There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
dwetterau 6 hours ago [-]
It will get to the point where it could know to ask those questions, like a human would. Clearly these tools are not there yet, but I think the models are probably good enough for this already.
bitmasher9 6 hours ago [-]
It’s probably the only thing that would get me to start taking photos of my food, but it would need to be about as accurate as I am in chronometer.
surfmike 6 hours ago [-]
The founder of parrotpal (another AI calorie tracking app, supporting both text and photos) points out that using photos is one of the least accurate ways for tracking food: https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/
The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).
Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.
edanm 1 hours ago [-]
> Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating.
I haven't used ParrtPal, what makes it easier than using MyFitnessPal?
tayo42 4 hours ago [-]
> seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too
What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )
schmichael 3 hours ago [-]
My unprofessional nutritional advice is: do what works for you! So if that’s calorie counting: great! No need to give it a second thought.
But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...
squillion 3 hours ago [-]
I also read that counting calories is so inaccurate that you may die of starvation or become obese, on the same diet. That is, if you exclusively ate what you measured, and all of it.
Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc. It’s also possible that the measurement errors even out over time, but I suspect the timescale is too long (if you’ve undereaten for two days you’ll end up eating something out of the diet).
edanm 1 hours ago [-]
> Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc.
This is what critics don't get. Calorie counting is what makes people have better awareness, and what makes people aware of what meal is more nutritious.
When you're in the weeds of this stuff it's hard to remember, but many people honestly don't know what are caloric equivalents of different foods, and that's pretty important information if you're trying to eat better.
adrian_b 2 hours ago [-]
Counting calories has low accuracy for various reasons, e.g. for variances in the percentages of food digestion and of nutrient absorption, even in the same individual. There are also appearances of low accuracy caused by the fact that the body adjusts the energy allocated for various internal processes in order to compensate the variances in daily energy intake, but this capacity of compensation is finite and it can be overridden by changing sufficiently the daily energy intake, i.e. the calorie count.
Nevertheless, if done correctly you can never die of starvation or become obese, because you must not aim for a theoretical value, but for the value which you find by experiment that it keeps your weight constant.
I have been obese for many years and after many failed attempts to lose weight I was believing that kind of BS that for some people it may be impossible to control their weight.
However, I had always failed because I had always done it wrongly. After I had started counting calories properly, in less than a year I have lost more than a third of my body weight and since then I maintain whatever body weight I believe to be the right value.
The difference between "before" and "after" is that I have switched from eating when I felt like it and until believing to have had enough, to only eating after making a plan of what to eat during that day, and in which quantities, according to the calories limit, and then sticking to the plan made in the morning and never eating anything extra, not even a snack or a sweetened beverage.
During the initial time, when losing weight, absolutely essential was the use of accurate weighing scales, with resolution of 0.1 kg or better, in order to check my weight each day at the same hour and reduce the calorie limit whenever the weight was not less by 0.1 kg than the weight of the previous day (with some smoothing to avoid overshooting, especially because it appears that there is a delay of several days between reducing the calorie limit to a value that forces a continuous weight reduction and the start of the actual weight decreasing).
After losing weight, I had to continue counting calories, otherwise I would not keep my desired weight. If I do not eat according to a plan, according to a calorie limit, I gain weight extremely easily, at a rate at least 6 to 10 times greater than the rate at which I can lose again the added weight.
For an example of a calorie limit, I am a male of average height and with a sedentary lifestyle, even if I do at least a half of hour per day of exercising, including weight lifting. In order to keep the weight for a BMI of about 25, I have to eat in the range of 1800 to 1900 kcal/day (which I do in 2 meals per day, each slightly above 900 kcal).
There have been a few nutritional studies done in USA and linked recently on HN. Like in other similar studies, the diets used for the subjects were around 2400 to 2500 kcal/day. I have no idea about which may be the difference between me and the subjects of those studies, but if I ate 2400 kcal/day I would become obese in a few weeks, gaining weight by up to a couple of pounds per day.
