Oura's Meals Feature Is Not Like Any Other Food Tracking App I've Used

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Hot on the heels of Oura’s AI Advisor, another app feature from the smart ring company is leaving beta and becoming available to all users: meal logging. But this isn’t just another calorie tracking app—Oura’s Meals feature provides feedback on what you’re eating and when, without judging you for how much. 

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Glucose tracking is also coming to the app, and Oura has announced a partnership with Dexcom to sell the Stelo continuous glucose monitor, which can be purchased without a prescription. If you use the Stelo monitor, you can view some glucose statistics in the Oura app, including how your blood glucose responds to the meals you track. 

How Oura’s meal tracking works

Once you have the Meals feature enabled (it’s rolling out to everyone today, the company says), just tap the plus sign in the lower right corner and select “Log a meal.” 

The simplest way to log a meal is to take a photo of your food, but don’t worry if you forget until your plate is clean. You can tap “Text input” at the bottom to type in a description of what you ate, or select one of your recent meals if you’re repeating something you ate within the past few days. 

The app takes a few seconds to think, and then it tells you what it believes you ate. (You can correct it if it’s wrong—more about that below.) Then it gives you some text feedback about your meal and a little section of statistics judging whether the meal was high or low in protein, fiber, and other factors—mostly macronutrients, but also how “processed” the meal was. 

The feedback encourages you to eat more protein and vegetables, without getting negative about your choices, and I appreciate that. Oura says in its press release: “Oura’s guidance avoids penalizing food choices, instead presenting non-judgmental insights that help members make informed choices based on their health objectives, whether that’s improving energy levels, maintaining metabolic health, or enhancing dietary balance.”

The advice is gentle and the results are usually correct

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Oura’s conclusions about what’s in a food photo have usually been correct for me, but sometimes it misses an ingredient—for example, it might log a “rice and beans bowl” but not notice that there was also chicken in the mix. The description might suggest that I could include protein next time. As I said earlier, this is no big deal, because you can correct this at the bottom of the screen. 

Scroll down and you’ll see a list of the ingredients or components of your meal. You can remove components that weren’t actually there and add anything that the AI missed. I found this process quick and easy. In a few taps, the app would then tell me that I did a great job getting both protein and fiber in my meal, and the stats would look correct. 

The text feedback on the meals is sometimes helpful, but at other times is too vague and generic to be of any real use. The few shreds of cabbage in my rice bowl contain anthocyanins? I don’t actually care. Garlic was valued in ancient civilizations for its medicinal properties? Great, that’s super important to know when I’m logging some garlic bread as a snack.

I do sometimes enjoy that it suggests a way I could improve the meal next time—usually by adding some veggies or protein—but when I do log a meal with veggies and protein, it then just suggests that I might want to have the meal with “extra veggies” next time. 

I loved seeing a graphic of my meal timing

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

I’ve been disorganized with my eating lately, sometimes snarfing down snacks throughout the day and not sitting down to a real dinner until late in the evening. I know that late meals can affect my sleep, and that mealtimes are important for setting your body’s clock. So I was delighted to see that Oura tracks the time of meals as well as their content. 

Each meal I log is shown on a circle that represents my day. My sleep times and wind-down (bedtime) hours are shown in blue and green, respectively. There’s a yellow dot for each meal I logged today, and a yellowish area showing the times I normally eat. Right now, the app judges my mealtimes as “irregular.” Harsh, but true. I can see on the circular graphic just how late I’ve been eating. 

Where Oura’s Meals feature falls short

The functions of the Meals feature seem to work quite well, but so many functions are missing. For example, I can only see that nice graph of meal timing after I log a meal! There’s no way to access it just to take a peek. I tried asking the AI Advisor about my meal patterns, and it describes them to me in text, but says it can’t generate graphs or images to share with me. 

I also wish I could see a summary of how I’m doing on protein, fiber, level of processing, and the other factors Oura tracks. But again, these only show up when you log a meal, and aren’t available otherwise. The Advisor will describe them to me in broad terms (“Your meals show balance, but your fiber and added sugar trends stand out”) but I hoped for better. 

Another feature it’s missing—which I’m actually OK with—is that it doesn’t seem to care how much food you’re eating. It doesn’t know how many grams of protein I’ve eaten, and certainly has no clue about the number of calories. On the one hand: excellent. I don’t need another app assuming that I want to lose weight or making me measure everything as I log it. “Yes, that’s rice” is so much easier to tell the app than “I ate exactly 205 grams of rice.” 

But on the other hand, the recommendations would make more sense if the app had a sense of balance. Did I eat a lot of chicken breast and a small amount of candy today, or the other way around? Those would be drastically different eating patterns, worth giving drastically different advice. 

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