Take a food photo and this app counts the calories. Does it work?

Food tracking apps have been popular-calorie-related MyFitnespal for some time now has millions of British users who manually enter their daily consumption. However, Cal AI represents a new generation and uses large voice models to generate detailed food data on the click of a camera. Zoe, the nutritional opponent, develops its own version of this technology, which she hopes that she could offer another transformation in our ability to pursue and optimize our diet.

But does it actually work? And how? The app counts calories by separating the components of a meal of mushrooms or rigatoni pieces by recognizing differences in textures, shapes and colors and exceeding them against a huge database. The app then returns information about the nutritional content of each food and calculates the total calories of the food.

I immediately find a mistake with my lunch. Since the noodles are in a high cardboard pot, only ten rigatonis are visible. Cal Ai correctly identified the ten in the photo and tells me that they contain 150 calories, 10 g protein, 10 g fat and 30 g of carbohydrates. It does not have the diet in food it cannot see – my own menu of the chain tells me that I can actually consume 819 calories.

• Ozempic bumps could soon be put in the shade by the first weight loss pill in the shade

The founders, Zach Yadegari (18) and Henry Langmack (17) insist that these are only children’s problems. “The AI ​​model gets better every day because it is being trained more and more data,” says the Ebullient Yadegari. “The angle sometimes changes the perception of the portion size. But (over time) things like a spoon is also used to refer and find out the size.”

Zach Yadegari

Brett Malinowski

Yadegari and Langmacc played on US television last week and are not shy about their services. “The way Cal Ai grew so quickly was a combination of a great idea, paired with an amazing execution,” says Yadegari.

A little calmed down, I give the app again and upload a photo of an egg: 78 calories that Google informs me is correct. I am attempted to cross the borders of Cal AIS again and try a picture of a living Aberdeen Angus Cow. “Beef,” it says. Not wrong again.

That evening I test it over a square meal and present a plate of salmon, potato puree and broccoli. The app tells me that it is 550 calories, which feels roughly correct, except that it clearly does not know how much butter I put in the potato puree. It can only provide a rough estimate based on typical cooking habits – unless they inform them differently.

The next morning I tried yogurt, fruit compot and muesli to complete a whole day with meals on Cal Ai. It appreciates this at 450 calories (another round) that feels general again – except that it has not discovered my generous addition to honey.

• How much sugar do you really eat?

Based on my size, my weight and the desire to maintain my current weight (instead of losing weight), the app relies my daily calorie goal on massive 1,688. When I add up my rigaton, salmon and yogurt meals, I have used 1,050 calories. But given the fact of how far Cal Ai was on the pasta and the butter and honey fails, I suspect that my real number is far higher.

Vicki Couchman for the Sunday Times

The app is free of charge in the first three days, then £ 19.99 a year, which makes it cheaper than most of its competitors. It is clearly not perfect, but I can see how this gamified technology can be addicted.

Perhaps not surprisingly, most nutritionists with whom I talked about this app are doubtful. “When I saw it, my heart sank,” says Stephanie Moore, a nutritional value that works on anorexia and advises against enthusiastic calorie counts. “Fewer calories are not necessarily better,” she explains. “Low calories are often with low fat and low quality, and higher fat -rich foods often contain really important nutrients.”

But Sarah Berry, chief scientist at Zoe, is more open to the technology if she is used properly. “Nutritional assessment is plagued by nutritionists,” she says. “It is very difficult to judge exactly what people eat because it is incredibly stressful to record everything they eat and drink.”

Zoes app, which is launched in the United States, will not focus on calories and instead rate fiber, fat quality and the total value of meals.

• Skinnytok: The online trend leads children who starve themselves

The founders of Cal Ai say that none of you or your global team of 17 developers has nutritional qualifications, but have consulted nutritionists. “The calorie tracking is certainly not for everyone, but for the majority of people,” says Yadegari. “The development of an eating disorder is not only through the use of a cross-calorie app-es ​​many other factors in the game.”

Interestingly, Langmack believes that users will actually benefit from its simplicity and the fact that it is only 90 percent exactly. “It does not press users into the type of obsessive tracking that they could get in other apps,” he says.

Whatever his shortcomings, better versions of this app will probably come soon, and the direction of travel seems to be more and more body optimization and self -analysis. And yet after a day of using Cal Ai, I feel less comfortable and more neurotic in terms of my diet than in years. If app-capable calorie fixation is our future, count me.