CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.
Is tracking your food worth it? I spent six weeks testing an AI meal-tracking app to answer that question. Getty Image/Zooey Liao/CNET
Have you ever looked at food packaging or even a meal on your plate and thought, "How healthy is this?" That's the question today's food and barcode scanning apps aim to answer with tools that provide food healthiness scores at the click of a button. Nowadays many of them even utilize AI to provide summaries of why certain foods are rated more healthy than others.
I spent six weeks testing one such app, Zoe Health: AI Meal Tracker, which uses AI photo logging, an AI chatbot, a processed food risk scale, a diet score, a plant counter and more to help you be more mindful of the food you eat. I also consulted a registered dietitian to get their thoughts on these features.
How the Zoe Health 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.
"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," says Federica Amati, head nutritionist at Zoe, on what inspired the app's creation.
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.
... continue reading