
| the US where big portions are considered part of the
| experience. Especially hamburgers, subs, and other
| sandwiches. I once ate at a place that served a plate-sized
| burrito completely covered in french fries. 12 inches wide
| and 6 inches tall. SOME people can eat that amount of food
| but most people cannot, and nobody is expected to.
|
| Finally, large portions in NY street food are often
| customary because for lots of people with demanding jobs
| and 12-16 hour shifts, lunch is often their only meal. Or,
| half of it is lunch, the other half is dinner later on.
| marinmania wrote:
| I highly recommend people get a food scale/measuring cups and
| weighing everything single thing they eat (even small things
| like nuts and cooking oil) for at least two weeks. After that I
| think you have a much better appreciation for how many calories
| your regular meals and snacks have.
| dailykoder wrote:
| I counted calories and put everything on a scale, for about 2
| or 3 months in 2022 (iirc). And you are 100% right. I had
| absolutely no idea how much calories some food has. There
| were a lot of things, but I think cashews were my biggest eye
| opener (probably obvious to a lot of people). I easily
| achieved my goal of -10kg and saved A LOT of money, because I
| always had food prepared. And since I was going for a calorie
| deficit, I easily could afford a few sweets on the weekend.
|
| Then I obviously got lazy. And while I sometimes still think
| I can estimate how much I am eating, I am probably wrong,
| because my bathroom scale says something different. My key
| takeaway is that it takes quite a bit of effort, but once you
| got into a routine, it's not hard.
|
| Edit: Also, while I might have tried to ditch "wasted
| calories", I didn't put too much effort in eating healthy.
| One step at a time.
| mattlondon wrote:
| +1
|
| The killer for me was breakfast cereals. The box shows a
| _full bowl_ of whatever, full to the brim etc. in reality the
| pictures are probably 5 or 6 or more servings - a single
| serving would barely even cover the base of the bowl and even
| then be 200ish calories before milk.
|
| If you just pour yourself "a bowl" of cereal without thinking
| or weighing then you're probably having 1200+ calories (or
| about 50% of your entire daily quota) even before you add
| milk or anything else, just for breakfast.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't know if they still do this, but I remember Special
| K cereal had identical calories listed for their various
| varieties, despite obvious differences in the ingredients;
| they just changed the portion size for each variety.
| ksenzee wrote:
| Cereal bowl sizes vary wildly, to make it even more
| confusing. Mine hold two cups (~450ml). Some hold way more
| than that. Some hold less. Buy a new set of bowls and you
| might be affecting your entire household's eating habits.
| mrgaro wrote:
| I downloaded SnapCalorie to try it out on Android. I went all
| the way through the sign-up phase, only to discovery that I
| would need to activate subscription in order to have the 7-day
| trial. Ended up uninstalling the app :(
| wnorris510 wrote:
| We're an early stage startup and the models are expensive,
| we're trying to get the price as low as possible, but yes we
| need to charge to cover costs right now. Sorry about that!
|
| You might get a yearly discount offer that is less than
| $2/month if you get lucky (A/B test split). But that's less
| than the cost of running the model for people, so hopefully
| others will consider paying full price.
| ploynog wrote:
| I think the complaint is that you only get told that you
| require a paid plan AFTER signing up. At least on a brief
| look on the Play Store page and your website, it does not
| immediately mention it prominently.
|
| That seems like a very dark pattern and is, honestly,
| pretty scummy.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| It doesn't seem like - it is
|
| Which makes it par for the course in the scam that is
| mobile development
| wnorris510 wrote:
| This is not a dark pattern, it's just a constraint that
| the app stores place on the pricing disclosure that is
| very non-intuitive. You _have_ to mark your app as
| "free" to download if you charge a recurring subscription
| fee. You can only mark it as paid if there is a one time
| fee to download the app.
|
| Our FAQ and pricing pages all list that it is a paid only
| app. All of our ads explain that it's subscription based.
| Anyone who asks we're very transparent about it. If
| there's somewhere else where you think we can list it to
| make it more clear I'm happy to add it, just not sure
| where that would be.
| felideon wrote:
| What FAQ and pricing pages? Your website makes no mention
| of pricing at all.
|
| Edit: The "dark" pattern is in the registration flow. It
| doesn't mention that the app requires a subscription
| anywhere until after you've created an account. Surely
| you could add a disclaimer before creating your account?
| This has nothing to do with the App Store.
|
| Edit 2: I'm not saying you intended to implement a dark
| pattern. Just perhaps a UX oversight.
|
| Edit 3: The download page would be another great place to
| put this info, since that's the primary CTA on the home
| page (there's 4 prominent download buttons).
| idiot900 wrote:
| https://www.snapcalorie.com/
|
| I cannot find a FAQ or pricing page on your website.
| amendegree wrote:
| I don't see any mention of the price in the FAQ[0], which
| I had to guess the url of because it doesn't have a link
| anywhere on the homepage. Trying to guess the url of the
| pricing page doesn't yield any results.
|
| [0] https://www.snapcalorie.com/faq.html
| tln wrote:
| I'm on an annual plan from another app (Calory, $30)
| otherwise I would have bit.
|
| It gives some features with a totally free plan. That makes
| the IaP feel less like a bait and switch.
