Count Your Calories With Meal Snap



The Meal Snap Application
(photo taken from gadgetoz.com)



Have you ever wanted to be able to count your calories quickly while at a restaurant or keep track of your daily calorie intake?  Several methods cost a lot of time and money; but, there’s now an application that can do it all for you.  The new application, Meal Snap, according to an April 13^th post on Gigaom, The Apple Blog, was released through the Apple iPhone earlier this month.  The new application analyzes food photography captured with your iPhone’s camera, and returns an approximate calorie count for each food item.

Darrell Etherington, the author of the Gigaom blog post states:                                    

Meal Snap, which sells for $2.99, offers the ability to take a photo of food, add a caption and let the system find out how many calories it contains. The app also automatically keeps a daily log of your tracked meals, but there’s no sign-up process, and no real settings to fiddle with, although you can sign in to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare to share your snapped meals.

The results given back to you are specified in a range and although the information is not exact, it is pretty close.  For example, if you take a photograph of a sliced apple as compared to a whole apple, the results may return slightly different.

In addition to telling you your calorie intake, Meal Snap can also tell you the ingredients in the food you are about to eat.  This function may be very helpful to those who have food allergies.  

Although the application was originally made for dieters, the narrator in the video below states that the main reason people download this application is because of its magical ability to recognize food.  In his tests, the application recognized 9 out of the 10 items he photographed.  Even obscure things such as mashed apple pie were able to be recognized by Meal Snap.    

This application sounds fun; but to me, it seems like different lighting conditions and the contrast of different serving dishes may also be factors in the results.

In an article posted on ZDNet Health, author Denise Amrich, RN studied different types of serving dishes.  She photographed McDonalds Fruit and Maple Oatmeal in the original McDonald’s cup.  She then moved the oatmeal into a plain white bowl.  When receiving the results she states

Meal Snapp Food Recognition and Calorie Count
(photo taken from huffingtonpost.com)

The first McDonald’s oatmeal in the McDonald’s cup was estimated to be 195-293 calories.  That’s not a bad guess!  The nutritional information on the cup actually says that it contains290 calories.

Interestingly enough, the same McDonald’s oatmeal in a white ceramic bowl was estimated to be 250-375 calories.  The app was still right.  290 is definitely in that range.  It’s funny that moving it to a bowl added up to 85 calories.

So the different dishware does affect the results, but not by much.

Meal Snap is a great way to count your calories, entertain your friends, and it’s fun.  I would say that for the entertainment value alone, it is worth the $2.99.