Personalized Diet
How to discover what foods are good for each individual?
–
Food makes the energy inside our bodies. I'm curious about a problem of discovering how to know which foods are the right ones for each individual; how to mix & match them, and eat them throughout a day for best energy release?
It seems to me that me inherit our nutrition habits from families we come from. But what if the family didn't have healthy nutrition habits? Or perhaps those habits doesn't fit the individual? One is left with getting lost in the noise of Internet search trying to understand the basics of "good nutrition", and then trial & error of what food fits the individual. Could it be easier?
For example, there are methods to check for food intolerances (but Internet tells me that these tests' accuracy is questionable).
So, I'm curious how to design a personalised-diet plan (foods and recipes) for oneself and how would everyone do that themselves instead of going to a nutrition expert.
Anyone cares about such a problem? Share how you're exploring your "feeding quest"!
Mindey recommends this video and this video, and tracking foods in a diary
Inga recommends Elimination Diet
Hmm, after following friends' suggestions I discovered something! The reason for my interest in food plans was a symptom - headaches.
But now after mapping the foods I eat and making a list of foods to pause for Elimination Diet, I discovered that it could be "tyramine" causing my headaches (because I started eating new foods 2 weeks ago, that contain it!) Well, I am starting my 2 week pause on these foods now and will see if that's the case.
But it's funny that I discovered this unexpected solution (experiment to try) after publicly sharing this puzzle here, which prompted conversations with 2 different friends and led to the interesting solution to try out!
So yeah thank you friends for responding to my puzzle (even if it was in 1:1 rooms!) :)
My experiment learnings to be shared in 2 weeks..
So, would this problem be better named as "Food compatibility matching" or something like that, because that is what you're describing. "Food quest" seems very generic, could mean things anything from farming to shopping, etc., but what you're describing, is more of individually biocompatible food discovery.
// How to discover what foods are good for each individual?
The popular answer: "there's an app for that". The funny thing is, making an app is making a list or a few of them, and asking people to fill them: doing the stats (dependence analysis) auto-discovers what's good for whom. The more participants in the study, the merrier.
However, most people don't have time for writing yet another app for this or that. Only food data won't fully solve the higher problem of individual well-being. Generic solution for this is sensors, schedulers, and database technology.
I just wonder what sensors could feel our discomfort of our bodies, like how a secchi disk measured transparency of lakes and oceans. Of we could measure the actual food-induced sense of comfort or discomfort automatically, it would very much ease the process of such data collection...
I guess, using neuralink, we could automate that collection of data about food-induced variations of well-being, quite literally reading off the signals from corresponding brain regions.
I think this might be more complicated than keeping a diary or even than monitoring the body’s response to a given food using technology.
There are at least two reasons why I think this is more complicated than either of those processes suggest:
(1) such a process presupposes that the body’s needs are static. But, this is not the case. If I go for a run one day, my body’s needs that day will be different from what they are on another day when I do not go for a run. Likewise if I am sick. And, as our bodies age, of course, our needs change, too.
(2) such a process presupposes that the body’s way of processing food remains static. But, this is also not the case. The micro biome, for example, changes through time, and this has an effect on the kinds and amounts of nutrients that are available to the body after eating. Likewise regarding the age of cells/organs.
So, I think using a diary or technology can be very useful and informative—but, it also can be misleading if we do not keep the above in mind.