How will a camera phone help me eat better?

Great question - one that we are bursting with excitement to answer. They let you record and learn from everything you eat. This is the most important thing you can do to eat better for a lifetime. And, they let you do this easily.

You may have kept a food diary before. Chances are it was a great healthy decision you made. Chances also are, that it took a lot of time to maintain. Paper food diaries are a great end but not a great means to eating better. With your camera phone, you won't need to write down what you eat!

Best of all, your dietitian will look at photos of what you actually eat - not what you think you eat to give you custom food coaching. In effect your dietitian will "see" every bite.

Wow, that's a bunch of perky bullshit.

most chess? not intelligent enough -- impressive number crunching, though -- do they have programs that can learn how to beat specific people over time?

I think there are chess playing programs that learn, but the ones that use brute-force computation can beat the pants off of them.

Wow, that's a bunch of perky bullshit.

What if I told you the dieticians on the other side of the computer were actually robots?

Photographing your food...not such a bad idea. I keep a food diary, and often disremember portion sizes.

Do you know if there have been lessons learnt from chess-playing research that have been parlayed into things that touch our lives? AI seems designed for lots of ivory tower applications, but also surprising discoveries that end up in the strangest places (the way the podcast lady was talking, Kismet begat Roomba. And now I really want a damned Roomba).

What if I told you the dieticians on the other side of the computer were actually robots?

VERBAL LITTER.

I keep a food diary, and often disremember portion sizes.

I don't clean my plate, so I'd need before and after pictures. And judging by how long it can take me to eat any one thing (I've been working on this slice of cake since morning), I'd need lots of pics.

When I was tracking my food, though, I needed to map the quantities to something measurable, not just described. So photos wouldn't be that useful.

OMG I just reached out to touch the google braille.

This is a surprising new low after last night's sudoku disaster.

What if I told you the dieticians on the other side of the computer were actually robots?

Next you'll be saying that you switched my regular brewed coffee with rich, aromatic Folgers Crystals.

Chances also are, that it took a lot of time to maintain. Paper food diaries are a great end but not a great means to eating better. With your camera phone, you won't need to write down what you eat!

I thought the effort involved was one of the benefits because writing something down forces you to pay attention to it. Take away that, and the whole thing seems kind of pointless.