Many dieters, healthy eaters, and athletes complain about how annoying and tedious counting calories can be, but what if there were an easy way to go about that whole ordeal? What if you could just snap a cellphone photo of what you're about to eat in order to have an app spit out the approximate calorie content of your meal?
MobileCrunch reports that an iPhone app called Meal Snap claims that it will let you do just that.
I was a bit skeptical though, so I decided to test things out myself.
First I gathered up the snacks on my desk.
There were two small chocolate bunnies, a pack of gum, a bag of gummy bears, a pile of Sour Patch Kids, a can of Red Bull, and a bottle of water. (Don't judge me, no one ever claimed that tech bloggers are healthy eaters.) The app told me to photograph those things and offered me a chance to caption my photo. I simply dubbed the pile "Tech blogger fuel" and tapped a button to continue.
I was presented with the option to share my meal on Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, but I declined. (No need to show off my unhealthy eating habits quite so much.)
The app let me tag the meal type — I went with "Afternoon Snack" — and then it told me that it'd be a few moments before the calorie count for the photographed items would appear.
It barely took three seconds before I had my results: 337-505 calories.
Hang on a minute! Something is wrong here.
Let's review. I've got two small chocolate bunnies (170 calories each), a pack of gum (some small insignificant number of calories), a bag of gummy bears (490 calories), a pile of Sour Patch Kids (about 280 calories), a can of Red Bull (110 calories), and a bottle of water (probably no calories).
That adds up to about 1220 calories, definitely more than 505 calories — which is the upper limit presented by the app. So what's going on here?
- Is the app flawed and set to simply spit out some random number of calories?
- Did my strange pile of food confuse the algorithm used to determine calorie counts?
- Is the app so incredible that it calculated the average serving portions of each item, factored in how much candy I can eat before my sweet tooth is satisfied, and actually provided a perfectly accurate calorie count for what I'll really eat?
It's a mystery, but if you want to try out Meal Snap yourself, it's priced at $2.99 and available in the App Store now.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.