How Crowdsourcing Can Help You Lose Weight

Having strong support is one of the keys to reaching a goal—and that's definitely true when it comes to dieting. Thing is, your weight-loss support network may not have to help you out face-to-face. And in fact, the feedback doesn't even need to come from people you've met in real life. That's the takeaway of a new study published in the Journal of the American Informatics Association, which found that nutrition info crowd-sourced from app users was just as sound as info that came from nutrition experts.

In the past few years, there's been a surge in smartphone apps that allow users to upload a photo of a meal and ask other users to weigh in on how healthy it is—so researchers decided to investigate just how accurate this crowdsourced food feedback is. Using an app called Eatery, they took a look at 450 photos of foods and/or drinks that had been previously uploaded by 333 users in the U.S. and Europe. The app lets users rate the items in the photos on a sliding scale from "fit" (healthy) to "fat" (unhealthy). Three researchers with nutrition backgrounds also rated the food and drinks in the photos, basing their ratings on the 2010 U.S. Dietary Guidelines. The result: The crowdsourced nutritional ratings and expert ratings showed strong similarities. "The findings suggest that a large group of untrained peers can provide feedback comparable to trained raters who are familiar with the U.S. Dietary Guidelines using a basic rating scale," the researchers wrote in the study.

It's encouraging to know that when it comes to diet advice, your social network might just have your back. Still, you'll want to be careful when consulting non-experts for health-related advice. One of the reasons the crowdsourced info in the study may have turned out to be more or less accurate is that a large pool of app users were rating each food on a scale that wasn't super-specific—but in real life, if you ask two friends more concrete weight-loss questions, your odds of getting an accurate and reliable answer might be significantly lower. If you're looking for more guidance on how to drop pounds in a healthy way, definitely feel free to consult people you know—but you should also keep an eye on our weight-loss channel.

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