We study how dietary assessment instruments — food-frequency questionnaires, 24-hour recalls, weighed-food records, and the newer generation of image-based and AI-mediated tools — perform against weighed-food reference, and how their reported accuracy compares with the methodology used to produce it.
Our publications are released open-access under CC BY 4.0. We do not accept funding from, and do not enter commercial relationships with, any of the dietary assessment products evaluated in our work — see our funding statement and conflict-of-interest policy.
Background: Image-based and AI-assisted dietary assessment applications have proliferated in both consumer and clinical contexts, yet independent replication of vendor-reported accuracy remains sparse and methodologicall…
Photo-based and manual-entry dietary assessment represent the two dominant modalities in consumer dietary tracking. Their relative accuracy has been examined in a growing but heterogeneous literature, and their performan…
Manual-entry dietary tracking depends on the food database against which entries are matched. The quality and provenance of these databases — the fraction of entries from analytical sources, the fraction user-submitted, …
Consumer dietary assessment tools are increasingly recommended for patient self-monitoring in weight management, type-2 diabetes, pre-surgical optimisation, and other clinical contexts. The accuracy threshold at which su…
Portion estimation for mixed dishes — stews, curries, casseroles, stir-fries, composite salads, and similar preparations whose ingredients are not separable on visual inspection — is the single source of error that most …
The Initiative is small. We pre-register protocols, publish weighed-food protocols and code, prefer Bland-Altman and equivalence testing over null-hypothesis significance for agreement claims, and report limits of agreement as our primary outcome for accuracy work. Where we evaluate commercial products, we evaluate the public-facing surface as a black box; we do not enter commercial NDAs.