In the space of a fortnight Ive discovered that lettuce can be bad for me, and butter good.
Ive been given a fair idea of why I sometimes find it difficult to concentrate and Ive learned that while it may be wise to steer clear of croissants, tiramisu and brownies are fine.
To receive these revelations about the way my body processes different foods I had to pay 259, put an app on my phone, wear a blood sugar sensor, record what I ate, provide a couple of samples, and eat some very special muffins.
Personalised nutrition will be so revolutionary that it is set to transform the way food is sold and consumed, according to Professor Tim Spector, from Kings College London.
He co-founded ZOE, which gave me insights into the food I should be eating. The company is already well known for an app which has provided a source of Covid data during the pandemic, but its personalised nutrition service is likely to become bigger still.
It uses artificial intelligence to offer a personalised solution for those of us wanting to eat more healthily by choosing the right diet, helping to overcome the confusion caused by dietary fads that seem to change from week to week.
ZOE, and similar apps available in America, claim to have nailed things once and for all by analysing your bodys unique response to virtually every food under the sun and guiding you towards the best meals for you.
I think its inevitable that personalised nutrition will become mainstream, said Professor Spector. This is going to influence the food industry to provide new products and to change our nutritional guidelines into subsets rather than pretending that all males or all females are the same.
Other academics are supportive of the concept. But they concerned that it may be too simplistic, and are cautious about any rush to get products out on the market before the evidence behind them is robust enough.
ZOEs app has been available since April and has already signed up 10,000 members. Another 220,000 are on a waiting list as the company races to hire more of the personal coaches needed for the online advice it offers as part of the package.
ZOE personalised nutrition users must have a thin, 50p piece -sized sensor stuck to their arm and leave it there for two weeks.
This is not actually a painful or uncomfortable process. The sensor has a harmless and flexible pin and takes and stores a continuous blood sugar reading. But its memory is limited so it must be swiped at least every eight hours to a ZOE app you download onto your phone to ensure continuous readings. You hold the phone close to your arm, which gives a little ping, a bit like when you use your credit card on your phone.
Users must also eat a selection of carefully prepared muffins, which involve given quantities of various known food groups. This is followed by a finger prick blood test which is then sent off for analysis and gives clues into blood sugar and fat responses.
The data collected from the sensor, the blood test, a stool sample you give and a food diary you keep is used by ZOEs AI systems to analyse your response to various foods and predict your response to a whole range of others.
My two week programme has given me advice that could significantly improve my health as I get older. It has told me that my gut bacteria is pretty good overall (varied and generally of the right kind) giving me a degree of protection against everything from depression to dementia.
And Im fairly good at processing and clearing fat particles from my blood. This reduces the risk of inflammation that can lead to a whole range of health problems such as heart disease and diabetes and make you put on weight.
Less encouragingly, it turns out that Im not very good at processing and clearing sugar from my blood, with everything from bread and ice cream to lettuce, carrots and green beans sending my blood sugar levels soaring.
Blood sugar spikes are caused when your body breaks down carbohydrates into sugar molecules, or glucose, which is then shipped through the walls of your gut and into your blood, before getting absorbed by muscles and cells around the body.
My poor blood sugar response to foods is something I hadnt expected and need to keep an eye on because blood sugar spikes can contribute to heart, kidney, eyesight and other problems.
On top of that, a blood sugar spike is often followed by a crash, disturbing concentration, sapping energy and making you hungry.
This is something I suspect has been happening, on and off, for years without me being aware although, as so often with these things, its hard to be sure.
This isnt to say that lettuce, carrots and green beans cant play a valuable role in a balanced diet as they are low fat, boost gut bacteria and packed with goodness.
But its worth bearing in mind our blood sugar response to these and other foods when trying to keep down spikes.
The app uses a scoring system to tell you how good you are at processing sugar and fat for any given food or combination of food including those you didnt consume during the tests.
It does this by using artificial intelligence to predict your response to foods you didnt consume as well as to any given meal you care to make up.
This is the key to curbing my blood sugar spikes. Because Im good at clearing fats, such as butter or olive oil, but not so good at clearing sugars, I can get away with eating more fats but need to keep carb consumption relatively low.
So by eating extra fats I can reduce my blood sugar spikes by covering the sugars in the carbs with fat, like a blanket.
This slows down the speed of uptake of sugar from the gut because fat is more slowly absorbed than sugar, so the peaks of the combined sugars and fats are lower. Some people refer to this process as putting clothes on their carbs.
So, using the app, I find I can mitigate the blood sugar spike I would get from eating a slice or two of sourdough bread by liberally adding healthy fats such as butter or cheese, for example.
A bowl of brown basmati rice which on its own gives me a combined score of 35 (out of 100, where 100 is the best) based on its impact on blood sugar, blood fat and gut bacteria increases to 69 when a table spoonful of extra virgin olive oil is added. Adding a handful of mixed nuts takes me up to 83, which is a very respectable score.
Meanwhile, two white slices of sourdough, which give me a ZOE score of 26, rises to 29 with butter, 37 when cheddar cheese is added and 61 with a decent portion of avocado.