|
| The proposition of SnapCalorie is compelling. Calory ui is
| decent and I use a scale so accuracy should be good but I
| think their database is shitty. Meatloaf will vary from 1.5
| kcal/g to 3, steak will show as 1 kcal/g, stuff like that.
| mrgaro wrote:
| Thanks for you quick answer. I want to clarify that I would
| have liked to try the app for a few days before activating
| subscription.
|
| Now with the current flow I would need to activate the
| subscription and then immediately go to Play Store settings
| to deactivate the subscription so that I would not forget
| it.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| That's pretty standard for free trials in my experience.
| Amazon prime, audible, musescore, I'd be harder pressed
| to think of a service I've recently tried where it was
| not like that.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| This is the problem with any fitness app.
|
| They either need to show you ads, charge you for premium for
| services that used to be free making your free tier
| functionally useless (looking at you, MFP who gated barcode
| scanning behind their honestly ludicrously priced
| subscription), or sell your data, and they often do all
| three.
|
| The entire industry is like this, and honestly an app that
| charges one time and fucks off would be ideal but given the
| amount you'd probably need to charge as a one off (or for
| major upgrades) most consumers would rather have the slow
| bleed of $10/mo than $25 one time.
| wnorris510 wrote:
| You really don't want to pay a one-time fee, it incentives
| the developers to stop maintaining the app.
| saulpw wrote:
| This would often be a feature.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Except most app stores require future maintenance and
| compliance to keep publishing the app. Someone has to
| keep the lights on.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I like the general idea of ongoing revenue, but I want to
| pay something on par with buying a full version every 3-5
| years. Subscription software usually costs _much_ more
| than that.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I would love for developers to stop messing with most
| apps.
| ellisv wrote:
| Most don't require a subscription _before_ a trial.
|
| I'm paying for a fitness app subscription that annually is
| less than 1 month of gym membership. But I had a 7 day
| trial which got me hooked before I had to sign up for the
| subscription.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Thanks - just read this comment while it was downloading and
| installing, so uninstalled straight away.
|
| Back to fitness pal and scanning barcodes (which is not
| really much of a hardship tbh)
| tejohnso wrote:
| > you need to use a food scale or something that measure the
| volume of food
|
| Isn't that obvious? Basic high school science projects would
| have students using measuring devices. Are you saying that it's
| common for nutritional studies to tell people to eyeball their
| portions and that is then used as actual data?
|
| I see from the article "Nutritional epidemiology studies
| typically ask people to keep a food diary or complete
| questionnaires about their intake over the past 24 hours, a
| week, or even several months." I find that hard to believe. How
| could any study like that be taken seriously? That's like
| having someone stand at a street corner for an hour and observe
| the population to then come up with an average BMI for the
| neighbourhood.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I would wager that just paying attention to, and thinking
| about what someone eats has a decent impact on their health -
| so it _feels_ like it 's working, and like your estimates are
| accurate.
|
| After all - once you started doing it, you started losing
| weight/building muscle/achieving whatever result.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Which is a reason why keeping a food diary is an often
| recommended technique for changing your diet and eating
| healthier.
| ellisv wrote:
| Yes, the mere act of monitoring (including self-monitoring)
| leads to behavioral change.
|
| This alone can be sufficient for some people.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| One factor is just the sheer volume of snacks and treats
| - outside of the portion size of any particular meal. If
| your were not self-aware of constant eating that can have
| a big impact - at least it did for a few friends of mine.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yup, I discovered this 14 years ago and wrote a proposal to
| do barcode scanning to help, but left academia soon after.
| zahlman wrote:
| >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.
|
| I can typically estimate them accurately without direct
| measurement, and with feedback that will tend to make errors
| cancel out over time. My trick is to note package weights, and
| divide containers into N equal portions. That is: I decide a
| target portion size _first_ , and then portion it out.
|
| If the task is "measure out an ounce of butter" I realistically
| won't be 40% off - because I can very accurately divide a
| rectangular solid in half repeatedly, and the butter comes in a
| one-pound package. Similarly, I have a pretty good idea how
| much grilled chicken is on my plate, because I know how much
| raw chicken I cooked, because I made a whole piece from a pack
| of N roughly-equal pieces weighing X (values which I noted when
| I bought it).
| wnorris510 wrote:
| Yeah, dividing out a known portion size is a good hack that
| will probably help with accuracy. In our research most
| people's calories and error came from eating out where they
| didn't have these hints, but this is a good trick if you
| mostly cook for yourself!
| zahlman wrote:
| Historically I would rely on the restaurant's printed
| nutrition info. But I don't really eat out often enough for
| this to matter.
| tombert wrote:
| It can still be useful just to get rough estimates of
| what you're making at home, especially for portions and
| products that are roughly comparable.
|
| If I make an egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich in the
| morning, and forget to weigh out or count how much of
| something I used, it can still be useful for back-of-
| napkin estimates if I Google the McDonalds Sausage
| McMuffin with Egg.
|
| Obviously it's not going to be exactly equivalent, but I
| usually assume my homemade thing is 20% more than the
| restaurant to compensate.
|
| It's of course better if you just weigh everything out
| first, you can get much more accurate measurements and
| calorie estimates then, but this can work in a pinch.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| I started eating half of whatever was served as an
| individual portion whenever I was at a restaurant and not
| home cooking. It's the thing that tipped the scales for me
| when having difficulty losing weight.
