These apps promise clarity. Take a photo of your meal, let artificial intelligence identify the ingredients, and instantly see your calorie count, macronutrient breakdown, and whether you are hitting your daily targets. For millions of Australians, food tracking apps have become the digital version of a nutrition coach living in their pocket.
The appeal makes sense. Most popular commercial smartphone apps for nutrition care available in Australia were food and nutrient trackers of acceptable to good quality. AI features were increasingly integrated, appearing in 7 out of 18 apps, including image recognition of foods and drinks, voice-to-text meal logging, chatbots, and algorithmic calculations for energy expenditure personalisation. For people trying to lose weight or manage their health, these tools genuinely work. Fitness apps have proven effective in helping people lose weight; a meta-analysis of data from 41 studies found that the average body mass index score across the studies dropped significantly for participants who used mobile fitness apps compared to those who didn't.
Yet the Wired article testing these apps uncovered something more complicated: alongside genuine progress toward nutrition goals came unexpected anxiety. That experience, it turns out, is common. More than one-third of participants in research studies retrospectively reported the perceptions that use of a calorie tracking app at least "somewhat" contributed to their disordered eating patterns. Mental health experts believe fitness apps can exacerbate symptoms of eating disorders because tracking numbers often induces rigid, inflexible thinking regarding health, diet, and exercise.
The harm is not universal, however. This matters. Those using a calorie tracking app for weight-control or shape reasons were more likely to report that the app had contributed to several eating disorder symptoms (food preoccupation, all-or-none thinking around food, food anxiety) than those using an app for health or disease prevention reasons. Among dietary self-monitoring naive undergraduate women with low-risk of an eating disorder, dietary self-monitoring via MyFitnessPal for 1 month did not increase eating disorder risk, impact other aspects of mental health, or alter health behaviours including dietary intake. The user's starting point and motivation, research shows, shape the outcome.
For Australian users, accuracy remains another concern. Manual food-logging apps overestimated energy intake for the Western diet by an average of 1040 kilojoules, while they underestimated energy intake for the Asian diet and the recommended diet by an average of 1520 kilojoules and 944 kilojoules respectively. AI-integrated food apps often had difficulty accurately identifying energy content for mixed Asian dishes; for example the calories for beef pho were overestimated by 49 percent, while pearl milk tea had calorie underestimations of up to 76 percent. For a diverse nation, this gap matters.
To enhance the credibility and accuracy of nutrition apps, creators should engage dietitians in their development, train AI models with diverse food images particularly for mixed and culturally varied dishes, expand food composition databases and educate users on capturing high-quality food images for better recognition accuracy.
The real question is not whether food tracking apps work. They do. The question is whether they work for you. People who report using fitness apps primarily for weight control or body image reasons rather than health reasons are significantly more likely to experience symptoms of eating disorders; before using fitness apps, it may be useful to ask yourself whether your motive is related to body dissatisfaction or health. A person tracking macros to manage type 2 diabetes likely faces a different relationship with the app than someone obsessing over a number on the scale. Know yourself first. Let the app serve your actual health, not a punitive version of it.