Seize Life Fast. LifeOmic Releases LIFE Fasting Tracker App.
Today, LifeOmic released the first of its LIFE apps to help individuals track and improve metabolic health.
LIFE Fasting Tracker app is a free app available for iOS devices on Apple’s App Store. It features a beautiful mobile-first interface that allows users to track their fasts, monitor their mood and progress, and share activity and health data with LIFE friends as well as clinicians and researchers via LifeOmic’s Precision Health Cloud™ (PHC) platform.
The LIFE Fasting Tracker app makes it easy and fun for users to harness intermittent fasting for metabolic health and track fasting progress. It is the only intermittent fasting app that has a built-in social network to sustain metabolic health and is built upon a HIPAA and HITRUST CSF© certified platform for precision health, by which users can securely share information to contribute to medical research and receive more personalized care from their physicians.
Fasting has ancient roots in human history, but metabolism and aging science researchers have only recently uncovered the molecular mechanisms of its metabolic health benefits. Fasting triggers ketosis and signaling pathways that improve cellular and mitochondrial function and help eliminate undividing senescent cells, which contribute to tissue aging, and their inflammatory secretions. Senescent cells and cancer cells are relatively metabolically inflexible, or deficient in their ability to switch from using sugars to using fats as fuel. These cells are particularly vulnerable to periods of caloric restriction.
“Caloric restriction has been shown to improve health and potentially increase lifespan across a wide range of organisms from yeast to humans,” says LifeOmic CEO Dr. Don Brown. “However, few people have the discipline to cut their overall caloric intake by 30–40%. Intermittent fasting has exploded in popularity with the growing realization that building a few hours of starvation into each day has the same or perhaps greater benefit than long-term caloric restriction. We created the LIFE app to help people adopt this simple but effective lifestyle change — and share it with friends and family.”
Based on animal and early clinical studies, going without calories for at least 12 hours several times per week can result in weight loss, reduced inflammation and lowered risk of diseases of aging including heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders and even cancer, especially when combined with healthy diet and exercise.
“In human trials we have observed up to 20 to 30% decreases in triglyceride levels, modest declines in LDL cholesterol levels and increases in HDL cholesterol levels over the course three months of regular fasting,” says Dr. Krista Varady, an Associate Professor of Nutrition at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “Intermittent fasting may have a greater positive impact on insulin resistance than traditional calorie restriction diets, and even individuals of healthy weight can expect to see metabolic benefits over time.” Varady’s research, which is funded by the NIH and the American Heart Association, focuses on the efficacy of intermittent fasting for weight loss, weight maintenance and cardio-protection in obese adults.
The LIFE app supports any type of fasting or fasting schedule, including time-restricted feeding, circadian rhythm fasting, alternate day fasting and others. Users can start and stop fasts with a single gesture, monitor their fasting progress and metrics, see when they enter partial ketosis or when their bodies start burning fats for fuel, and intuitively log how they are feeling.
The LIFE Fasting Tracker app harnesses social and behavioral science to promote health behavior change. Being part of a community of others working to incorporate fasting into their daily lives helps users better achieve their metabolic health goals. With LIFE Circles, users can fast with friends, see at a glance who else is fasting now, and give and receive encouragement within custom circles of LIFE users they care about, from friends to coworkers to healthcare providers.
“When we started building LIFE Fasting Tracker, I thought of it as a utility app that new fasters would use to learn how to fast and to build a routine,” says Annica Burns, LifeOmic’s Director of Mobile Engineering. “I had no idea how much joy would come from the ability to join a fasting circle and fast with friends. Even though I have now formed a habit of fasting and naturally do it almost every day, I still check in on my fasting circle multiple times a day — it feels like taking a coffee break with friends.”
All of the LIFE mobile apps will use LifeOmic’s HIPAA compliant and HITRUST CSF certified Precision Health Cloud (PHC) platform to securely store user and patient data. Health and lifestyle data that users opt to share with their healthcare providers and researchers via LIFE apps will ultimately drive precision and personalized medicine. Healthcare providers can use the LIFE mobile apps to extend care and information flow outside of their facilities, further empowering app users to take the best actions on their health and wellness goals. Clinicians, healthcare providers and researchers will be able to draw insights across LIFE app-collected, wearable, electronic health record (EHR), clinical and genotypic data using the deep analytics capabilities of PHC.
While the current LIFE Fasting Tracker app is available for IOS devices only, a future extended version of the app that will track health behaviors including exercise, nutrition, fasting, sleep and stress reduction techniques will roll out with both IOS and Android versions.