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| 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.
| foxyv wrote:
| 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.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Plus the whole sugar vs. sugar alcohol nonsense, which I
| still don't completely understand.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Sugar alcohols seem simple enough to me. The properties
| vary but they generally have fewer calories per gram and
| a low glycemic index, and some of them are much sweeter
| per calorie.
| freedomben wrote:
| IANA nutritionist or expert at all in this area so take
| this with a grain of salt, but my understanding from
| looking into it is that the sugar alcohol doesn't break
| down in digestion and isn't absorbed, that's why the
| "carbs" from sugar alcohol "don't count."
|
| I would recommend taking it easy on the sugar alcohols
| even though they "don't count" because they can cause
| significant gas ;-)
| foxyv wrote:
| It depends on the type. Some are partially digested as
| carbohydrates. Others are not. You can look up their
| individual Glycemin Index.
|
| https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0261/4761/8864/files/Sc
| ree...
| rini17 wrote:
| And some like xylitol are highly toxic to dogs, must be
| careful around them.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I also hate the games they play with labeling such as "no
| sugar added." Bought a cherry pie from a local market
| labeled "no sugar added" thinking it was going to be
| extra tart only to take it home and taste sugar. Reading
| the label it listed sugar alcohol which I learned can
| cause gas and bloating in some people, which I soon found
| out. Once slice had me doubled over with gas pains a
| whole night and shit my brains out the next day. I got my
| money back for that piece of garbage pie. I want to punch
| whoever thought no sugar added means fuck all...
| vanviegen wrote:
| 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.
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| Yes. I can find everywhere on labels the carb amount. I
| use 2 app too. And after a lot of errors I acquired a six
| sense (that try to kill me everyday ;-D)
| foxyv wrote:
| This makes so much more sense than the labels in the USA.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| 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?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| pkaye wrote:
| The rounding rule is carbs <0.5g can be rounded down to 0
| and calories <5 can be rounded down to 0. But I have a
| feeling even if they properly labeled it without rounding,
| people would eat the whole pack of tic tac anyway.
|
| https://foodlabelmaker.com/regulatory-hub/fda/rounding-
| rules...
| foxyv wrote:
| So you can just make the serving size so small that
| everything is less than 0.5g
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| My favorite example is that cooking spray advertises 0g of
| fat, giving a serving size of 0.33 seconds of spray
| bluGill wrote:
| That might even be realistic if you are spraying a baking
| sheet - since you cover the whole thing. But if you are
| cooking pancakes and spray the pan after each one you get
| a lot of carbs.
| hilux wrote:
| Carbs?
| krferriter wrote:
| I think this is one of the crazier ones. It's just canola
| oil! It's the same as spreading that much canola oil on
| the surface, the spray is mainly convenient because it
| spreads it out evenly for you without you needing to
| contact the surface. But Pam gets to put "0g fat" and
| "For Fat Free Cooking" on the side of all their cans.
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| The margins the FDA allows for class 2 and third group
| nutrients are also quite generous. I'm sure they made sense
| back when they were first introduced, but as food science
| has improved, the standards have not.
|
| > The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows calorie
| content to exceed label calories by up to 20%
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/
|
| > Class I nutrients are those added in fortified or
| fabricated foods. These nutrients are vitamins, minerals,
| protein, dietary fiber, or potassium. Class I nutrients
| must be present at 100% or more of the value declared on
| the label
|
| > Class II nutrients are vitamins, minerals, protein, total
| carbohydrate, dietary fiber, other carbohydrate,
| polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, or potassium that
| occur naturally in a food product. Class II nutrients must
| be present at 80% or more of the value declared on the
| label.
|
| > The Third Group nutrients include calories, sugars, total
| fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium. [...] For
| foods with label declarations of Third Group nutrients, the
| ratio between the amount obtained by laboratory analysis
| and the amount declared on the product label in the
| Nutrition Facts panel must be 120% or less, i.e., the label
| is considered to be out of compliance if the nutrient
| content of a composite of the product is greater than 20%
| above the value declared on the label.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-
| guidan...
|
| Edit: Expanded the quotes to include definitions.
| yapyap wrote:
| I'm rather unknowledgeable on diabetes, so here's a question
| that may seem basic:
|
| does choosing healthier meal, a salad instead of sweet ribs,
| not suffice for a good blood sugar?
| skyyler wrote:
| So, first off, commercial salad dressing almost always has
| sugar in it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time
| you're shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer
| "simple vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have
| any sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come
| in contact with are full of sugar.
|
| Even low GI foods still cause blood sugar to raise by some
| amount.
|
| All of the vegetables in the salad have carbohydrates that
| will raise blood sugar. Carrots, onions, tomatoes, all of
| that will raise blood sugar. Croutons? Blood sugar.
|
| Obviously selecting a garden salad with no dressing is a
| healthier choice than "sweet ribs". Most diabetics (that
| are managing their condition) are not going to be ordering
| things with refined sugar in them.
|
| Where things get tricky is asking questions like "what's
| healthier, a honey-miso glazed salmon with brown rice or a
| salad with croutons and a honey and berry dressing?" or
| "What's better for you, grilled chicken with a sugary
| barbeque sauce or fried chicken with no sauce?"
