🧠 Don't make me think
Ep 29: What's in that breakfast sandwich anyway? An exploration of nutrition, technology, and artificial intelligence. And, a bug report for a major worldwide news outlet.
It’s the last Monday in March. Really? Hard to believe. This edition is a little longer than others (and you may need to click through if you’re reading this in your email to read the entire article), but please do so if you’re interested in nutrition, technology, and AI. It’s worth it, and I may or may not find out that the New York Times has at least one thing wrong.
A Tip for the Modern Worker
Don't present a choice if there really isn't one. People love to have their opinions and feelings considered when a choice is being made. When you involve others in your analysis and decision-making, you give them a stake in the outcome and make them feel empowered. If you've already decided, though, don't give the impression that you'll consider their input. State your rationale, make the decision, and move on. Anything else will seem disingenuous.
This tip is one of 365 in my Handbook for the Modern Worker. This one’s equally good for parenting and the boardroom. Empowerment is, well, powerful, and nothing evaporates it more than giving someone the impression that they have a voice when they don’t.
#365DayDraw
I drew this and wrote the accompanying annotation as part of my #365DayDraw project 7 years ago today.
We believe it's all connected somehow
Ah, another abstract gem. An eye, a hand, a spiral, and a diamond. What does it all mean? Seven years on, I have no idea. But it’s profound, right?
Commentary
Nutrition Tracking for a Novice
After listening to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Peter Attia about the Science and Art of Longevity, I set out to find a way to accurately track my protein intake. Attia’s recommendation is that you consume one gram of protein per pound of body weight. Since I weigh 180 pounds, that means 180 grams of protein per day, which I know is higher than what I consume. I needed to know how much higher, though, so I turned to some apps for help.
I tried to use MyFitnessPal several years ago in a bid to curb daytime snack cravings. An accountability measure, if you will. The process of entering our foods, which are typically home-cooked and either invented or sourced from one of our few cookbooks, was overwhelmingly complicated. With a renewed focus from Attia’s podcast, I tried to get set up on Noom and only made it through about half of their startup questions before giving up. Just let me in already and try to enter a recipe!
I then tried Carbon, which was recommended in the podcast, and was frustrated they offered no free trial. Undeterred, I forked over $9.99 for a trial month. Like MyFitnessPal, the process of entering custom meals was onerous. I had to enter items one-by-one, resolving them to matches in the database. Entering a breakfast sandwich with a handful of ingredients was passable, but trying to find something I ate at Dinosaur Barbecue was impossible. I felt like these applications would really need to have more buy-in from restaurants and recipe purveyors. Imagine scanning a QR code on a restaurant menu or a recipe that’d feed an accurate per-serving ingredient list into one of these tracker apps. That’d be pure gold.
So, that’s the background for the research I did this morning and the basis for this somewhat lengthier article. Read to the end. It’s worth it.
Nutrition in New York Times Cooking
We subscribe to the New York Times and absolutely love their cooking site. Surely they have nutritional information in their recipes. I went to our favorite recipe for Stuffed Peppers and I found what I was looking for under the ingredient list. It wasn’t terribly easy to parse, but they cited 777 calories per serving with 9 grams of protein.
They also had a nice disclaimer throwing a service called Edamam under the bus if something was awry, and guiding us to a nutritionist for the real breakdown. Nice disclaimer, but I was more interested in what was going on under the hood. Off to Edamam we go!
Edamam’s Nutrition Analysis API
Edamam offers three services:
Nutrition Analysis API: Copy/paste any food recipe and learn its nutrition details in under a second
Food Database API: Get free access to a database with close to 900,000 foods and over 680,000 unique UPC codes
Recipe Search API: Search over 2.3 million recipes by diets, calories, and nutrient ranges
I surmised that the New York Times was relying on Edamam’s Nutrition Analysis API, and I imagine their service, and many others, rely on the USDA Nutrient database as a source of raw data. Edamam offers a free test page for the Nutrition Analysis API, allowing me to paste in ingredients and get fast nutrition results.
I tried it out with the verbatim Stuffed Pepper ingredient list from the New York Times.
