The Associated Press

Cellphones are ubiquitous in Japan, and concern over expanding waistlines is on the rise, leading Japanese health-care officials to launch a new service allowing weight-conscious individuals to send photos of their meals to nutritionists for analysis.

The concept is on a test run for now, and one little drawback is that dieters have to wait three days to find out how much damage they did by eating the meal they just photographed with their cellphone.

Public health insurance offices in the Osaka region, in western Japan, have launched the service on a trial basis. About 100 heart patients signed up in the first year, followed by diabetes and obesity patients in the second.

"Japanese have been getting fatter, especially men in their 20s and 30s, and there is concern over what they learned about nutrition when they were younger," Osaka official Satomi Onishi said. "We're hoping that this program can help us to get a handle on the problem."

Nutritionists can work with photos from one day of meals or several weeks' worth. Results come back in three days. Participants also can log onto a website to get more dietary information and upload photos from digital cameras.

The battle of the bulge is a growing obsession in Japan, a country that is slowly losing its reputation for low-fat fish-and-rice diets and slim waistlines. Bigger portions and more meat and fried foods have led to obesity and related illnesses such as high blood pressure becoming a rising concern.

The health ministry estimated last year that more than half of Japanese men and about one in five women between the ages of 40 and 70 — nearly 20 million people — were at risk of metabolic syndrome, a term for a cluster of conditions associated with obesity, high cholesterol and increased risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

The health ministry aims to reduce by 25 per cent the number of people at risk of metabolic syndrome by 2015, and Osaka officials hope the cellphone program will help.

"Cellphones are everywhere here," Onishi said. "We're hoping they can now make it easier for people to get help improving their diet."