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Obesity, according to the chief executive of NHS England Simon Stevens, is “the new smoking”: a grave risk to our health, which causes one in five cancer deaths in the UK.

But what to do about it? Stevens told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that we may eventually need “reformulation to take sugar out of foods, in the same way that’s successfully happened with salt” and also suggested that parents should take action by, for example, giving their children “cut-up apples not sugary bars”.

But could technology also play a role? Undoubtedly, even if it seems somewhat counterintuitive to say so (isn’t it video games, after all, that are supposed to be keeping our children from physical exercise?)

There are, in fact, already a number of apps that can help towards this goal. They essentially fall into the categories of “weight loss” apps like Lose It!, which creates a custom weight loss plan for users based on their goals; food trackers like Carb Master; and the rather more random, such as Change Talk: Childhood Obesity “a role-play simulation where you take the role of a healthcare provider and engage in a practice conversation with a virtual mother and her child… to help them identify motivation for change, supporting them to implement changes in their diet, screen time, and exercise.”

These are all well and good. But these apps require a level of dedication and concentration from users – manually noting the details of meals consumed, for example – that could put off the casual user. And these are arguably the most important people to attract: anyone who is dedicated enough to carefully note down what they eat every day is probably dedicated enough to make a serious fist of losing some weight.

This is where Google’s new Im2Calories innovation could come in. Popular Science reports that Google research scientist Kevin Murphy unveiled the project, which uses deep learning algorithms to analyse photos of food and estimate how many calories are on the plate, at the Rework Deep Learning Summit in Boston last week.

In one example, Popular Science explains, Im2Calories looked at an image and counted two eggs, two pancakes and three strips of bacon. It then gauged the size of each piece of food in relation to the plate and estimated the calories they contained, combining visual analysis – determining the depth of each pixel in the image – with pattern recognition, drawing on the large amount of calorific data that is freely available.

Users – largely theoretical ones for the moment – can also use drop-down menus to correct the software if, say, the system confuses fried eggs with poached, with the resulting data helping Im2Calories to continually improve its analysis.

The goal, according to Murphy, is to simplify the process of keeping a food diary, taking the grunt and guess work out of the job (and, yes, it is hardly a backbreaking task to write down what you eat every day – but it’s significant enough to stop many people doing it). As to when the product might be available, Murphy wouldn’t say, with Google only recently filing a patent for the technology.

What does seem clear, though, is the impact this technology could have. Over the last few years fitness tracking tools have shaken up the world of exercise by automatically recording details like heart rate, calories burned and distance travelled for those who wear them; Im2Calories could do the same for food, squaring the technological circle of healthy eating and exercise.

But Im2Calories could arguably make a far bigger impact than these fitness tracking tools thanks to the product’s ease of use. Most fitness trackers require users to shell out for pricey pieces of hardware; Im2Calories would (theoretically) only need your phone’s camera and an app, making the system incredibly accessible.

Imagine a Google food tracker app, launched with all the weight of the tech giant behind it, which allows users to take a picture of the food they are about to eat to receive detailed calorific information on it.

Given than Google has billions of users worldwide – Google+ apparently passed 1bn users in September 2013, YouTube has 1bn active users a month – it is hard to see a Google food tracker not picking up several million users at the very least. What’s more, with Google making a profit of $4.76bn (£3.16bn) in the fourth quarter of 2014, the company could easily make the app available for free, figuring out a path to monetisation later.

Even if the vast majority of these users didn’t actively change their eating habits, simply knowing the calorific value of their food would encourage them to eat more healthily. This information would also prove hugely useful to the medical profession, be it on a personal level – showing the family doctor your food consumption for the past week – or on a wider scale, feeding anonymised data back into a central database to create one of the most detailed surveys imaginable of modern eating habits.

Now imagine Im2Calories twinned with other Google properties, such as the intelligent personal assistant Google Now, which learns from your activities to deliver personalised information and assistance. It could provide subtle, unobtrusive healthy eating tips based on your actual diet, direct to your mobile phone. Or imagine some combination of Im2Calories and Search, that you could use to search for calorific information of foods, based on constantly updated, real-time data. That’s powerful stuff.

Will Google do this? We don’t know for sure and the company is keeping its cards close to its chest. But Google has already made health one of its priorities, launching personal health information centralisation service Google Health (which ultimately failed) in 2008, and earlier this year announcing that it would surface pre-vetted medical facts when people search for common health problems.

With this in mind and the newly-patented Im2Calories fresh from its public debut, it seems illogical for Google not to release a product that would bring the company ever closer into its users’ lives and even save the odd life while it is doing it.

@google