4 large red, orange or yellow bell peppers
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup finely chopped fennel bulb (about ½ a small bulb) or celery
1 cup finely chopped yellow onion (about 1 small)
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes
1 pound ground beef (at least 15 percent fat), turkey, chicken or pork
¾ cup dry white wine, chicken broth or vegetable broth
1 (14-ounce) can diced fire-roasted tomatoes
1½ teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste
½ teaspoon black pepper, plus more to taste
1 cup cooked white or brown rice
¼ cup grated Parmesan
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley, plus more for serving (optional)
1 cup shredded mozzarella, provolone or other semifirm cheese
The service spit out a per-ingredient summary of calories and weights per item.
… and also a nutrition card with all of the dimensions I was looking for.
Note that I wasn’t prompted for serving size so that massive calorie number is easily explained as the total calories spread across the 6-8 servings. Divide by 8 and you get 776.75, rounding to 777 for what the New York Times shows on their per-serving nutrition card. So yeah, that’s how they’re doing it.
What about my breakfast sandwich?
Now, on to the home-cooked food you won’t find in any recipe book. Here’s a recent breakfast of ours, using whole wheat toast in lieu of the English muffin we usually use. Hey, we were out. Here’s what we traditionally make it with:
1 whole wheat English muffin
1 egg
1 T chipotle aioli
1/4 C spinach greens
2 slices cheddar cheese
1 Morningstar Farms veggie sausage
Edamam came up with 29 grams of protein, just about what I’d manually calculated after bailing on the apps I mentioned earlier. That was a lot easier, just pasting in the entire list of ingredients and clicking go. Integration is a key piece in making these apps more palatable (pardon the pun). Carbon made me find each ingredient in their structured database. I wondered if it would have been far friendlier to accept things as pasted text like Edamam, or even better, natural language.
ChatGPT to the Rescue?
Ah, time to put artificial intelligence to the test. How would it fare with natural language input for my beloved breakfast sandwich? I asked:
How much protein is in my breakfast sandwich? It has a whole wheat English muffin, an egg, a smear of chipotle aioli, a quarter cup of spinach greens, a few slices of cheddar cheese, and one Morningstar Farms veggie sausage.
ChatGPT’s response:
The amount of protein in your breakfast sandwich depends on the specific brands and amounts of ingredients used. However, I can give you a rough estimate based on average nutritional values.
A whole wheat English muffin typically contains about 4-5 grams of protein, while one large egg contains around 6 grams of protein. A quarter cup of spinach has about 1 gram of protein, and a few slices of cheddar cheese provide approximately 7-8 grams of protein. A Morningstar Farms veggie sausage has around 9 grams of protein.
Assuming your breakfast sandwich contains one of each of these ingredients, the total amount of protein in your sandwich would be approximately 27-30 grams. However, keep in mind that the exact amount of protein may vary based on the specific brands and serving sizes used in your sandwich.
Nice. 29 grams from Edamam squares nicely with a range of 27-30. I followed up:
how many calories?
The number of calories in your breakfast sandwich also depends on the specific brands and amounts of ingredients used. However, here is an estimate of the calories based on average values:
Whole wheat English muffin: 120-140 calories
Large egg: 70-80 calories
Chipotle aioli (1 tablespoon): 80-100 calories
Spinach (1/4 cup): 5-10 calories
Cheddar cheese (1 slice): 70-110 calories
Morningstar Farms veggie sausage: 70-80 calories
Assuming your breakfast sandwich contains one of each of these ingredients, the total number of calories would be approximately 415-500 calories. Again, keep in mind that the exact number of calories may vary based on the specific brands and serving sizes used in your sandwich.
This was pretty close to Edamam’s estimate of 530 calories. Instead of asking for bits of information, I wondered if the chatbot could just give it to me as a nutrition card. It might as well have said, “hold my beer.”
Now that’s really impressive, isn’t it?
Back to the Times
I read that ChatGPT has a new capability to reach out to resources on the Internet in real-time. I wondered how it would handle the Stuffed Peppers recipe.
Okay, nice. But something’s wrong with that calorie count since New York Times and Edamam said it was 777. To make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I had it adjust the servings to 8.
Something’s awry because even when correcting it to 8 servings, the nutrition card bears no resemblance to what Edamam supplied the New York Times with. And there’s little transparency as to why. I thought about challenging the chatbot to explain itself, but I shared my findings with Amy as a cautionary tale in trusting AI.
