Do you want to lose weight but don’t know what to put on your plate? A new app promises to make your life easier by counting food calories using a simple photograph.
Counting calories would almost become child’s play with this fun and practical application. However, it carries some risks, believes our nutrition expert, Alexandra Murcier.
An application that recognizes food on the plate
The Healthify Snap application seduces with its astonishing simplicity: all you have to do is take a photo of your meal to obtain the exact number of calories on your plate.
A 2.0 device, which relies on artificial intelligence to detect, in real time, calories but also the type of food ingested (the exact variety of salad for example).
According to its creator, who spoke to DailyMailOnline, the application is 90% accurate and can detect “over a million foods from a single photo“.
Besides this calorie counting solution, Healthify supports users to lose weight. She therefore offers the help of a virtual professional coach to obtain advice on her diet and/or her sports routine – to be adapted according to her objectives.
NO to diets, YES to WW!
Healthify has several limitations
On paper, Healthify appears to be the “ideal” application for losing weight, Alexandra Murcier has some reservations about it.
“The reliability of the results is questionable. In addition, the application cannot detect the exact weight of oil contained in a sauce, especially when going to a restaurant. The estimate will always be approximate. Furthermore, not all calories are equal: 100 calories of carrot or candy is not comparable. The data from this application are therefore limiting and too restrictive: they are not interesting from a nutritional point of view“, she says.
The right attitude? “Learn to read labels and understand what you are eating. It’s more interesting in the long term!“, concludes the specialist.
