SmartCrunch counts calories and tracks a goal weight. It is not a medical device, it diagnoses and treats nothing, and nothing it puts on screen is medical or dietetic advice. If something about your health or your eating worries you, the right thing to consult is a qualified professional, not an app.
The rest of this page says what that means in practice. Please read it before you let SmartCrunch influence what you eat — and read section 4 whatever else you skip.
1. What SmartCrunch actually is#
It is a diary with arithmetic attached.
You record what you ate and what you weigh. The app converts that into a daily calorie and macronutrient budget aimed at a goal weight, keeps a smoothed line through your weight readings, and works backwards from your own diary and your own weight curve to estimate the calorie level at which your weight would sit still. It reads figures you allow it to read from Apple Health, and writes your logged day back there as daily totals. With a paid subscription, a generative AI model additionally guesses what a meal was from a photograph or a sentence, and drafts a plan for the rest of the day.
That is the whole of it. It is a tool for making better-informed decisions about food. It is not a physician, a registered dietitian, an endocrinologist or a therapist, and it is not a substitute for any of them.
2. Not a medical device#
- SmartCrunch is not a medical device. No regulator anywhere has reviewed it, certified it or authorised it — not the United States Food and Drug Administration, not a notified body under the European Union’s rules for medical devices, and no counterpart of theirs in any other country.
- It is not designed, and not intended, to diagnose, treat, cure, relieve or avert any illness, disorder or condition, and it does none of those things.
- Nothing it displays — no budget, no deficit, no trend line, no projected date, no AI-written sentence — is a clinical measurement, a medical opinion or a diagnosis.
- Never let it stand between you and care. It must not be what decides whether you see somebody, postpone an appointment, alter a treatment or abandon one. Something in the app unsettling you is grounds for picking up the phone to a professional; it is never grounds for handling the matter alone with a screen.
3. Every number is an estimate#
The app computes a great deal and none of it is measured. Specifically, these are all estimates:
- Your maintenance calories, by whichever route the app could resolve them — from your own diary and weight curve, from a formula over your height, weight, age and sex, or from what Apple Health believes you burned.
- Your daily calorie budget and your protein, fat and carbohydrate targets, which are computed from that maintenance figure and the rate of change you asked for.
- The energy in what you ate. This is an estimate twice over: once in the portion size you told the app about, and again in the per-100-gram figures behind the food you selected (see section 9).
- Your weight trend, which is a smoothed line through noisy readings, not your body’s true trajectory. Day-to-day weight moves several kilograms on water, salt, glycogen and gut contents alone.
- Micronutrient totals, which are only as complete as the database records behind the entries — most records carry no micronutrient data at all, so a total is a floor, never a full account.
- The projected date on which you would reach your goal (see section 6).
The app is deliberately built to say “not enough data yet” rather than to invent a figure, and when it declines to show you something, that is the honest answer and not a fault. But where it does show a figure, treat it as an approximation with real error bars, not as a reading off an instrument.
4. Eating disorders and your relationship with food#
This is the most important section on this page, and it is why it is not buried at the bottom.
SmartCrunch shows you a calorie deficit every single day. That is the product. It puts a number on what you eat, marks it against a target, and tells you how far under you are. For a lot of people that is a neutral, useful instrument. For some people it is fuel on a fire.
If you live with, or have ever lived with, anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, orthorexia, or any other disordered relationship with food, weight or your body: this app is not built for you and may make things worse. Daily calorie targets, visible deficits, weight logged to a decimal place and a countdown to a goal weight are precisely the mechanics that pull an old pattern back into the centre of a life. We would rather you never install it than install it and be harmed by it.
And if you did not think any of this applied to you, but you notice that:
- you feel anxious, guilty or ashamed when you go over the number;
- you have started skipping meals, or eating less than the app suggests, to see a bigger deficit;
- you weigh yourself several times a day, or you cannot leave the app alone;
- you avoid eating with other people because the food would be hard to log;
- the number has begun to feel like a verdict on you rather than information —
then please stop using SmartCrunch and talk to somebody. Delete it if that helps; your weight and your health do not depend on this app, and no diary is worth this. A doctor is a good first call. So is a registered dietitian with eating-disorder experience, a therapist, or your national eating-disorder association or helpline — most countries have one, and your doctor or a pharmacist can point you to the right one where you live. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number.
This is not a legal formality and it is not us covering ourselves. It is the one thing we would actually like you to take away from this page.
5. Adaptive maintenance is a model of you, not a measurement of your metabolism#
One of the app’s better ideas is that it does not trust a population formula for long. Given enough logged days and enough weight readings, it solves the energy balance backwards: if you averaged a certain intake and your weight moved at a certain rate, your maintenance level must be about such-and-such.
That is genuinely more personal than a formula. It is still not a measurement of your metabolism. Nobody has put you in a metabolic chamber. The estimate rests entirely on the honesty and completeness of your diary, and it fails in one particular direction that matters:
If you systematically under-log — forget the oil in the pan, guess the portion low, skip the handful of nuts — the app concludes that you maintain on less than you really do, and gives you a budget lower than you actually need. That error does not feel like an error. It feels like a personalised number.