| barbazoo wrote:
| > commercial salad dressing almost always has sugar in
| it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time you're
| shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer "simple
| vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have any
| sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come in
| contact with are full of sugar.
|
| Making salad dressing is really easy btw in case anyone
| wants to try. Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar,
| salt and pepper and you're set for most salads. Even a
| restaurant should be able to whip that up.
| skyyler wrote:
| If you have an immersion blender, making mayonnaise
| without sugar in it is very easy:
|
| https://www.seriouseats.com/two-minute-mayonnaise
|
| (And it tastes way better than commercial mayo!)
|
| I love this author's recipes; it's the opposite of the
| normal recipe-preamble-slop. All of the stuff before the
| actual recipe is relevant information. In more complex
| recipes, he goes over the testing and process that led to
| the finished recipe. It's a wonderful view into the world
| of recipe creation.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Awesome, I'll give that a try. What I like about it is
| that you can use whatever high quality eggs you normally
| use instead of the cage eggs that mass producers will
| use. Until now I had to resort to vegan mayo.
| glandium wrote:
| "If you have an immersion blender"
|
| You can also make mayonnaise with a whisk.
| skyyler wrote:
| Yes, you can make mayonnaise with a whisk.
|
| It's so much easier to do it with a hand blender though.
| It takes longer to clean up afterwards than it takes to
| make. And no maintaining a steady thin stream of oil, you
| just put it all into a container and blitz it.
|
| You can make meringues and cakes with a whisk, too, but
| most people I know have electric mixers for that.
|
| Mechanical eggbeaters with little flywheels were popular
| before the electric ones, too!
| nottorp wrote:
| > Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar, salt and
| pepper and you're set for most salads.
|
| Why do you need a "dressing"? In my corner of Europe they
| put the above by default on every restaurant table and
| the salad has nothing in it (or maybe a tiny bit of oil
| and vinegar), you adjust it to taste.
|
| The only places that offer salad "dressings" are american
| inspired and even those mostly serve it separately so you
| can ignore it.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| For the same reason you add some spices before cooking,
| and salt multiple times throughout a recipe.
|
| Plus, it's a little hard to emulsify or even suspend the
| oil and vinegar right there at the table.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > or maybe a tiny bit of oil and vinegar
|
| That's what I mean by "dressing". We're talking about the
| same thing.
| nottorp wrote:
| Ah well, above us they seem to call mayonnaise and other
| fat and high calorie stuff "dressing"?
| ryan-richt wrote:
| Also watch out for "sugar by another name" ... pineapple
| puree, white grape juice/concentrate, apple
| juice/concentrate are very common commercial dressing
| ingredients to load up on sugar.
|
| Sure always ask for the vinaigrette eating out, but at
| home make your own salad dressing:
|
| * get a mixing bowl big enough to toss salad in, and a
| whisk * add 1T dijon mustard, 1T not-balsamic vinegar
| (balsamic is high sugar! I like sherry or beer vinegar),
| salt & pepper * drizzle in 1T olive oil while rapidly
| whisking. * Add 3 oz or more salad, toss, done for 2
| servings
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I just use old dijon bottles with a bit left in it to get
| the rest out and shake the heck out of it but I go
| through a lot of mustard.
|
| The lengths I've seen brands go To avoid having sugar as
| their 1st or 2nd ingredient...
|
| after that you have invert sugar, corn syrup, molasses,
| brown rice syrup etc. as following ingredients...
| sgerenser wrote:
| A few years ago organic/natural products were marketed as
| containing "Evaporated Cane Juice" (aka Cane Sugar) but
| my understanding is the FDA put an end to that one.
| reubenswartz wrote:
| Making your own salad dressing is really easy and let's
| you have a salad you really like in a couple of minutes.
|
| My recipe is basically what you have here, although I
| usually mix some balsamic and other vinegars, and add a
| bit lemon juice.
|
| I went from feeling sorry for people who were "forced" to
| eat salads to craving them. (Side benefit of not having
| the afternoon urge to sleep.)
| stretchwithme wrote:
| I buy a salad kit at Trader Joe's. It has sugar in it.
| And I buy arugula and make 4 salads out of that one
| salad. I add a dash of olive oil and pecans. And end up
| throwing out 1/3 of dressing that came with the salad.
|
| So I get some of the sugar sources in the kit. Just
| smaller amounts.
|
| Otherwise, I just use olive oil and balsamic vinegar with
| arugula, pecans.
|
| Arugula is a good source of nitrates, which are good for
| nitric acid.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Not a diabetic but adult later onset lactose intolerant and
| the problem is you really have NO idea what restaurants put
| into stuff, even if you ask.
|
| Even a stupid salad, what's in the dressing, what's in the
| bread/croutons, what was the meat glazed with. Etc.
|
| Restaurant food tastes good because it is generally
| unhealthy top to bottom, with quantities of salt, butter,
| etc no sane person would use at home.
|
| One thought experiment - when was the last time you ate out
| and needed to add salt to anything? Now thing of home
| cooking how often you might add a little salt while you are
| eating.
|
| The easiest thing to do is ruling out restaurants entirely,
| but then that's rather anti-social.. Not to mention
| family/friends gatherings, etc.
