Oura Meals Is Unlike Any Other Food Tracking App I’ve Used
Following on from Oura’s AI Advisor, another app feature from the smart ring company is moving out of beta and becoming available to all users: food logging. But this isn’t just another calorie-tracking app—Oura’s Meals provides information on what you eat and when , without judging you for how much.
The app has also added glucose tracking, and Oura announced a partnership with Dexcom to sell the Stelo continuous glucose monitor, which can be purchased without a prescription. If you use a Stelo monitor, you can view some glucose statistics in the Oura app, including how your blood glucose levels respond to the meals you track.
How Oura Food Tracking Works
Once you’ve turned on the Meal feature (the company says it’s available to everyone today), simply tap the plus sign in the bottom right corner and select “Record Meal.”
The easiest way to record your meals is to take a photo of the food, but don’t worry if you forget until your plate is clean. You can tap Enter Text at the bottom to enter a description of what you ate, or select one of your recent meals if you’re repeating what you ate over the past few days.
The app takes a few seconds to think and then tells you what it thinks you ate. (You can correct this if it’s wrong—more on that below.) It then gives you text feedback about your meal and a small stats section that lets you evaluate whether the meal was high in protein, fiber, and other factors—mostly macronutrients—as well as how “processed” the food was.
The reviews encourage you to eat more protein and vegetables without feeling negative about your choices, and I appreciate that. Oura says in a press release, “Oura’s Guide does not penalize food choices, but instead presents unbiased information that helps members make informed choices based on their health goals, whether it’s increasing energy levels, maintaining metabolic health, or improving dietary balance.”
The advice is gentle and the results are usually correct.
Oura’s conclusions about what’s in a food photo are usually correct for me, but sometimes she’ll miss an ingredient—for example, she might write down “a bowl of rice and beans” but not notice that there was also chicken in the mix. The description suggests that next time I might include protein. As I said earlier, there is nothing wrong with this, because you can fix it at the bottom of the screen.
Scroll down and you will see a list of ingredients or ingredients for your dish. You can remove components that weren’t actually there and add anything the AI missed. I found the process quick and easy. After a few taps, the app will tell me that I’ve done a great job of getting protein and fiber in my meals, and the stats will look correct.
Text feedback about food is sometimes helpful, but sometimes it’s too vague and general to be of any real use. Do a few pieces of kale in my bowl of rice contain anthocyanins? I don’t really care. Was garlic valued in ancient civilizations for its medicinal properties? Great, this is very important to know when I take garlic bread as a snack.
Sometimes I like that it suggests how I can improve the meal next time – usually by adding some vegetables or protein – but when I write down a meal with vegetables and protein, it just suggests that next time I might want to eat a meal with “extra veggies.”
I liked seeing the meal timing chart.
I’ve become disorganized with food lately, sometimes snacking throughout the day and not sitting down to a real dinner until late in the evening. I know that eating late can affect my sleep and that meal timing is important in setting your body’s clock. So I was happy to see that Oura tracks the timing of meals as well as their contents.
Every meal I write down appears in a circle representing my day. Bedtime and sleep time (sleep time) are shown in blue and green respectively. Each meal I logged today has a yellow dot, and the yellowish area shows the time I usually eat. Right now the app considers my eating to be “irregular.” Tough, but true. On the pie graph I can see how late I ate.
Where Oura’s Meals Feature Fails
The Power function features seem to work quite well, but many features are missing. For example, I can only see this beautiful meal timing chart after I record my meals! There is no way to access it just to take a look. I tried asking an AI advisor about my diet and he described it to me in text, but said he couldn’t create graphs or images to share with me.
I’d also like to see a summary of how I’m doing with protein, fiber, processing levels, and other factors Oura tracks. But again, these only appear when you are logging a meal and are otherwise unavailable. The consultant will describe them to me in general terms (“Your food is balanced, but there are noticeable trends towards fiber and added sugar”), but I was hoping for the best.
Another feature it lacks – and which I actually agree with – is that it doesn’t seem to care how much food you eat. He doesn’t know how many grams of protein I ate, and he certainly doesn’t have any idea about the number of calories. On the one hand: great. I don’t need another app that assumes I want to lose weight or forces me to measure everything I write down. It’s much easier to tell an app “Yes, that’s rice” than “I ate exactly 205 grams of rice.”
But on the other hand, the recommendations would make more sense if there was a sense of balance in the application. Did I eat a lot of chicken breast and some candy today, or vice versa? These would be completely different eating patterns, and it would be worth giving completely different advice.