doesn't increase eating disorder incidence for undergrad women "who had not engaged in dietary self-monitoring in the past year and who were at low-risk for an eating disorder" and who were willing to sign up for this
Honestly, I wish there was some mechanism to somehow punish authors that title their papers like a buzzfeed piece. I'm really sick of seeing things like, "Diet has no effect on BMI" and then it turns out that what they meant was that you have a lot of freedom in what you eat as long as you stay around the same total calorie intake or whatever. There's no feedback mechanism to swat these things down and it shows.
You're not supposed to read just the title, you need to read at least the abstract. It clearly states in the abstract what the conclusions are:
"Conclusions: Among dietary self-monitoring naive undergraduate women with low-risk of an eating disorder, dietary self-monitoring via MyFitnessPal for 1 month did not increase eating disorder risk, impact other aspects of mental health, or alter health behaviors including dietary intake. The null results in our study may be due to the selection of a low-risk sample; future research should explore whether there are populations for whom dietary self-monitoring is contraindicated. "
Science is not easily summarized to sound bites that you can share as an image macro on social media. This is doubly true for something as difficult as nutrition.
Not claiming that the study itself is useless, it's important to understand how interventions affect completely healthy people, but my worry would be that it triggers eating disorders in high-risk group, that would affect wether we want to widely encourage calorie counting or just recommend it to those who specifically need it. The thread OP helpfully points out the fact that this study doesn't do much to answer that question.
