Why Your FitBit is Failing You: The Foundation for Personalized Nutrition
My food tracker is depending on me. It’s reliant on my memory, my willingness, my honesty. My ability to find the “right” nutritional information for my favorite protein bar, or recipe. Sometimes, I slip. Should I input the small amount of soymilk added to my coffee — and what brand was it anyway? Did it contain sugar, or carrageenan?
Today, I ate pizza, my dear nutrition tracker. I should tell you that, but I can’t bear your judgement. I forgot to log what I ate for breakfast yesterday. I’ve failed you.
Sound familiar? 1 in 5 people will use an app or similar tool to track their food intake. 19 million people will buy a fitness tracker this year, and yet only 10% of them will succeed with consistency.
It’s not you. It’s a failure of the technology.
Fitbit, Google Fit, Weight Watchers — all are creating experiences to help people quantify their food intake, to help them lose weight or reach health and fitness goals. But changing habits is an uphill battle. Choosing what to eat is a challenge, capturing what was eaten is unnecessarily difficult, and the additional judgement we project onto the tools we use becomes inhibiting. Highly motivated people might overcome the significant barriers to regularly logging their food intake. But for the rest of us, the hurdles to finding the right food, accurately inputting the quantity, and remembering to log each bite are too high. Diets, trackers and programs are abandoned and the status quo returns.
To fix this cycle, we need to capture food decisions when people ask what they want to eat and where they are already taking these actions, before the decision is made.
Providing meaningful value upfront through personalized food discovery experiences, we can elegantly:
- Empower people to be successful with their food choices
- More effectively capture their decisions, and ultimately,
- Create a traceable system for understanding the way ingredients, food processing, agricultural practices, etc affect human health on bio-individual levels.
This can be a meaningful tool for the general population, beyond the 20% of Americans who self identify as “on a diet.”
Identify Food
Underlying these problems is the lack of standardized information for products and ingredients in the US. Technology platforms, such as Google, Amazon, Instacart, UnderArmour, and Jawbone are working to make eating, ordering, and improving human nutrition are all working from incomplete and incompatible data sets. This information would enable them to know exactly what is in our food, and better extrapolate consumer needs.
For consumers, the level of complexity has become dangerous. The USDA’s Nutritional Database, the standard reference for nutrition in the US, contains just 8,000 ingredients and products, a small fraction of what’s in our foods.
The USDA lists less than 35 ingredients that would be considered types of sugar. At Ingredient1, our database has captured over 1300 words in the grocery store that just mean “sugar.” For example, we’ve mapped 1300 words that just mean “sugar” to 12 different ways you think about sugar: High Fructose Corn Syrup, Artificial, Refined, Honey, etc. We have found over 80 ways that a brand might label “Stevia,” a sugar substitute, on the back of a package, including “steviol glycosides” and “reb a.”
The way ingredient names are written needs to be standardized for humans and computers alike.Though the FDA has put basic standards in place for “naming” ingredients, they are not efficiently enforced or thorough enough.
How can researchers understand whether all sugars are created equal, without a full listing of all of the words that mean sugar? How can consumers act on preferences when food information is chaotic and misleading?
We need a single identification system for all food products and ingredients sold in the United States. As new ingredients or new names are introduced, having a standardized resource will help shoppers identify foods that are safe for their dietary needs.
What’s at risk?
According to the FDA, lupin is likely to become a popular ingredient as a substitute for gluten-containing flours. However, it has the same protein structure as a peanut, and may trigger a severe reaction in a peanut allergic child.“While many parents know to look for and avoid peanut ingredients in the diet of their peanut-allergic child, they may have no idea what lupin is or whether it is an ingredient that could cause their child harm,” says Stefano Luccioli, M.D., a senior medical advisor at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The ingredients ghee and lactalbumin will trigger a milk allergy, albumen an egg allergy, and einkorn a wheat allergy, yet none of these words are in the USDA database of ingredients.
If a person is newly diagnosed with an allergy, they are dependent upon outside resources, which they may or may not trust or have access to. When eating in a social situation where food selections are being provided for them, consumers are dependent on other people’s knowledge.
A recently diagnosed diabetic using health optimizing nutrition tracking tools, is thinking about food choice at the same time they are thinking about fitness goals. If you don’t want to eat refined sugar or soy, you shouldn’t need to memorize over 350 words for “refined sugar” or 400 for soy.
Mapping ingredients to allergens, diets, and classifications will make it easier for consumers to navigate food choices. Clear ingredient and product standards will pave the way for greater accountability in labeling claims, maintenance of product nutritional information, and ingredient traceability back to the point of origin.
Additionally, personal tracking of micro nutritional information can only be achieved by standardizing the nutritional information in specific ingredients and products. In 2010, the updated US Dietary Guidelines stated that four vitamins are so low in the standard american diet that it poses a real public health risk, including calcium, vitamin D, potassium, and fiber. Six other key nutrients were singled out for also being “tenuous.”With easy access to all of this information and a simplified system for keeping track of it, people could more easily identify their macro-nutritional deficiencies.
An encyclopedia of ingredients and products that links common elements together is vital for removing consumer confusion, and to create seamless experiences that help shoppers make educated decisions. Additionally, researchers tasked with studying food and health impacts would be able to more easily isolate areas of study.
Established companies and startups are trying to amass product information from all of the food brands, including GS1, Gladson, Food Essentials, Factual, and Ingredient1, among others.There are too many information sources for each food brand to manage, and each encounter the same challenges: gaps in nutritional and product data, limited product selection, inconsistent naming, elastic marketing claims, and universally sustained industry engagement. Standardizing product and ingredient information is the foundation for capturing insights that can be used in a meaningful way.
As access to health optimizing technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, we have huge opportunities to impact the trajectory of an individual’s health by supporting them with better data.
If your diet tracking software had access to ingredient information at a restaurant or grocery store so you could make informed food purchasing decisions, instead of tracking food mistakes after the fact, we’d be moving in the right direction.
My fitbit and I have a dishonest relationship. Sometimes we both undershare information, sometimes we overshare. Neither of us are flexible. We’re either in it to win it, or off. I cheat on my fitbit, but partially because it doesn’t give me what I need. The promise of our relationship is to get healthier together, and to make better food choices together. The path to mutual respect and understanding are stronger information systems to provide the support we need.
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
