The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes

Snaq is a diabetes app that is designed to track both your diet and your blood glucose, giving you the tools to optimize your blood sugar management all in one program.

Stanford University experts once suggested that folks living with type 1 diabetes make an extra 180 health-related decisions daily. That can get exhausting! It’s a lot to keep in your head at once. We think that any product that helps make that easier is worth a look.

Who They Are

The Snaq app was founded by a person with type 1 diabetes. Like the rest of us, he found mealtimes to be stressful, given how difficult it is to accurately dose insulin for food. Snaq is his solution, an app that combines both meal and biosensor data to facilitate people with diabetes make the right eating and insulin dosing decisions. Snaq was created to help people living with diabetes “take the guesswork out of mealtime decisions.”

What Snaq App Does

Snaq synthesizes blood sugar data and nutritional information. Simply put, you sync your app with whatever software you already use to track your blood sugar, and you enter the food that you eat, one meal at a time.

Snaq connects to the two most popular continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), the Freestyle Libre and Dexcom G6. Sync it up, and it will automatically import your data. It also works with the leading blood sugar management apps, such as mySugr, Tidepool, and Sugarmate.

Tracking both nutritional inputs and blood sugar responses helps make trends easier to see. Do you always spike from white rice? Are you dosing too much insulin for your breakfast?  If you eat the same meals, Snaq will track the numbers, and let you realize how often you end up with an in-range blood sugar.

Camera Carb Counting

If there’s one feature we were most excited to try, it’s this one, which claims to count carbs simply by using your smartphone’s camera.

We found this feature extremely easy to use. Using the Snaq app, you release up your camera and snap a picture of your plate. The app highlights various foods on the plate, and makes guesses as to what they are. It’s usually in the right neighborhood, but even if it guesses incorrectly, it’s very easy to type in the correct food. If you have multiple different items on your plate, you can highlight one at a time and make sure the app knows what you’re eating. It takes barely a minute to get nutrition facts for what you’re eating. We’ve struggled with many different types of nutrition trackers, and this one is a breeze.

On newer iPhones – a list of compatible models can be found on the company’s FAQ page – the app uses 3D analysis to make sophisticated guesses as to portion sizes. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test this feature, so we can’t say how well it works. I’d encourage interested readers to download the app, which lets you try the snapshot a few times before you have to pay anything.

If you don’t have a newer iPhone, the app guesses that you’ve chosen standard portion sizes. This didn’t work so great – for example, it couldn’t tell the difference between half a bagel and an entire bagel. If you use insulin for every meal, the difference between 25g of carbohydrates and 50g of carbohydrates is huge. Getting that number wrong in either direction can pretty much ruin your day.

(Like any nutrition tracking software, the more complex your food, the more difficult it is to track macronutrients. No app can be expected to understand how many carbs there are in your grandma’s homemade stew.)

For users that don’t need to count every carbohydrate perfectly – or for those who already know how many carbs there are in the foods that they eat, and can correct the app’s guesses rapidly – it seems like a very nifty way of tracking nutritional intake.

The Bottom Line

Our team found the Snaq app to be extremely user-friendly. It’s not cluttered with unnecessary features, and the food database is great and easy to navigate. We had success integrating our CGMs into the app, and enjoyed seeing the blood sugar results presented on the same screen as food and insulin records, and think it would be a fine way to track glucose management and the effect of diabetes decisions like meals and insulin boluses. Some users, however, may find that the camera doesn’t quite provide enough accuracy to use as a replacement for traditional carbohydrate counting.

The diabetes application is currently only available to people living in the United States.

Diabetes Daily

The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes