App to track dietary data, helps lose weight

If you plan to lose weight, some apps can do the job for you more efficiently by reliably tracking dietary data and preparing what suits your body the most, say researchers.

Smartphones may offer users an advantage over traditional methods when tracking diet data, a team from Arizona State University found.

For the study, researchers recruited healthy adults and randomly divided them into groups based on their diet-tracking method.

The groups consisted of those who used the "Lose It!" app, those who recorded dietary intake using the memo function of their smartphone and those who used traditional paper and pencil to record their diet.

Although smartphone use did not affect total weight loss among the 47 participants who completed the study, researchers observed better diet tracking results among those in the smartphone use groups.

The memo and paper and pencil groups reported twice the number of missing days as the group using the app.

"Participants using a commercially available app more consistently entered complete days of dietary data compared with the paper-and-pencil group and also withdrew from the study less often than the other groups," explained lead author Christopher Wharton.

"It is possible that app technology offers a less burdensome method for tracking data compared with traditional tools," he added.