If you are struggling to maintain or lose weight even though you think you are eating a healthy diet, new research out this week in the journal The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has a simple tip to help - take a photo of everything you eat through the day to help jog your memory.

In the study, researchers gave a day's worth of food to 152 volunteers and split them into different groups. 

One group was asked to take photos of their meals using a specific food recording app, whereas another group was just asked at the end of the day to remember what they had eaten.

The actual estimated caloric intake for the day was much more accurate for those volunteers who had taken photos of their food compared to those relying on their memories and ties into previous research showing how our memory often underestimates how much we eat in a day. Our brains are especially good at forgetting that piece of chocolate we ate while standing looking for inspiration in the pantry, or the two cupcakes we ate at the office morning tea.  By getting into a routine of creating a digital record of everything that touches our lips, we are much more likely to have a realistic idea of where some of our extra calories might be coming from.

While this new research might help our Instagram accounts to fill up with arty shots of our lunch each day, other researchers at the University of Waterloo have gone one step further and created an AI driven system that watches and records every mouthful of food that you eat.  Trained to analyse food on a spoon, chopstick or fork this new system can identify a wide range of food items and calculates the volume of food that you with within a 4 percent margin of error. This new analysis uses image recognition to identify the ingredients of your meal just by looking at it as it videos every bite that you eat. While the tech makes the process of food logging less manual and time consuming for the user, the idea of constantly being watched every time you put something in your mouth might still be a bit too 'Big Brother' for many of us.

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If you are struggling to maintain or lose weight even though you think you are eating a healthy diet, new research out this week in the journal <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916524004568?via%3Dihub" data-anchor="?via%3Dihub">The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition</a> has a simple tip to help - take a photo of everything you eat through the day to help jog your memory. 
In the study, researchers gave a day's worth of food to 152 volunteers and split them into different groups.  
One group was asked to take photos of their meals using a specific food recording app, whereas another group was just asked at the end of the day to remember what they had eaten. 
The actual estimated caloric intake for the day was much more accurate for those volunteers who had taken photos of their food compared to those relying on their memories and ties into previous research showing how our memory often underestimates how much we eat in a day. Our brains are especially good at forgetting that piece of chocolate we ate while standing looking for inspiration in the pantry, or the two cupcakes we ate at the office morning tea.  By getting into a routine of creating a digital record of everything that touches our lips, we are much more likely to have a realistic idea of where some of our extra calories might be coming from. 
While this new research might help our Instagram accounts to fill up with arty shots of our lunch each day, other researchers at the University of Waterloo have gone one step further and created an AI driven system that watches and records every mouthful of food that you eat.  Trained to analyse food on a spoon, chopstick or fork this new system can identify a wide range of food items and calculates the volume of food that you with within a 4 percent margin of error. This new analysis uses image recognition to identify the ingredients of your meal just by looking at it as it videos every bite that you eat. While the tech makes the process of food logging less manual and time consuming for the user, the idea of constantly being watched every time you put something in your mouth might still be a bit too 'Big Brother' for many of us. 
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News, opinion, analysis, lifestyle and entertainment – we’ve got your Sunday morning listening covered with The Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin on Newstalk ZB.

The Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin

Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on the new AI systems recording what people eat

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/6db80467-9a0a-42ed-a020-b1890183759c/transcript