The only difference that I am aware of is that my food is cooked by myself from high-quality raw ingredients, while the subjects of those studies were eating mostly industrially-produced food, so my "calories" may be "bigger" than their "calories" (i.e. more of the food being actually digested and absorbed).
tayo42 3 hours ago [-]
Oh I guess, I try to go towards overestimating calories taken in and underestimate my calories spent.
It does work for me, but being vigilant about it is tedious so I'm open to hearing if people have better ways.
squillion 2 hours ago [-]
Take a look at these books:
- David Ludwig, Always Hungry?
- Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution
The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.
jaronheard 8 hours ago [-]
I like how in the article the author includes the instructions for Cal AI:
- Include a reference object (like a coin or your hand) for scale
And then the screenshots show just a pictures of bowls of food with no reference objects at all.
Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
PlunderBunny 8 hours ago [-]
I noticed that too - I wonder if the coin/hand was cropped out?
horsawlarway 7 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing yes. I think you can even see half a coin in the cropped photo of the tofu salad (lower right edge, under the metal bowl).
muratsu 9 hours ago [-]
These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.
AstroBen 8 hours ago [-]
What's going on with the google reviews of that app.. basically all 5 star with one word over and over again - 'good'
They're solicited, right?
m_ke 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
thierrydamiba 7 hours ago [-]
I think a claim like that requires proof. You’re accusing them of fraud.
asdev 9 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't trust the revenue numbers, plus the churn is probably insanely high. Flashes in the pan
tekla 9 hours ago [-]
They provide value in that they lie to you and you feel better about yourself.
muratsu 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t mind if the reality of their business is similar to gyms in the sense that they make money off of peoples desires but have low utilization.
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
klabb3 9 hours ago [-]
That’s exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. ”Why are you thinking this is meant to work?”. But of course, normal trusting people will believe it if it’s on the ”trusted app stores”.
These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
I suspect this might be because diet marketing before AI was one of the most fraught with misinformation subjects you could run across. This is because the "sale" of the idea has an effect on every salesman, so all of the salesmen are trying to sell every thing at once,since that's also selling their thing, and ground truth gets stampeded. Now when you combine diet marketing and AI, you get a multiplier. Both in the sellers and the buyers, since the desire to believe is stacked.
jimjimjim 5 hours ago [-]
This makes me sad. Yes a fool and their money are soon parted but this drives user expectations for apps even lower, pushing competent apps out of the market because of the price difference.
Kiyo-Lynn 6 hours ago [-]
I’ve tried a few AI-powered calorie tracking tools too. At first it felt super convenient, just take a photo and get the numbers.
But over time I kept seeing mistakes. Sometimes it would even tag a salad as soup.
Eventually I went back to the old way. Fewer photos, more mindful eating. Honestly I feel better that way.
nvahalik 7 hours ago [-]
I work for a company that offers nutrition tracking on an app in the App Store.
We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.
We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.
We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.
Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
irrational 7 hours ago [-]
Does that work for homemade food as well? The vast majority of the food we eat is homemade with recipes that don’t have any sort of nutritional information. I’ve always wished there was a simple way to figure out the calories. Taking a picture would be ideal.
senko 3 hours ago [-]
CalAI is just objectively a bad app even discounting its AI calorie estimator as an irrelevant gimmick:
* the UX is bad
* the stats are laughable
* charts worse than nothing (really, misleading to look at)
* lacking basic functionality such as “duplicate for today”
* can’t see or export the meal photo
* their “streak” attempt at gamification is so bad it literally cannot count
And yes, the AI there is atrociously bad. Not only can it not reliably detect calorie content (I don’t think anyone could on a basis of a photo in general case), but it so often mislabels food (like the example in article) it’s just a comedic relief. And there’s a “Fix” button which does nothing.
It’s like they never really tried hard. Combined with the general lack of quality, looks like a typical quick money grab riding the AI hype wave. I’m pretty confident the app could be vibe-coded in a week (and that’s generous). Maybe the backend is more complex? Don’t think so as there are no social features, it just stores data.
