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The Zoe Health app can help you learn more about the food you eat with its AI chatbot. Getty Image/Zooey Liao/CNET
Have you ever picked up an item in a grocery store or looked down at the meal in front of you and asked yourself, "How healthy is this?" Today's AI food logging and barcode scanning apps can help you answer that question. For the past six weeks, I tested one that has it all: the Plus version of the Zoe Health: AI Meal Tracker.
I've spent the previous 11 years reporting on health trends, misinformation and testing products that claim to have the power to improve our lives. This experience has made me curious about the wellness crazes, apps and other gadgets that promise a healthier lifestyle, so I was particularly interested in seeing if the Zoe app is one that's worth adding to your phone's home screen.
When I asked Dr. Federica Amati, head nutritionist at Zoe, about the motivation behind the app, she said, "The inspiration was to make something that was super easy to use, really fun, positive in its messaging and to turn the typical nutrition tracker on its head, so to create something that doesn't feel like you're trying to not eat anything."
How the Zoe app works
The Zoe app was designed by the creators of the world's largest nutrition study and combines several features that could be beneficial for learning more about your nutrition -- that is, if they work correctly. Here was my experience.
AI photo logging: It's fast and weirdly accurate
The AI photo-logging feature allows you to take a photo of your meal to see a breakdown of the ingredients (which you can edit) and the nutrition facts, along with a food score and an overview of the food and why it received the score it did from Ziggie, the app's AI nutrition coach. The food score ranges from 0 to 100 and indicates how certain foods may impact your health.
During clinical trials, Amati says the company tested manually logging meal photos and weighing all the included ingredients versus using AI for photo logging. "We compared [AI photo logging] to manual logging, and it is above 95% in terms of accuracy match, so we're the first validated photo-logging tool on the market," she says.
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