Munchy is an iPhone app that uses AI to analyze diet. It is primarily designed with two goals in mind:
• To give the user a better understanding of the food we eat
• To help the user with long-term diet tracking
If you’re interested in trying Munchy Beta, you’ll need an iPhone with at least iOS 16. Sorry, Android users. You can contact me through the platform where you’re reading this or send an email. Once you’ve done that, you’ll receive a reply within a few days with more details.
And now you’re probably wondering:
- Does it even work?
Yes, it does. If you take a picture of what you’re eating, I believe I can demonstrate that the accuracy over time is better than 20%. In reality, I think it’s better than 10%, but I’d rather under-promise than over-promise.
- And is 20% good?
Yes, it is. Manual diet tracking takes time and always depends on either weighing the food or making a personal judgment. Because people are people, it easily becomes an uncertain process. Hospitals and dietitians who use diet tracking say that if the manual tracking is within 20%, it’s considered good and very useful. I’m confident that as long as you remember to take a picture, Munchy is just as good—if not better—than manual diet tracking.
- Is it better than if I weigh everything?
No, it’s not. If you truly weigh and record everything you eat, then weighing and directly selecting the food you eat will be a more accurate way of tracking. But again, you have to consider situations where it’s impossible to be 100% certain about what’s in the food, let alone weigh it.
- Will I have to go through endless lifestyle questions?
No. Munchy is not a lifestyle app that gives you encouraging tips throughout the day or guides you through why broccoli is healthier than gravy. It’s a no-nonsense diet tracking app where you simply take pictures of what you eat, and after a while, Munchy can start giving you useful statistics about your eating habits. What you choose to do with the statistics is entirely up to you. Munchy does include guidelines for good nutrition and can use AI to analyze your current data, but it will always be up to you to use the information.
Basically, Munchy doesn’t care how much fast food or cake you eat, but it will of course show up in the statistics.
- And what about my GDPR rights? What about me? ME?
Our eating habits are personal, and no one wants to receive Karen Wolf ads the day after binge-eating 2 kg of cookies while watching Titanic. Munchy Beta collects data on how much you use it, but it doesn’t collect any information about what you eat. The pictures you take are sent to AI, but they’re deleted after a few months and are not used for anything else. The only reason they are stored is for legal purposes, for example, if they need to be used in legal cases.
All your diet data is stored only on your phone and is not sent anywhere else.
Even though I need your Apple email to sign you up for the Beta test, I can’t extract any information from it. In that regard, it’s like any other email. The test runs through Apple Testflight, so it’s safer than even death and taxes.
If you’ve made it this far, you might be interested in participating. Write to me at
lars.b.amundsen@gmail.com
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