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| Things are changing nonetheless. My wife is celiac (we're
| quite a problematic family: I'm diabetic, she's celiac),
| but by law, she is guaranteed that a suitable menu must
| be available wherever she goes, or at least that
| waitstaff and business owners know how to handle the
| situation when she informs them. (I know for a fact that
| managing celiac disease and the most severe and dangerous
| intolerances is a mandatory requirement for obtaining a
| business license.)
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think in the US, it's basically an intractable problem
| the way restaurants operate and are staffed. Low margin,
| high failure rate businesses with many fly by night small
| operators. Front of house staff is high turnover, while
| back of house staff is largely non-English speaking of
| sometimes questionable immigration/work permit status.
|
| And then there is the supply chain since most restaurants
| are not cooking every single part of every meal from
| absolute scratch ingredients.
|
| There was a story about a woman near us operating some
| sort of celiac friendly/gluten free bakery. One day the
| donuts were delivered and she noticed some D shaped
| sprinkles and realized her supplier had come up short and
| just put some random Dunkin Donuts into the delivery.
| Good on her catching it, but how in good conscience could
| she operate a bakery advertising itself as celiac
| friendly/gluten free if she was outsourcing like this?
|
| If I had any sort of food allergy that could result in
| hospitalization or death, I'd just stop eating out. I'd
| rather be a little boring than very dead.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Why would you run a bakery and not make donuts yourself?
| They're dead simple if you have a fryer.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I didn't know their simple and will try. To answer your
| question, perhaps donuts aren't her main product, for me
| it's more about pastry which is a side bonus for
| bakeries, thought if I go to a personal shop I expect 95%
| hand made products but that my differ depending on the
| culture (I'm not from the US). Also they may be just
| cheaper (taking into account your time)
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Right, and to a consumer this is all opaque.
|
| You go to a place advertising itself as gluten free /
| vegan / celiac safe / whatever .. and its been
| outsourced.
|
| Once it's outsourced, all bets are off. Who knows if the
| vendor subbed it out further, etc.
|
| Which is why for a certain level of food sensitivity it's
| almost not worth eating out. It comes down to - do you
| trust random strangers with your life?
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Healthier isn't a good metric, A carb heavy salad will
| probably be worse than those protein heavy ribs by
| themselves (Maybe the rib sauce will tip you over, or maybe
| you will use a salad dressing that put any "healthiness" to
| the test)
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| Is a really complex game. The basic reasoning is that for
| every X carbohydrates ingested, you need to inject Y
| insulin (according to a personal ratio).
|
| However, everything is complicated by numerous factors and
| the technology you use.
|
| Factors: how you feel, stress, exercise, what you ate in
| previous meals, your blood sugar level at the start of the
| meal, and the activities you'll engage in after the meal
| (physical or mental).
|
| There's also the issue of how you administer insulin.
|
| In Italy, up until 3-5 years ago, most of us were using the
| "multiple daily injections" method, which involved taking a
| dose of "long-acting" insulin (lasting 24 hours) as a
| "base" and using "rapid or ultra-rapid" insulin at meals.
| Clearly, this approach provides limited control and
| requires a VERY habitual lifestyle (you can't skip a meal;
| the long-acting insulin keeps working regardless).
|
| Now (at least here in Italy), we are all transitioning to
| or already using CGM systems, which are more or less
| intelligent systems that continuously administer insulin at
| a "medium" rate. Based on input from the patient regarding
| the predicted amount of carbohydrates (and fats) they will
| consume, the system calculates the best strategy for what
| is called the "meal bolus" (using strategies like multi-
| phase, direct, etc.) and at the same time, it maintains a
| continuous but adaptable level of injection to achieve a
| target blood sugar level (day and NIGHT!!)
|
| In essence, it's a very nerdy way of dying slowly
| (hopefully as slowly as possible).
|
| E un mondo difficile E vita intensa Felicita a momenti E
| futuro incerto
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > E un mondo difficile E vita intensa Felicita a momenti
| E futuro incerto
|
| I was curious, for the other curious:
|
| "It's a tough world And intense life Happiness in moments
| And uncertain future"
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| Diabetes is a complex and mentally demanding disease. It
| affects you in the short term and has a significant
| impact in the long term. Everything is in your hands,
| fully aware that every mistake has immediate consequences
| but, worse, accumulates over time. That phrase (from this
| song) perfectly capture the mental state of my 20 years
| living with the disease. No tragedy (there are worse
| things), just deep awareness.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cu3K1njbYqs
| ksenzee wrote:
| This depends on a lot of factors. There are some type II
| diabetics like this: they might need insulin after a meal
| with a high glycemic index, but not after a meal with a low
| glycemic index. There are some type II diabetics with more
| advanced disease who need insulin after eating anything.
| Type I diabetics entirely lose their ability to make
| insulin, which is why the disease was fatal before insulin
| was discovered, no matter what the kids (it was almost
| always kids) ate or didn't eat. As a general rule, it is
| inaccurate to equate diabetes with unhealthy eating. The
| Venn diagram only overlaps.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >does choosing healthier meal,
|
| For a type 1 diabetic, no (gets more complex with type 2).
