Purdue Researchers Click Nutrition With Camera Diet Study

Dumb digital dieting.

"A Purdue University team plans to help health-conscious people better gauge what's on their plates by using their cell phone cameras."

Steve, do I see the fPhone coming?

Here is how it claims to work, but will not.

"Currently, dieters can subscribe to online sites that monitor eating habits by critiquing photos they send of their meals. The idea offers busy people the chance to get nutritional feedback without spending time writing down all of their meals, drinks and snacks.

'This idea of using cameras to evaluate your diet by snapping pictures of your meals is not a new one," Boushey said. "What makes our proposal different is that we're designing the software to better evaluate portion sizes and nutritional content...'"

Here is the team:

"Edward Delp, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and an expert in image analysis, will be working to create a reliable method for estimating the sizes of food in the photos. David Ebert, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will primarily be responsible for techniques to help confirm the portion sizes of the food in pictures. Kyle Lutes, an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Technology, will put his experience with hand-held computing devices to work by designing necessary programming. "

Besides needing sophisticated terrain mapping software to determine the peaks and valleys in the mashed potatoes, density analysis capabilities, sniffer technology and programs for determining the presence of butter and sour cream, temperature sensors for evaluating the volatilization of fragrant molecules and other high-tech stuff, people have to be willing to order food, input data, get served, wait to eat and then make alterations.

(DoD, TSA and HomeSec would love to get their hands on the aforementioned technology, I wager.)

What could possibly go wrong in a Rube Goldberg scheme like this?

"Evaluating food intake without the hassle of diet journals could impact American health, she said. "

Yes.

Negatively.

Purdue is the same institution of lower learning that brought us the "four-year degree with a concentration in" personal training.

This is clear proof that Purdue students are "special needs" cases, because only "special kids" would need 4 years to learn something so simple.

These researchers must have graduated from Purdue or fulfilled the lowest percentile requirement for appointment to the faculty.

How else can one explain their stupidity?

"'We're committed to figuring out the details,' Boushey said. 'Diet is one of the most difficult exposures to measure in terms of how it contributes to disease. People are so confused about diet these days. We want to offer good advice to the public so they can stop throwing up their hands and saying, 'I'm going to eat whatever I want.'"

Rest assured, their efforts will lead to more trouble.

"Good advice" from these folks is an impossibility.