Is there a way for me to take a picture of a food and find nutritional values without AI? I sometimes use duck.ai to ask because, when making tortilla for example idk what could be exact because while I can read values for a tortilla, I don’t have a way to check the same for meat and other similar stuff I put in tortilla.
Wow, I am old. This has never in my life been an issue? I just used a calorie counter and people’s own recipes for estimates. I guess that would be the old fashioned way of doing this and probably what AI is doing most of the time. Pulling a recipe, looking at the ingredients and quantities and spitting back some values. Granted it can probably do it far faster than we can. But, I got by with that method for decades…
Problem is, many things I have do not have packaging with nutritional values and similar and I need to use internet for this, which AI usually is the fastest to explain, especially because English is not my first language and food I am eating is not well known in English (Balkan)
Yeah, I always used a generic app for counting calories. You could look up raw ingredients, add them to a list, then get a nutritional value and calories for the whole list (ie recipe) and even save that and share it. I’m guess apps like this probably rely on AI now though too. I think it was just called “calorie counter” with a blue logo. Some of them have international barcode scanners too but it is still a lot of guessing and it takes time if you’re not preparing the same things regularly. But they had a pretty robust user curated database for non-packaged foods. You just had to choose what was closest to what you were using or investigate and make your own custom entries for later.
You’re probably just gonna have to get better at guesstimating, (e.g. by comparing to similar pre-made options and their nutrition labels), or use an app for tracking nutrition that integrates with OpenFoodFacts and get a scale to weigh your ingredients. (or a similar database, though most use OpenFoodFacts even if they have their own, too)
I don’t really know of any other good ways to just take photos and get a good nutritional read, and pretty much any implementation would use “AI” to some degree, though probably more a dedicated machine learning model over an LLM, which would use more power and water, but the method of just weighing out each part of a meal and putting it in an app works pretty well.
Like, for me, I can scan the barcode of the tortillas I buy to import the nutrition facts into the (admittedly kind of janky) app I use (Waistline), then plop my plate on my scale, put in some ground beef, scan the barcode from the beef packaging, and then I can put in how many grams I have. Very accurate, but a little time consuming.
Not sure if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, though.
In that case, I’d say just find any food that’s just similar enough, and use that. It’s better to have a close-ish estimate than none at all.
For example, I had no clue what the nutrition would be like for the meatloaf I had the other day, so I just entered it as if it was pure ground beef and called it good enough.
Is there a way for me to take a picture of a food and find nutritional values without AI? I sometimes use duck.ai to ask because, when making tortilla for example idk what could be exact because while I can read values for a tortilla, I don’t have a way to check the same for meat and other similar stuff I put in tortilla.
Wow, I am old. This has never in my life been an issue? I just used a calorie counter and people’s own recipes for estimates. I guess that would be the old fashioned way of doing this and probably what AI is doing most of the time. Pulling a recipe, looking at the ingredients and quantities and spitting back some values. Granted it can probably do it far faster than we can. But, I got by with that method for decades…
Problem is, many things I have do not have packaging with nutritional values and similar and I need to use internet for this, which AI usually is the fastest to explain, especially because English is not my first language and food I am eating is not well known in English (Balkan)
Yeah, I always used a generic app for counting calories. You could look up raw ingredients, add them to a list, then get a nutritional value and calories for the whole list (ie recipe) and even save that and share it. I’m guess apps like this probably rely on AI now though too. I think it was just called “calorie counter” with a blue logo. Some of them have international barcode scanners too but it is still a lot of guessing and it takes time if you’re not preparing the same things regularly. But they had a pretty robust user curated database for non-packaged foods. You just had to choose what was closest to what you were using or investigate and make your own custom entries for later.
You’re probably just gonna have to get better at guesstimating, (e.g. by comparing to similar pre-made options and their nutrition labels), or use an app for tracking nutrition that integrates with OpenFoodFacts and get a scale to weigh your ingredients. (or a similar database, though most use OpenFoodFacts even if they have their own, too)
I don’t really know of any other good ways to just take photos and get a good nutritional read, and pretty much any implementation would use “AI” to some degree, though probably more a dedicated machine learning model over an LLM, which would use more power and water, but the method of just weighing out each part of a meal and putting it in an app works pretty well.
Like, for me, I can scan the barcode of the tortillas I buy to import the nutrition facts into the (admittedly kind of janky) app I use (Waistline), then plop my plate on my scale, put in some ground beef, scan the barcode from the beef packaging, and then I can put in how many grams I have. Very accurate, but a little time consuming.
Not sure if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, though.
Actually, I am using waistline, but there are some food I can’t find and are hard to find nutritional values, and I am bad at guessing anything
In that case, I’d say just find any food that’s just similar enough, and use that. It’s better to have a close-ish estimate than none at all.
For example, I had no clue what the nutrition would be like for the meatloaf I had the other day, so I just entered it as if it was pure ground beef and called it good enough.
Yeah, true it is just that I kinda want to be perfectly accurate but yeah you are right