Beyond Food Logging
The Benefits of Proactive Suggestions
Dietary optimization for the purpose of disease prevention or as a part of a therapeutic strategy (so-called medical-nutritional therapy) has traditionally hinged on the accurate and regular logging of foods eaten at meals and snacks. For diseases like diabetes, this has commonly focused on tracking the consumption of carbohydrates, however there are a wide variety of conditions for which food logging is highly useful, including gluten enteropathy, inflammatory bowel disease, allergic conditions, lipid disorders, gout, and many others. These logs have been a hallmark of patient self-care for over a century, and when dutifully taken to a doctor, nutritionist, or other trained expert, could be used to make actionable suggestions to improve one’s diet and avoid disease-triggering food consumption habits.
However, traditional food logging has several drawbacks that have limited it from producing widespread and consistent health improvement across diverse populations. First off, food logging is cumbersome and time consuming. It requires a person to take a moment (or several), and have the means to jot down what they are eating. This can potentially take time away from enjoying a meal, or from focusing on other matters, such as work, while eating during the course of a busy day. These difficulties keep many from ever initiating food logging efforts, even when instructed to do so by their care provider.
Next, food logging, when not done in the moment, is fraught with inaccuracies. For example, people tasked with tracking calories taken in per day as a part of a weight loss regimen will notoriously often underestimate their caloric intake, thus creating a discrepancy when and if they are unable to lose the desired weight. Why these inaccuracies? Part of the answer stems for our natural tendency to adjust numbers to meet our perceived goals or the expectations of our care providers. We want to make ourselves feel good and please those who are monitoring our efforts. The other part of the answer stems from the fact that we eat many times per day, and often only log our intake patterns the next day (or at the end of a week). This time delay naturally leads to forgetfulness, and this produces important inaccuracies. Without an accurate food log, it becomes useless to help us in our quest for better health.
On the other hand, passive tracking and proactive suggestions, which Suggestic provides, can greatly enhance the completeness and accuracy of food logging, and also iteratively improve the extent to which the foods we eat align with our desired dietary regimen. Suggestic uses machine learning and an extensive database to “know” what you are eating with minimal need to manually enter this information as compared to traditional food logging. This simplifies an otherwise tedious process and allows it to occur without any undesirable time lag. Suggestic also knows what diet you are striving to maintain, and can integrate your ongoing food choices, and the venue at which your next food will be consumed, with this information. By doing so, the app can suggest much “better” food choices than might have been made without it. These proactive suggestions can greatly accelerate the time we need to fully adhere to our desired diet, thus improving our health more rapidly than could be achieved by traditional food logging.
