#FoodPorn Rescues Nutrition Science! So Snap Away…
Siri and I were walking to a meeting. My energy levels were dropping, I was hungry. Siri reads my implanted nutrition indicator and recommended a 125 calorie snack with at least 100 milligrams of magnesium. She told me the store nearby had a sugar free jalapeno roasted pumpkin seed snack that my sister loved. No time. Thank god for drone delivery.
I winked to snap a photo of the package and sent it to my sister with an OMG, because who knew there were sugar free jalapeno roasted pumpkin seeds out there? My contact lenses calculate the size of the package, it’s contents, and gauge it against the movement of my hand, and bites chewed. It’s automatically logged into my nutrition indicator, which keeps track of the mineral dips caused by my workout and poor intestinal absorption.
15 minutes later, I get a stomach ache. My nutrition indicator analyzes the foods I’ve been eating and identifies a pattern. The information is anonymized, and ported into a data center for food scientists studying gluten free eaters and medical researchers studying gastrointestinal health.
Sound farfetched? This future is not far off. Though it may be daunting to imagine implanted nutritional trackers and personal data being anonymized at mass scale, access to this type of information is crucial to solving one of the most important legacies of our era: knowing how food and modern production impacts health.
The path to bio-individual food choices, enabled by technology, begins with the rudest habit of the 21 century: #foodporn.
What we know today about the connections between health and diet is based on a few major diet studies and an array of disparate, fragmented studies on food. Nutritional studies are notoriously flawed: they are either observational or self reported. Food tracking by participants is skewed by memory and misperception (mostly leading to underreporting). These inaccuracies are hard to overcome, even with today’s best food tracking software.
Social media is already positioned to fill this gap. Foods that we are hesitant to input in our food tracking devices, we are unashamed to post on our social media feeds.
For scientists and researchers studying the human body and disease, understanding how food patterns influence disease, or interact with medications, may not be a primary component of their mission. However, thorough analytics integrating eating patterns, ingredients, and food processing with genetic markers, symptoms, and treatments will uncover associations that will accelerate medical advancements.
With a data layer powering food discovery and consumer input on what they want to eat, tied to delivery platforms that share what was purchased, we can harness social and nutrition tracking tools to learn “what a person has eaten.” Social platforms, like Instagram, can be turned into a virtual treasure trove to understand food human behavior. Connecting our daily food rituals with our love of food sharing will lead to a wealth of consumer data.
The first generation of “social experience recording” of food intake already exists, but isn’t being utilized for this purpose: 63% of people ages 13–32 record what they eat by posting a picture on social networks. On Instagram alone, #foodporn is tagged 76M times, #food has over 170M photos tagged, #eatclean has over 27M, #diet has over 22M, #hungry has over 18M. On Pinterest, there are over 5.7 billion food related pins that indicate the types of foods individuals are interested in, affecting 26 million users. Food dominates our newsfeeds, capturing this can fill information gaps in the food chain.
The next generation of technology will make connections between payment systems, hardware devices, social platforms, and personal health systems. By organizing the information for consumers, we pave the way for technology to capture real time consumer behavior before, during, and after the point of purchase. We also normalize information so seemingly unrelated platforms — like food delivery services and medical devices — can effectively share and draw conclusions from ingredient information.
Capturing “what a person ate” based on knowing “what a person bought” or “what a person shares” can be achieved through a tracking trifecta: the integration of passive tracking technology, social experience reporting, and active nutrition tracking.
Passive tracking already exists in many capacities. Online retailers know what you bought. Loyalty cards capture that information for brick and mortar stores. Apple Watch and Fitbit record fitness habits without you logging them.
Social experience recording will build upon the desire to share that’s now reflected on food blogs, tweets, instagram photos, and pinterest boards. Through experimental tracking we control what we post, who we follow, and who we share with.
Active nutrition tracking requires an intentional commitment to recording an action, so the tool can give specific feedback. Specific goals drive usage. Software like MyFitnessPal, Up by Jawbone, as well as formal weight loss programs like Weight Watchers and like Lose It provide structure for behavioral change.
This tracking trifecta will be made seamless though technology already in development: augmenting human vision with external information, implantables tracking “nutritional biomarkers,” nutritional values being calculated based on a photograph. Some of the most compelling developments include:
- Contact lenses that superimpose a digital image onto glasses, so you can see them as a single integrated image. These were showcased by a startup, Innovega, in 2014. Imagine walking into a grocery store with these lenses and seeing highlighted the best foods for your diet, which are also recommended by your friends and favorite chefs.
- Google obtained two patents for smart contact lenses designed to alert people with diabetes of potential dangerous dip in blood sugar levels. Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, is developing implantable technology to track troops “nutritional biomarkers” including metabolites, vitamin, and antioxidant levels in real-time.
- Automatic Dietary Monitoring sensors are in development to track chewing and swallowing. Electromyography has already been used to detect hand gestures. This type of passive monitoring can be harnessed to know the quantities you are consuming.
- Google’s IM2Calories aims to calculate the caloric value of what you eat based on a photo. So snap a photo of your dinner, or meal preparation, post on instagram to show your friends how awesome you are, and IM2Calories will do the math for you on the side.
It’s impossible, and exhilarating, to imagine where the advancement of wearables, implantables, social media, and augmented reality will lead us. It is critical to close the ever widening gap between technological know-how and our ability to understand the health ramifications. Without that, the food industry and governments regulating them will never elicit the people’s trust.
For now, technology still has its limitations. But every day there is another food delivery startup, a new fitness device, a fresh social experience. Each segment in the tracking trifecta is evolving rapidly. Integrating obvious, and not so obvious spaces where we talk #foodporn, is an opportunity to understand the implications of food better. So we can eat better, and feel better.
Next time you question whether to pause at dinner, and rudely snap a photo of your food ….go for it. Save nutrition science. Your future self will thank you.
Related Articles in Series:
1. What Should I Eat? Why No One Knows & How to Solve it
2. Why Your FitBit is Failing You: The Foundation for Personalized Nutrition