ZOE recommends aiming for a score of 60 or more, where possible something that is much easier to achieve by adding suitable extra ingredients or swapping one major component for another.
Meanwhile, Ive learned that while croissants and ice cream send my blood sugar soaring, chocolate brownies, panna cotta and tiramisu are fine for blood sugar due to their higher fat and lower carb content paving the way for more better targeted desert treats.
These baked treats actually produce a lower blood sugar spike than lettuce, carrots, green beans and a wide variety of other healthy foods although it is not recommended they are routinely swapped for them as they are considerably less healthy overall.
An, admittedly small, interim research study ahead of a much bigger one due to report next year looked at how 17 people responded after 12 weeks of using ZOE findings as the basis of a personalised diet.
It found that 64.7 per cent felt less hungry and 82.4 per cent felt more energetic. Meanwhile, participants lost an average of 9.4 lbs (4.3kgs) in weight, primarily because the reduction in blood sugar spikes made them feel less hungry.
Although I am still in the early stages of my ZOE diet, I too can report feeling more energetic and less hungry as I take more care to balance out my meals with ingredients which for me curb spikes in blood sugar.
The way people react to food is so personal that even identical twins are likely to respond quite differently to the same meal, according to research by the team behind the ZOE app.
In fact less than half of our response to any given food is governed by our genes, with the remainder down to factors such as sleep patterns, exercise, meal timing and gut microbe, it found.
Professor Spector predicts that when these individual responses to food are better understood the food industry could respond by labelling products as being suitable for people with poor glucose scores, or being fat response friendly.
At the moment you just have how many calories or fat are in it but this would tell you how you are likely to respond if a good or bad responder, he said.
All the big companies have personalised nutrition divisions already set up. They just dont talk about it. They are aware that people are going to demand to know how these foods are going to affect your gut health, for example.
The academic believes that personalised nutrition apps could one day be as ubiquitous as Uber apps.
It could be something that is like am Uber app that everyone has if the NHS decided to underwrite it. Ten or 15 years ago, no-one would have thought everyone would have had something like an Uber app to call a chauffeur service, he said.
The amount of money generated from diet and nutrition apps in the UK is forecast to soar this decade, from around $10m (8.6m) at the moment to $45m in 2030 and much more beyond, according to data from Grand View Research.
Apart from ZOE, options in the UK are fairly limited at the moment. They include analyses based on DNA samples which Professor Spector dismisses as pretty useless given that genes only account for the minority of our food reactions.
And there is Lumen, a tool that users breathe in and out of to take readings of carbon dioxide to determine whether theyre in fat or carb-burning mode and then adapt their eating accordingly.
Meanwhile, in the US and Israel the Daytwo app gives nutritional recommendations to people with diabetes, obesity and non-alchoholic fatty disease a range of liver conditions affecting people who drink little to no alcohol based on an analysis of their gut bacteria and AI to predict blood glucose response. Another app called Levels is broadly similar but not available outside the US.
Daytwo was set up by Professors Eran Segal and Eran Elinav from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel after they published a gamechanging paper in 2015 which is generally seen as paving the way for personalised nutrition apps.
The study confirmed previous research findings on how various foods caused blood sugar spikes but crucially, it found that the magnitude of these spikes had huge variation from one person to the next.Professor Elinav told i: Personalised nutrition offers a data-driven, individualised way to modify ones diet without having to give up on large groups of foods.
I believe it may be harnessed to tackle a growing number of microbiome-associated metabolic, immune and other diseases. We are continuing to actively research these prospects.
Daniel Davis, professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester, adds: The potential for personalised nutrition is huge. Tim Spector, and a handful of other like-minded pioneers, are challenging the status quo and bringing to the foreground bold new ideas for healthcare.
But while there is much that a good personalised nutrition app can teach us it is important to recognise potential shortcomings because even the broadest ones dont provide a full picture, according to Newcastle Universitys Professor John Mathers, who has been involved in a number of studies in the area published in journals such as Nature and the British Medical Journal.
Overall, I am very supportive of the idea of personalised nutrition but I worry that there has been a rush to commercialisation before the evidence for what really works is sufficiently robust, he said.
The ZOE approach is based on high quality research, which gives it an advantage over some of its competitors. But it puts a large amount of emphasis on a few simple markers such as short-term changes in blood glucose concentration as an index of the complex effects of food consumption on the human body.
Many experts would argue against the restrictions on bread, potatoes and rice [which cause blood sugar spikes in many people].
His concerns about ZOE will be even more applicable to other less sophisticated alternatives on the market.
On a personal level, having used the ZOE app, I can see the dangers of focussing too much on a handful of admittedly key properties while ignoring the other health benefits of various foods. There is also a risk of becoming overly preoccupied with the effect of every ingredient you consume, and enjoying food less.But as long as you keep the bigger picture in mind I think the right apps can be a huge help to our health.
Original post:
Is lettuce bad, and butter good? I tried the personalised diet app that'll change how you eat - iNews