Paid for a year (Android app) to see how well they applied AI to the field, now continue to use it like a meal photo log with some (manually entered) metadata, otherwise Excel would be a nicer solution.
Traubenfuchs 2 hours ago [-]
We live in a post quality age.
Consumers just don't care.
AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition.
You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
Sleepthinker 6 hours ago [-]
As a gym enthusiast, if this app can’t give me accurate calorie counts and nutrient data, it’s basically useless to me. But for the average person, this is a big deal because we tend to seek convenience and want the easiest path to our goals. If this app wants to truly deliver results, it still has a long way to go.
Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.
cowanon2222 7 hours ago [-]
I've had pretty good results using the AI features in Macrofactor. It's certainly not perfect, but it does a pretty good job with mixed text and photos and allows you to easily fine-tune the results.
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
tunesmith 8 hours ago [-]
Weird article, it mentions three apps at the beginning, doesn't even test two of them in favor of two others it didn't mention, and then declares all the apps failures.
fullshark 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe in aggregate they are fine if the noise is unbiased and you do some things like correct it when it says an apple is tikka masala, but yeah, someone using this and lying to themselves about the calorie content of junk/comfort food seems pretty likely.
TeaVMFan 8 hours ago [-]
I prefer efficient manual entry to vibe-coding calories. I built my own Java-based SPA: https://frequal.com/cf/
It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
Also, a certain level of human involvement is what gets you to really care and change behavior.
I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.
tjpnz 5 hours ago [-]
If you want calorie counting to be of any value to you you're going to want to be accurate. Thankfully we're mostly creatures of habit. Source accurate numbers for everything you eat in a week and you're 90% covered for every other week. I recorded 30 items over two weeks and then added 15 more over 2.5 months. Don't sabotage your efforts with tools that don't work.
tayo42 4 hours ago [-]
This is my experience too. Not even 2 weeks, it was like a really tedious 3 or 4 days then I pretty much knew what to take out.
smartgamer112 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah cal AI is the worst of them all
solumunus 6 hours ago [-]
I genuinely can’t understand why anyone would even TRY using these apps. Of course they’re going to be terrible, but how could anyone with a modicum of intelligence suspect otherwise?
ValveFan6969 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dyauspitr 9 hours ago [-]
Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.
rahidz 9 hours ago [-]
>I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively.
Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
jvanderbot 7 hours ago [-]
Not OP, but I have verified, and it is accurate. At least accurate enough from images or descriptions when assuming average proportions. Where it's really accurate is when you have measurements, even rough. I took to having a 1/2 cup scoop around the house so I could get volume measurements.
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
I do this too and it's been spot on. I also have a very good idea of what I'm eating though: "2 oz of steel cut oats, 1 banana, probably about 4oz by weight, without the peal, about 12 ounces of coffee with 1 tsp of sugar and about 4oz of light no-sugar almond milk"
dyauspitr 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, a lot initially and now I’ve looked at them so much I can roughly tell without looking it up.
bigmadshoe 8 hours ago [-]
Tasks like summing a bunch of numbers from different parts of the input over a specific time period are still pretty error prone for LLMs. I would exercise caution if these results are important to you. A database or spreadsheet is going to be far more reliable – maybe you could have ChatGPT output a structured format and you could do the summation in a google sheet?
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah I know, it’s not something I need do a lot.
tcoff91 8 hours ago [-]
Read the article. What you are doing has nothing to do with the apps the article is talking about.
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
I actually think it’s quicker to just speak to the LLM about your diet than even taking a picture. But yes, I understand what you’re saying.
DontchaKnowit 8 hours ago [-]
This is different than the style of ai calorue app that extrapolates caloric content from pictures of your food. That kind is gimmicky BS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892
There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/
The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).
Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.
I haven't used ParrtPal, what makes it easier than using MyFitnessPal?
What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )
But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...
Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc. It’s also possible that the measurement errors even out over time, but I suspect the timescale is too long (if you’ve undereaten for two days you’ll end up eating something out of the diet).
This is what critics don't get. Calorie counting is what makes people have better awareness, and what makes people aware of what meal is more nutritious.
When you're in the weeds of this stuff it's hard to remember, but many people honestly don't know what are caloric equivalents of different foods, and that's pretty important information if you're trying to eat better.
Nevertheless, if done correctly you can never die of starvation or become obese, because you must not aim for a theoretical value, but for the value which you find by experiment that it keeps your weight constant.
I have been obese for many years and after many failed attempts to lose weight I was believing that kind of BS that for some people it may be impossible to control their weight.
However, I had always failed because I had always done it wrongly. After I had started counting calories properly, in less than a year I have lost more than a third of my body weight and since then I maintain whatever body weight I believe to be the right value.
The difference between "before" and "after" is that I have switched from eating when I felt like it and until believing to have had enough, to only eating after making a plan of what to eat during that day, and in which quantities, according to the calories limit, and then sticking to the plan made in the morning and never eating anything extra, not even a snack or a sweetened beverage.
During the initial time, when losing weight, absolutely essential was the use of accurate weighing scales, with resolution of 0.1 kg or better, in order to check my weight each day at the same hour and reduce the calorie limit whenever the weight was not less by 0.1 kg than the weight of the previous day (with some smoothing to avoid overshooting, especially because it appears that there is a delay of several days between reducing the calorie limit to a value that forces a continuous weight reduction and the start of the actual weight decreasing).
After losing weight, I had to continue counting calories, otherwise I would not keep my desired weight. If I do not eat according to a plan, according to a calorie limit, I gain weight extremely easily, at a rate at least 6 to 10 times greater than the rate at which I can lose again the added weight.
For an example of a calorie limit, I am a male of average height and with a sedentary lifestyle, even if I do at least a half of hour per day of exercising, including weight lifting. In order to keep the weight for a BMI of about 25, I have to eat in the range of 1800 to 1900 kcal/day (which I do in 2 meals per day, each slightly above 900 kcal).
There have been a few nutritional studies done in USA and linked recently on HN. Like in other similar studies, the diets used for the subjects were around 2400 to 2500 kcal/day. I have no idea about which may be the difference between me and the subjects of those studies, but if I ate 2400 kcal/day I would become obese in a few weeks, gaining weight by up to a couple of pounds per day.
The only difference that I am aware of is that my food is cooked by myself from high-quality raw ingredients, while the subjects of those studies were eating mostly industrially-produced food, so my "calories" may be "bigger" than their "calories" (i.e. more of the food being actually digested and absorbed).
It does work for me, but being vigilant about it is tedious so I'm open to hearing if people have better ways.
- David Ludwig, Always Hungry?
- Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution
The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.
Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
They're solicited, right?
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
Source?
We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.
We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.
We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.
Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
* the UX is bad
* the stats are laughable
* charts worse than nothing (really, misleading to look at)
* lacking basic functionality such as “duplicate for today”
* can’t see or export the meal photo
* their “streak” attempt at gamification is so bad it literally cannot count
And yes, the AI there is atrociously bad. Not only can it not reliably detect calorie content (I don’t think anyone could on a basis of a photo in general case), but it so often mislabels food (like the example in article) it’s just a comedic relief. And there’s a “Fix” button which does nothing.
It’s like they never really tried hard. Combined with the general lack of quality, looks like a typical quick money grab riding the AI hype wave. I’m pretty confident the app could be vibe-coded in a week (and that’s generous). Maybe the backend is more complex? Don’t think so as there are no social features, it just stores data.
Paid for a year (Android app) to see how well they applied AI to the field, now continue to use it like a meal photo log with some (manually entered) metadata, otherwise Excel would be a nicer solution.
Consumers just don't care.
AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition.
You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.
Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
I had predictive analytics and the whole 9 yards. Maybe I should have started a business! https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.