|
| Your body produces insulin at a basal rate.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_rate
|
| If you're healthy between the pancreas and the liver you
| maintain homeostasis and things are fine.
|
| As a T1D you don't get that base rate, so your blood sugar
| will mostly trend up and stay high, even without eating
| anything. You simply have to get more insulin to avoid
| burning out all the systems in your body and dying slowly.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That sounds really hard. Is the purpose of determining the
| amount of food so you can adjust the amount of insulin?
| Sorry, I don't know about the day to day of living with
| diabetes.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Yes, diabetics need to precisely adjust their insulin
| intake in proportion to carbohydrate intake.
| Jarmsy wrote:
| Also when figuring out how much insulin is needed for a
| given amount of carbs you need to factor in the type of
| carbs, your individual response to that type of carbs,
| what fats/protein/fiber you eat with it (fats and fiber
| tend to slow down the BG rise from carbs, protein can
| cause a rise when eaten on its own but can also slow down
| the rise from carbs), what time of day it is (I need
| around double the amount of insulin for the same food
| first thing in the morning vs in the afternoon), your
| mood, what else is in your stomach already, the weather
| (hot weather can greatly increase insulin sensitivity),
| your current fitness level, what physical activity you
| have done over the last day or 2 and what you will do
| over the coming hours, where on your body you inject, if
| you are fighting any illness...
| not2b wrote:
| For my wife (type 1 diabetic), physical activity is the
| big one that throws off her calculations as a walk in a
| hilly area makes her blood sugar drop like a rock. Of
| course she always has something with sugar with her but
| then she has to figure out how much to consume.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yea, as a T1D myself the amount of insulin I need is
| massively different from days I'm arguing on the internet
| compared to days I'm up doing physical exercise. Things
| get concerning really quick when you're a distance from
| anything and your glucose starts dropping.
| Jarmsy wrote:
| Hill walks are particularly challenging for me too. I can
| do rowing or weightlifting with my sugars staying fairly
| stable or rising if it's really intense, but something
| about walking steadily up a gentle slope makes it drop
| massively. There was some interesting research a couple
| of years back on how exercising the calf muscle is
| particularly effective at lowering BG, perhaps that has
| something to do with it
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9404652/
| pixl97 wrote:
| When you eat, depending on the glycemic index of the food
| you're consuming your blood sugar starts immediately going
| up and can quickly peak at dangerous numbers if the food is
| sugary.
|
| A diabetic will want to take dose of insulin a bit before
| eating in order to send their blood glucose level on a
| lowering trend. If you dose it right the two waves semi
| cancel each other out and your blood sugar goes up some,
| but hopefully not a huge amount.
|
| If you get the dose wrong, it drops dangerously or rockets
| up and you have take correction doses.
| michchinn wrote:
| From the paper (https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/
| papers/Thames...):
|
| > We asked them to estimate the mass of each ingredient present
| on the plate and subsequently converted these values into
| nutrition estimates using the same USDA [9] values we used to
| create our dataset
|
| I get that there's a linear relationship between the mass of a
| food and its calories, but I'd expect that nutritionists would
| be better at estimating the calories in a plate of food than
| the mass of a food item. Most people aren't doing the math in
| their heads, they're using a frame of reference that recognizes
| calories. Did you have this in mind? Is there any research on
| this?
| ryan-richt wrote:
| There is actually an elegant _mathematical_ solution to this
| problem using sensor fusion and a differential equation model
| of the science: if you weigh your food almost all of the time
| at home, and only make portion and ingredient guesses when
| infrequently eating out, we can actually estimate your personal
| rate of underestimation and correct for it.
|
| Our startup (BODYSIM.com) has also been doing research on this
| a long time. As founders, we all have >16 months of daily food
| logging mostly by kitchen scale weights, aligned to daily BIA-
| scale weigh-ins, fitness tracker calories, bi-weekly blood
| tests, monthly DEXAs, 3D scans, etc etc. We also have a
| science-based structural model of macronutrient balance and
| muscle hypertrophy. Given all that, we can VERY confidently
| estimate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) and its
| components, and predict how your fat and muscle mass will
| change on a daily basis. This is real math/science so you can
| also run it in reverse. This ("simultaneity constraint")
| provides enough constraints we can estimate users' individual
| underestimating/over-indulgence when eating out. In fact, it's
| better to just NOT log those days AT ALL and we can fill them
| in. I think this solution isn't more widely used b/c you need
| all this other "quantified self" type data at the same time.
| nathancahill wrote:
| This is really interesting, and I'll probably sign up for
| your app (I'm training for rock climbing). I've used a
| kitchen scale for a few weeks at home and got pretty good at
| estimating portion size during that time. Biggest takeaway
| was that even if you aren't "over-indulging" when you eat
| out, the portion sizes (especially in the US, less so in
| Europe) are just insane. 2-3x portions. Ordering half-orders
| or starters and letting the food settle before
| eating/ordering more helped quite a bit.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm currently dieting again, and the only way that I've been
| able to properly portion calories is to weigh nearly everything
| I eat and then add the numbers together in Google Sheets.
|
| Eyeballing a portion of a lot of food can be nearly impossible
| to determine how much food you actually got, but weight is
| fairly straightforward and objective (at least to an ounce or
| so of granularity for most kitchen scales, which is good enough
| for dieting).
