Taking pictures of your food may help you to lose weight.

Published Mar 8, 2017

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New research suggests that uploading images of your latest culinary creation will allow you to keep track of your dietary intake.

Image-based dietary assessment allows those seeking to shed some pounds to record their recent consumption.

Dietitians can then monitor their patients effectively, pointing out where any possible improvements can be made.

Experts say this method also helps to reduce any inaccuracies that could arise from more traditional dietary methods.

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Currently, many patients keep records or fill in questionnaires to document what they have recently consumed. But depending on their ability to correctly recall portion sizes and specific ingredients, many things can go wrong.

With the prevalence of smartphones, photography is emerging as a means of augmenting food-intake information gathering.

For example, a pre-diabetes patient could take a picture of everything they ate for three days, according to researchers from Oregon State University.

A dietitian could then analyze those photos to make recommendations for dietary improvements.

But before that can happen, dietitians who review the photos need more consistent, formal training.

Those wanting to shed the pounds must learn how to take the correct photographs, says study author Mary Cluskey.

She added: 'We need to work with people on their ability to take photos.

'Shoot at a 45-degree angle to the food, preferably while you're standing, and make sure you have adequate light.

'We want to make it as easy as possible for people to provide information that's as accurate as possible.'

Researchers tested the ability of 114 nutrition students to identify foods and portion sizes.

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They correctly identified the nine different foods nearly 80 per cent of the time. However, the participants struggled with the latter test after looking at images of meals on plates.

Two in five of their estimates were within a 10 per cent margin of how much the food actually weighed.

Foods without a definite shape, such as ice cream, were the hardest to assess, the study published in the journal Nutrients showed.

Dietary intake information is important to individuals using nutrition-based therapy for conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.

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