Smartphones may help monitor diet, lose weight

Smartphones can play a crucial role in helping people monitor their diet and keep to strict regimes, according to a new US study.
Researchers from the Arizona State University examined how smartphone use affected weight loss goals and determined that smartphones may offer users an advantage over traditional methods when tracking diet data.
Roughly 83 per cent of Americans now own a mobile phone and 45 per cent own smartphones with Internet access, researchers said.
For this study, researchers recruited healthy, weight-stable adults and semi-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, the researchers observed better diet tracking results among those in the smartphone-use groups.

"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," lead author Christopher Wharton, PhD, said.
"It's possible that app technology offers a less burdensome method for tracking data compared with traditional tools," said Wharton.
The memo and paper-and-pencil groups reported twice the number of missing days as the group using the app, but diet quality was not improved among app users.

Researchers concluded that food and nutrition professionals should consider using app technology in conjunction with dietary counselling for weight management.