| porphyra wrote:
| As someone who takes a photo of every single meal I eat, I was
| very excited to try out Snapcalorie but it was completely wrong
| for all the pictures I tried giving it. I uploaded a picture of
| a recent meal of tomato egg, baked octopus tentacles, and
| shrimp, and it identified it as pasta, mushrooms, and chicken.
| Also, it doesn't work for typical home meals that are eaten
| family-style.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| This should be an indication that tracking as a personal health
| methodology is inherently flawed. Your body is your most
| accurate measurement system, both in terms of precision and
| accuracy but also in its multidimensional, intersectional
| measurement apparatus that completely demolishes the poor
| substitutes found in personal nutrition, which are continuously
| shown to be either flawed in theory or in practice.
|
| Tracking takes more work and is less accurate. Bad trade.
|
| The only use I see in tracking is to perhaps help one inform
| one's intuition. But that's as far as I'll go.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| People are bad at reporting ANYTHING. Exercise, food, sex,
| grooming. Just ask a lawyer or anybody trying to get a story out
| of somebody.
|
| This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking
| people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-
| reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an
| example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Yeah the problem seem to be the researchers in the first place
| here, they're probably in a hurry to produce papers with
| supposedly real data.
|
| Or maybe the researchers know all this from years working in
| this field, the problem might be from those simplifying the
| research for the public
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Generalising, this is one of the lessons of the past ~2
| centuries in which we've had for the first time reasonably
| objective analogic recording capabilities: photography,
| phonography, cinema, and the like. Until their emergence, human
| testimony _across a wide range of phenomena_ was the only way
| to transmit information and, due to its low fidelity, low
| information density, unreliable interpretation and unreliable
| reproduction, that was at best only modestly reliable. A
| fantastic example of this (in numerous senses) is Albrecht
| Durer 's woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), made from second-hand
| reports and sketches. On the one hand, it doesn't look true to
| life, but on the other, specific features of the animal are
| recorded with remarkable accuracy --- the segmentation of body
| plates, horns, toes, and aspect of the eyes for example. See:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros>.
|
| And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to
| manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise
| to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be
| compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the
| emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop,
| photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less
| evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually
| _all_ still and video images are at least somewhat processed,
| and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in
| multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech
| and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone,
| layperson or expert.
|
| Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability
| fabulated reporting _even or exspecially when mediated by our
| technologies_ , which had previously offered a solution to that
| problem.
| shadowtree wrote:
| As someone who just lost 35 pounds through clean dieting:
|
| All calorie/portion numbers on packaged food are off by 10-20%. I
| set MyFitnessTracker to 1.5k calories (deficit for my build) and
| for weeks nothing would budge - even with strict portion control
| and weighing everything, plus 800 extra cals spent through
| exercise.
|
| Once I went to "1250" calories, I started losing weight. Went
| from to 205 to 175 pounds.
|
| With packaged food I mean anything like cream cheese, various
| sides, etc. - not pre-built meals (I assume those would be off by
| 50%).
|
| What weighing your food really does, is reveal how shockingly
| little you actually should be eating. I switched to small plates
| for all meals, as using the normal large ones was pointless and
| slightly de-motivating.
|
| But yeah, it's just calories. No matter what you eat.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Another more sensible explanation is that the calorie theory is
| fully wrong and unscientific, despite using numbers and
| measurements (it sounds very mathy though)
| zahlman wrote:
| While the article may have been published today, putting "self-
| reported food intake" into a search engine shows me that this is
| not at all a new finding. I would have considered it common
| knowledge, even. The entire reason people can conjure the mental
| image of a stereotypical obsessed dieter, weighing every morsel
| of food and looking it up in tables, is because _everyone else
| has barely any idea_ what their intake looks like.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Have used chatGPT for about a year to count my daily calorie in-
| take .
|
| Since I eat out daily at fairly healthy places (Cava, Panera,
| chic fil a only grilled nuggets & fruit cups, Jersey Mikes number
| 7 mini, noodles & company, MOD pizza) GPT knows their menu & each
| items calories. Upon getting the food I just tell GPT what I'm
| about to eat each time and it counts & retains and calculates
| through the day.
|
| In doing so as adult male (late 40s) 5'10 175 my body has gotten
| used to eating 1500 to 2k calories a day. Do weigh myself daily
| to ensure I'm not gaining as I do have a cheat day once a week.
|
| I understand the sodium content is higher then if I cooked at
| home but I'm focused on maintaining a fit look & counting
| calories along with a few weekly gym visits I think keeps me as I
| seek.
| cainxinth wrote:
| In my experience, people are especially bad at understanding how
| calorific alcohol is. Carbs and protein are generally 4 calories
| per gram. Alcohol is 7 calories per gram. Only fat is more energy
| dense at 9 calories per gram.
|
| I can recall in the aughts when there was a major low carb food
| trend and Bacardi had a popular ad campaign around the fact that
| their rum had no carbs, basically marketing it as the smarter
| option for people watching their weight -- even though all
| unflavored hard liquor has no carbs and is still incredibly
| calorific.
| aqme28 wrote:
| It's why you don't really see any beer below like 90-100
| Calories, despite all the "low calorie" beer marketing there is
| out there.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Alcohol is a tricky one, because its calories are an especially
| bad way of measuring impact on energy and weight.