The app applies checks before it trusts this route (how much of the window you actually logged, how long your weight series is, whether the answer is plausible), and it refuses to produce a figure rather than produce a bad one. Those checks reduce the risk. They do not remove it. If your budget looks implausibly low, or you feel persistently cold, exhausted, foggy or hungry in a way that is not normal for you, believe your body over the number and speak to a professional.
6. A projected date is a model, not a promise#
When the app tells you which week you would reach your goal weight, it is running one piece of arithmetic: your current gap to the target, divided by the rate the current daily energy difference implies, using a standard textbook constant for the energy density of body tissue.
That constant is a population average and a simplification. The projection also assumes that you keep eating the way you are eating now, that your maintenance level stays where it is, and that nothing else in your life happens.
None of those hold. Maintenance drifts downward as you lose weight, and it adapts. Water shifts hide weeks of real change and then release them all at once. Illness, travel, medication, stress and sleep all move the line. A plateau is normal and is not evidence that you have done something wrong.
Treat the date as a direction of travel, not as an appointment. A projection you miss is a projection, not a failure.
7. Talk to a doctor first#
Please get medical advice before you start changing what you eat with this app, and particularly if any of these describes you:
- You are pregnant, breastfeeding, postpartum, or trying to conceive. Energy restriction in these situations needs supervision. The app knows nothing about any of them and does not adjust for them.
- You have diabetes or any other metabolic, cardiac, renal, hepatic, thyroid or gastrointestinal condition — or you suspect you do.
- You take any medication whose dose or effect depends on food intake or body weight, insulin among the most obvious. Changing your intake without telling the prescriber can be dangerous.
- You have a history of an eating disorder or disordered eating. See section 4.
- You are under 18, or you are considering this app for a child or an adolescent. Growing bodies have requirements adult calorie arithmetic does not encode, and calorie tracking in adolescence carries its own risks. This is a conversation for a paediatrician or a dietitian, not for an app.
- You are recovering from illness, injury or surgery, or you are being treated for anything at all where diet forms part of the treatment.
- You are over 65, where unintended weight loss and loss of muscle carry risks that a calorie target does not see.
The app will not let a daily budget fall below a fixed safety floor. That floor is a crude backstop, not a recommendation, and it is not personalised to you. A number the app is willing to display is not thereby a number that is right for your body.
8. AI-written text can be wrong#
The numbers are computed by deterministic code on your iPhone. The paid features are not: a generative model — Google Gemini — looks at your photograph or your sentence and proposes what the food was and roughly what was in it, and drafts a plan for the rest of your day.
Generative models are confidently wrong on a regular basis. A model can identify the wrong dish, miss an ingredient completely, misjudge a portion by a factor of two, or fail to see the oil, butter, sugar or dressing that carries much of a meal’s energy. It cannot weigh anything, and it cannot see inside.
Every AI estimate is a first draft for you to correct. Check it and edit it before you keep it, because the moment you keep it, that estimate is what the app counts in your day and what it writes into Apple Health. The same applies to a suggested meal plan: it is a sketch produced by a language model, not a prescription, and nothing about it has been reviewed by a dietitian.
Nothing generated by the model is medical or nutritional advice, and none of it should be repeated to anyone else as though it were.
9. Food data can be wrong, and everything rests on it#
This deserves its own section because it is the quiet foundation of every figure in the app.
When you scan a barcode or search by name, the product’s nutritional figures come from Open Food Facts — an open database, edited collaboratively by members of the public, in the same spirit as a wiki. It is a genuinely valuable resource and we are glad it exists. It is also not verified by us and not verified by anyone in particular.
Which means, routinely:
- a record can be plainly wrong, or entered in the wrong unit;
- a record can be right for one country’s recipe of a product and wrong for yours;
- a record can be out of date, because the manufacturer reformulated;
- a record can be incomplete — no calories, no macronutrients, or no micronutrients at all;
- and even a correct label is itself an approximation. Legal tolerances on nutrition labelling are wide.
Every downstream number inherits this. Your day’s total, your deficit, your adaptive maintenance estimate and your projected date are all built on top of those records. If a record is wrong, so is everything the app concludes from it, and the app has no way of knowing.
Where a lookup returns nothing usable, the app says so and offers manual entry rather than filling the gap with a guess. Where a figure looks wrong to you, trust yourself and edit it.
10. Not for emergencies#
Nothing in SmartCrunch is watching over you. It takes no readings while you are not looking, it recognises no medical crisis, and it has no way of summoning anybody. Treating it as a safety net would be a mistake, because it is not one.
If this is an emergency, dial the emergency number for where you are, or get yourself to the nearest hospital.
11. Limitation of liability#
So far as the applicable law allows, Aleksandr Kolesnikov supplies SmartCrunch on an “as is” basis and carries no liability for illness, injury, nutritional deficiency, a change in your weight, an eating disorder made worse, or any other harm or loss that follows from your relying on what the app puts on screen. Nothing in this disclaimer excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, and nothing in it affects your mandatory statutory rights as a consumer. The full terms are in the Terms of Use, of which this disclaimer forms part.
12. Questions#
If anything here is unclear, or the app has told you something you think it should not have told you, please write to us. We would genuinely rather hear it.
- Aleksandr Kolesnikov — Dimitri Nikolaou 7, Limassol, Cyprus, 4006, the Republic of Cyprus
- Write to [email protected]
- Or start from the support page
See also: Terms of Use · Privacy Policy · Cookie Notice · Support