New App Makes Calorie Counting A Snap

Finding the calorie count of any food is now as easy as taking a picture of it. This, thanks to the new iPhone/iPod touch app, MealSnap by the folks at DailyBurn. Calorie counting can be a difficult process, especially when the item doesn’t come in a box or can. Now the practice is fun, quick, and mostly reliable using the $2.99 app. Ready to eat those chicken nuggets and fries at your favorite restaurant? Take a picture of the meal using the app, and then add a description to it. Next, the system “magically” detects the nutritional breakdown and automatically adds it to your list of meals for the day. Calories may be posted to Twitter, Facebook, or Foursquare. Before starting this article, I was a skeptic. But, the app works, with a few caveats. First, it makes an assumption on the portion size of the item, which may or may not be accurate. Second, calorie results are presented in a range. Depending on the item, this could lead to a significant discrepancy. For my test, I took photos of three items: a beer pretzel, a trail mix bar, and a bunch of grapes. The results were as follows, including the actual calories count according to the packaging: Beer Pretzel, 213-320 calories; 90 calories Trail Mix Bar, 138-207 calories; 140 calories Grapes, 37-56 calories; 45 calories, est. As you can see, the app worked perfectly for the trail mix bar; not so much with the beer pretzel. Still, I was impressed with the findings. If you can live with calorie ranges and knowing they are sometimes off, MealSnap is the app for you.

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