Sixty packets
We scanned sixty packets into five apps. The failure rate was not where we expected.
Barcode scanning is presented as a solved problem. It is solved for recognising the code and not solved for what happens next.
A small magazine about things that claim to work
11 pieces
Shorter pieces. Something we noticed, tested briefly, and thought was worth writing down.
Sixty packets
Barcode scanning is presented as a solved problem. It is solved for recognising the code and not solved for what happens next.
A one-minute check
Log one food, open the full breakdown, and count the numbers. What you find tells you more about the app than any review will.
A note on geometry
From directly above, a bowl with two inches of rice looks identical to a bowl with four. This is not a software limitation and it will not be fixed.
A labelling rule
Ours, attributed, or the maker's own claim. Most product writing collapses the second and third, and that collapse is where readers get misled.
A round number and two studies
The target on almost every fitness tracker began as the name of a 1960s pedometer. When researchers finally tested it, the benefit was real, but it levelled off earlier than the round number suggests, and earlier still for older adults.
A rule nobody wrote down
The '8×8' rule is repeated everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. When a physiologist went looking for the science behind it, he found a 1945 recommendation whose second sentence had been forgotten.
The critics have a point
Imprecise labels, crowd-sourced entries, logging that turns into another chore — the complaints against calorie tracking are real. The research on dietary self-monitoring draws a narrower, more useful conclusion than either side of that argument usually admits.
A lens and a claim
Screens delaying sleep is real physiology. Whether a lens coating corrects it is a separate question, and a systematic review of seventeen trials found the evidence too thin to answer it either way.
A habit worth breaking
We searched twenty common foods across four apps and checked where the correct entry ranked. On crowd-sourced databases, position told us nothing at all.
Reading a benchmark
±1.1% does not mean your dinner will be within 1.1%. Here is what these numbers actually describe, and the three questions to ask of any of them.
An experiment on ourselves
Two of us weighed and recorded every item for seven days, then logged the same food normally. The gap between the two was larger than the gap between the best and worst app.