4d ago

Is It Just Me?

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Is there a way for me to take a picture of a food and find nutritional values without AI? I sometimes use duck.ai to ask because, when making tortilla for example idk what could be exact because while I can read values for a tortilla, I don't have a way to check the same for meat and other similar stuff I put in tortilla.
- You're probably just gonna have to get better at guesstimating, (e.g. by comparing to similar pre-made options and their nutrition labels), or use an app for tracking nutrition that integrates with OpenFoodFacts and get a scale to weigh your ingredients. (or a similar database, though most use OpenFoodFacts even if they have their own, too)
  I don't really know of any other good ways to just take photos and get a good nutritional read, and pretty much any implementation would use "AI" to some degree, though probably more a dedicated machine learning model over an LLM, which would use more power and water, but the method of just weighing out each part of a meal and putting it in an app works pretty well.
  Like, for me, I can scan the barcode of the tortillas I buy to import the nutrition facts into the (admittedly kind of janky) app I use (Waistline), then plop my plate on my scale, put in some ground beef, scan the barcode from the beef packaging, and then I can put in how many grams I have. Very accurate, but a little time consuming.
  Not sure if that's the kind of thing you're looking for, though.
  
  Actually, I am using waistline, but there are some food I can't find and are hard to find nutritional values, and I am bad at guessing anything
  
  In that case, I'd say just find any food that's just similar enough, and use that. It's better to have a close-ish estimate than none at all.
  For example, I had no clue what the nutrition would be like for the meatloaf I had the other day, so I just entered it as if it was pure ground beef and called it good enough.
  
  Yeah, true it is just that I kinda want to be perfectly accurate but yeah you are right
- Wow, I am old. This has never in my life been an issue? I just used a calorie counter and people’s own recipes for estimates. I guess that would be the old fashioned way of doing this and probably what AI is doing most of the time. Pulling a recipe, looking at the ingredients and quantities and spitting back some values. Granted it can probably do it far faster than we can. But, I got by with that method for decades…
  
  Problem is, many things I have do not have packaging with nutritional values and similar and I need to use internet for this, which AI usually is the fastest to explain, especially because English is not my first language and food I am eating is not well known in English (Balkan)
  
  Yeah, I always used a generic app for counting calories. You could look up raw ingredients, add them to a list, then get a nutritional value and calories for the whole list (ie recipe) and even save that and share it. I’m guess apps like this probably rely on AI now though too. I think it was just called “calorie counter” with a blue logo. Some of them have international barcode scanners too but it is still a lot of guessing and it takes time if you’re not preparing the same things regularly. But they had a pretty robust user curated database for non-packaged foods. You just had to choose what was closest to what you were using or investigate and make your own custom entries for later.

349 comments