App takes the counting out of calorie counting

A new app by leading fitness social network and calorie counting app developer Daily Burn, Inc. aims to takes the hassle out of calorie counting.

Using Daily Burn's Meal Snap app, calorie counters simply snap a picture of the food or drink they are about to consume - instead of manually entering each item and the corresponding number of calories into a food diary or app - to record their calorie intake.

"We've heard from members over the years that calorie counting can be time consuming and harder for some of our users to sustain over time," said Andy Smith, CEO, Daily Burn, Inc. in an April 5 press release.

"We knew we had to come up with a solution - one that provides people the simplest way possible for them to become aware of what they put into their body and understand their daily consumption. Meal Snap is the ultimate in simplicity. You take the picture, Meal Snap does the rest."

The app works by uploading the food and drink photos to Meal Snap's central database, where the images are automatically identified and assigned a rough calorie range. The figures are sent back to the user within a few minutes.

The app store is bulging with calorie counting apps. Apps like Calorie Tracker by Livestrong.com, Fit Now, DailyBurn and Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker help users keep a food and exercise diary, while apps like FoodScanner let you scan packaged foods to record the number of calories you consume.

Meal Snap, however, is the first food tracking app to offer a one-step approach to calorie counting.

While Meal Snap might sound like the perfect solution for lazy calorie counters, it's still far from being an exact science.

While most early users have found the app to be quite helpful, others are complaining of huge variations in the returned calorie counts.

For example, sending in a picture of a bowl of pretzels and a coke returns a calorie count of between 389 and 584 calories, while a small handful of cashews ranges from 150 to 614 calories.

Despite the current discrepancies, people who have struggled to stick with a food diary in the past might find the app is worth its $2.99 price for the added convenience of one-step calorie recording.

For more information about Meal Snap and to see meals that have recently been snapped, visit http://www.mealsnap.com.