Amy quickly pointed out that 777 calories sounded waaaaaay too high for a stuffed pepper. I admit: I have no number sense when it comes to the nutritional value of pretty much anything. Amy does, and I’m so jealous of that. We agreed that when it comes to relying on computers, it pays to be a skeptic. You have to use your brain and ask yourself: does the information I’m getting make sense in the context of what I already know? You can’t blindly trust the system.
Who’s Wrong, and Who’s Right?
Someone was lying here, and it wasn’t clear. Could it be the storied New York Times, and subsequently Edamam? Or was it the untiring all-knowing ChatGPT? It was one of them.
You know, the New York Times was feeding the ingredient list to Edamam, who was then parsing each line and doing some math. ChatGPT ostensibly did the same thing, parsing the ingredient list and tallying the nutrients. I started doing some research of my own on some of the ingredients, and helpfully, Edamam provides transparency with a line-by-line breakdown of each ingredient.
Let’s start with 1 cup of brown rice. Edamam said it was 687.8 kcal, but a direct lookup on Google (which leverages the USDA database) said it was 216. Whoa. That’s a 3x overstatement right there.
I looked more closely at the ingredient list and found the problem. There were two entries in the ingredient list that, when parsed by Edamam, resulted in dirty data. I’m not sure what it was doing, but check this out.
The original line for the meat is “1 pound ground beef (at least 15 percent fat), turkey, chicken or pork.” That resolves to “1 pound fat), turkey” and 4082.3 kcal. Note the odd resolution of the ingredient in italics.
Correcting that to “1 pound ground turkey” results in 671.3 kcal. What’s going on here? It’s almost as if Edamam totaled up all four meat options, and that’d result in some pretty stuffed peppers! Doing the math, that makes sense.
1 pound ground beef = 1,506 calories
1 pound ground turkey = 924 calories
1 pound ground chicken = 569 calories
1 pound ground pork = 1,094 calories
Total Calories: 4,093
The rice discrepancy is similar: “1 cup cooked white or brown rice” yields 687.8 kcal, while “1 cup cooked brown rice” yields 218.4 kcal.
It’s not quite the same explanation since a cup of white rice is 206-242 calories (depending on the grain) and brown rice is 218.
Regardless, it’s clear Edamam has an issue with ambiguous or oddly qualified ingredient lines.
Correcting the entire recipe in Edamam for those two issues brings the total calories per serving from 777 to 291. And guess what? ChatGPT’s parsing of the same ingredient list calculated 279 calories per serving.
If there’s one conclusion here, it’s that ChatGPT’s parsing of recipe ingredients surpasses Edamam’s. And that New York Times Cooking needs to work with Edamam to fix a pretty fundamental problem with their nutrition calculations. But, there’s a broader conclusion to be made: it pays to be a knowledgable skeptic, and if you’re not one, to have access to one (hey, Amy!). Computers are getting better every day, but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Trust, but verify.
The overarching tenet of my user experience work is “Don’t make me think” and the current applications out there still do way too much of that. Integration of foundational data, AI, and compelling user experiences will offer us incredible functionality, but we need to temper that with input from the lovely organ between our ears. Keep thinking, friends.
Miscellanea
⚽ Ted Lasso Season 3 dropped on Apple TV+, and I’m disappointed only in the fact that I can’t binge it. Episodes 1 and 2 have been delightful, and I’m excited for these next weeks to unfold.
🗡️ Did you know that March 25 was Tolkien Reading Day? I’ve been making my way through The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies in recent months. Ironically, this week’s Five Bullet Friday from Tim Ferriss highlighted Tolkien, a movie about the orphaned author’s formative years, and I’m adding it to my “to watch” list. View the trailer, then watch the full title on streaming services.
✏️ If you’re a subscriber, you’ve also been getting my weekly Funny Friday posts. I have been saving my best ones (IMHO) for the New Yorker, but I’m not sure what their timeframe is for reviewing them. My February submissions are still in Received status after a month of waiting. As soon as they accept or decline, you get to see them fold into my weeklies (they won’t accept anything that’s been published). Patience is a virtue!