Crowd-sourcing apps on mobile phones could help encourage healthy eating, researchers say today.
At least one app already exists which allows users to post photographs of their meals.
These are then rated as healthy or unhealthy by other users of the app – or as "fit" or "fat".
Researchers compared the ratings given by app users with expert ratings given by public health students.
They found that both sets of ratings were similar. App users tended to rate fruit and vegetables as "fit" and meals full of sweet drinks and processed foods as "fat."
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Dr Gabrielle Turner-McGrievy, of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA, said: "Crowd-sourcing has potential as a way to improve adherence to dietary self monitoring over a longer period of time.
“The results of this study found that when basic feedback on diet quality by peer raters is crowd-sourced, it is comparable to feedback from expert raters, and that peers can rate both healthy and unhealthy foods in the expected direction."
The use of crowdsourcing for dietary self-monitoring: crowdsourced ratings of food pictures are comparable to ratings by trained observers Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 5 August 2014; doi 10.1136/amiajnl-2014-002636
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