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

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
It'd be joining me now I have Nane Girl. Doctor
Michelle Dickinson, Good morning, Good morning. You've got a really
interesting study today. And I don't know how I feel
about this.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Yeah, I don't know how I feel about it either,
but it's technology, so let's talk about it. I don't
know about you, but I have a rule which is,
if I'm like eating food, it's sort of bad for me.
Food chocolate cake while I'm standing up looking in the
pantry for other food, it doesn't count as calories.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
It didn't happen. It didn't exist, and it didn't happen.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
And you know, I think many of us are like, wow,
I just eat ate some nuts on the fly. I
sort of forgot I did that. And then we're all
wondering why am I not losing weight or why am
I putting on weight? And there's an extra probably five
hundred galories of snacking a day that you're not monitoring
that is actually not helping you with your weight loss
or your weight maintenance. And so this is a really
simple study and it's sort of really common sense is

(01:05):
in the American Journal of Clinic Nutrition, and it says,
if you want to actually be accurate about your calorie
in cake, just take photos of it. We all have
our smartphones with us. Take a photo of the meals
that you eat and the snacks that ewei and at
the end of the day, go through that slide show
have a look, and it's going to be like yes.
So they took basically one hundred and fifty two volunteers

(01:25):
and said here's your meals, eat what you want, and
at the end of the day, just write down and
record and recall what you ate. And those who just
did it by memory totally lie. They made it up.
They were like, oh, yeah, I barely ate anything.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
I was so good my dying one glass of wine.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Right, And then those who had to take a photo
everything had to confront their evidence. And actually them taking
a photo of it made them think, am I actually
going to eat this? Because now somebody's going to see
or I'm going to put into an app whatever. So
that's all cool, and yeah, that's a really nice study,
blah blah blah. So it's open source if you want
to watch it. But what I want to talk about
is the University of Waterloo last week also came out
with a study where there's a professor there who has

(02:01):
invented artificial intelligence that is tied up to a camera
that watches you around the house. And this one is
able to identify the type of food, the volume for
your food, and the calorific intake of the food on
anything that goes into your mouth that is either on
a spoon, a fork, or chopsticks. And so it is

(02:22):
now watching you all the time. Because still if you
take a photo of your food, you might lie. You
might go, oh, I'm just not going to take a
photo of those five cookies, and it won't really count.
It's watching you all the time, and it's now got
this beautiful sort of intelligence that can identify different foods.
And what it can do is identify different ingredients. So
you might not even have a standard recipe or something

(02:43):
from a box. You might have made your own homemade
whatever bruccoli soup, and it will be able to identify
a lot of those ingredients to work out and estimate
the calories within that. And then at the end of
the day you're like, uh uh, just see you know,
you don't remember sneaking in that extra you know, chocolate
peanut that you enjoyed, but I here's a photo of you.
Here's how many calories it was. Here's what your mouth

(03:03):
looked like as you were devouring it.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
It's just an extra step, right, And it's quite a
sensible idea for people to write down what they're eating
or to record what they're eating, because if they are,
if they are trying to eat well or eat better,
it gives you. It's a reminder, it's it's an opportunity
to actually realistically look at what you are eating and
work out how you might adjust it and eat better.

(03:27):
But this just feels like every time I had a
knife or fork in my hand or picked up a
mag I'd just be like, it's watching you.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
I'm being watched. Yeah, I switched.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Its judging me while I eat, you know, with what
I eat?

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yes, yeah, I mean it's not judging, you're just calculate,
But it feels like it's judging you. And then you go, well,
if that technology exists, are there going to be companies, like,
especially in America, health insurance companies where you go, oh, no,
I'm only like overweight because it's my genetics.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
And they're like.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Five, So just say, you know, we've got a record
of well, could be used for anything, yes, anything we
do in our home.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
At that point, I love tech, but every time I
think about it, I go, we can always be used
for evil. I'm sure it's great for you on a
diet to be watched all the time by a big
Brother camera. But maybe maybe I'll just keep sort of
lying to myself at these chocolate stick.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Hey, really quickly, just while I've got you. My producer
and I Cariy. We saw an article this morning that
you had done with one News TVNZ in one News
about water bottles, and we thought we'd throw it into
the panel, but since we have the scientist here who
was sort of involved with telling us actually the reality
of it. The question was how often should you clean

(04:38):
your drink bottle? And what is actually in or on
our drink bottle? And in this article you tell us
that the bacteria that you find in your water bottles
is way more than you would find on your toilet
seat forty times or just a little bit, just.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
A little bit, because we're disgusting because we just put
water on our bottles, we eat our food, we're chewing
our food. We'd take a set from a bottle. All
of that food, all of our aural bacteria goes into that.
We then use finger to pick up the straw, open
the lid, and then we don't wash it for months
because they're like, oh, it's only water. No it's not.
It's all the gems from everywhere, and there's like mold
spores in the air that are just hanging out in there.

(05:16):
And if you've got one of those bottles that's got
like the complex straw and all of that, like all
the nesties are growing. So I've got rid of all
the ones with the straw. But I just use like
you have the best element steel bot in a wide
Actually we do wash outs every couple of days. I
just sit on the bench and I get washed. And
I thought everyone did that and carrying My producer looked
at me and I'm sorry to throw urry under the bus.
I don't think she evil washes you waters months or

(05:38):
years some people and then people take it to the
gym where everybody's sweating on it. No, it's disgusting. You
have the best, so a steel open mouthed water bottle.
Throw it in the dish washer once a week. Give
it a good wash with a bit of soap and water.
You'll be fine. You've got those plastic ones with all
the straws and the complexities, you are growing our whole
ecosystem in there.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
It's disgusting. Thank you so much for clearing that up.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
For more from the Sunday session with friend Jessica Rudgin,
listen live to use talks It be of nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.