People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

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.

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...

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.

Not too shocking really:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1322248/

> Aiming to pour a “shot” of alcohol (1.5 ounces, 44.3 ml), both students and bartenders poured more into short, wide glasses than into tall slender glasses (46.1 ml v 44.7 ml and 54.6 ml v 46.4 ml, respectively). Practice reduced the tendency to overpour, but not for short, wide glasses. Despite an average of six years of experience, bartenders poured 20.5% more into short, wide glasses than tall, slender ones; paying careful attention reduced but did not eliminate the effect.

A plate is a very wide 'glass'.

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.

>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).

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?

>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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> - 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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)

> 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".

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Lean into that

And even if you don't record with 100pc accuracy, there's still a lot of value

>breathtaking naivete of scientists.

Crows are never whiter by washing.

You cannot dispense common sense through the educational system. Most career scientists are mediocre, and/or they are trying to survive in a rigged system.

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 Dürer'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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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

take-home sleep studies are common for sleep apnea, are they not? I did one...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.