|
| It is kind of like measuring the calories of wood. It burns
| well, so it has a high calories, but metabolizes poorly. A
| block of wood is about 400 kCal/100g.
|
| Ethanol has 1325 kJ/mol of energy. If the reaction stops part
| way through the metabolic pathways, which happens because
| acetic acid is excreted in the urine after drinking, then not
| nearly as much energy can be derived from alcohol, only 215.1
| kJ/mol.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol#Metabo...
| jmount wrote:
| I tried to use some dietary research as data examples in machine
| learning training courses. After running into self reporting
| (which I naively thought would be the exception, not the rule) I
| changed the my use of such sources to class discussions around
| reporting such as the following: https://www.vox.com/science-and-
| health/2018/9/19/17879102/br...
| UomoNeroNero wrote:
| Have you ever wondered why it's such a struggle for a diabetic to
| manage blood sugar levels in a sensible way? Here's the answer. I
| assure you that anyone with diabetes is forced (and the word
| "forced" doesn't fully convey the mental burden involved) to
| maintain an almost obsessive level of awareness about what they
| eat. There's no comparison to someone simply "on a diet."
|
| I guarantee you, it's an incredibly complex task. Unless one
| adopts a monastic approach of always eating exactly the same
| carefully measured meals at home, the challenge is constant.
|
| If one day a system based on vision and AI could accomplish this
| task (and it can't, it's impossible), it could charge any price
| and have millions of users.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Any research or studies based on self-reporting or interviews
| should be very suspect. Most people will answer or report what
| they think the researcher wants to hear, or what they think will
| make them "look good" even if the responses are anonymous.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| My successful weight loss approach is to give up on counting
| calories and focus entirely on my own weight.
|
| I set a goal weight for the week, and if I weigh more than that,
| I don't eat (or eat just vegetables). I've lost 5 kg so far and I
| maintained the weight loss between thanksgiving and new year's
| despite spikes on the holidays.
|
| It's taught me what proper portions feel like so I don't have a
| desire to rebound as soon as I take a break.
| dacox wrote:
| It's an open secret that most nutrition research is of extremely
| low quality - almost all relying on decades old self reported
| nutritional questionnaires.
|
| Sometimes dozens of these studies get wrapped up and analyzed
| together, and we headlines that THING IS BAD with a hazard ratio
| of like 1.05 (we figured out smoking was bad with a hazard ratio
| that was like 3! - you need a really good signal when you are
| analyzing such low quality data)
| Fricken wrote:
| The thing is we're all experts at eating food, we've all been
| doing it our whole lives. You'd think in that time one would have
| cultivated an intuition about whether they are eating too much or
| too little regardless of the nutrition information.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Constant and plentiful supplies of food are, on an evolutionary
| scale, a somewhat recent thing. Agriculture itself is what,
| around 12k years old - a few hundred generations?
|
| We're all experts at eating food but having an instinctual
| understanding of exactly when to stop eating was probably much
| less important historically.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I remember when I was researching illegal medical experimentation
| on prisoners in the USA, I found a quote from a researcher saying
| "one of the reasons we prefer to use prisoners is because we know
| exactly what they do and what they eat every single day."
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| This reminds me, out of the one app I *actually want* to be
| addictive, food tracking apps NEVER are.
| arionhardison wrote:
| I had some success here by gamifying the reporting process and
| breaking it into sessions of compliance .. "just do this for
| ever".
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Points of measurement are a challenging issue.
|
| One of the ... beyond annoying ... aspects of our track-
| everything-individuals-do-and-utilise-it-against-them
| contemporary information ecology is that it is so painfully
| difficult to make use of that information _for_ personal
| advantage.
|
| In the specific case of food intake, _it should be reasonably
| trivial_ to aggregate purchase information, at grocery stores,
| restaurants, and online deliveries, and at least arrive at a
| reasonable baseline of total consumption. Rather than having to
| fill out a food diary from memory with uncertain measurments, one
| can rely on grocery and menu receipts directly.
|
| This is more useful for those who live alone or shop for
| themselves (a large fraction of the population, but far from
| complete). It's based on the general principle that you tend to
| eat what you buy. There's some error imposed by food acquired
| elsewhere (shared at work, school, from friends, etc.), and of
| tossed food, but what you'll arrive at is _over time_ a pretty
| accurate record of intake.
|
| I'm surprised that such methods aren't more widely used or
| reported in both dietary management and research.
|
| My own personal experience has been that I've been most
| successful in dietary management when 1) I have direct control
| over shopping and 2) I focus far more on _what_ I eat than _how
| much_ , though some of the latter applies. If I'm aware that
| specific foods are deleterious to goals (highly-processed, junk
| foods, high-caloric / high-sugar liquids, etc), then _the most
| effective control point at minimum decision cost_ is _at the
| store_. If you _don 't buy_ crisps, chips, biscuits, fizzy
| drinks, ice cream, and the like, _it 's not at the house for you
| to consume_.
|
| I'm well aware that there are circumstances in which this is
| difficult to arrange, sometimes with friends or roommates, more
| often with families. I'll only say that clearly expressing terms
| and boundaries is tremendously useful here.
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