In the space of a fortnight I’ve discovered that lettuce can be bad for me, and butter good.
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’s 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.
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 giving me a degree of protection against everything from depression to dementia. My poor blood sugar response to foods is something I hadn’t expected and need to keep an eye on because blood sugar spikes can contribute to heart, kidney, eyesight and other problems.
But it’s worth bearing in mind our blood sugar response to these and other foods when trying to keep down spikes. So by eating extra fats I can reduce my blood sugar spikes by covering the sugars in the carbs with fat, like a blanket. 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.
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 in weight, primarily because the reduction in blood sugar spikes made them feel less hungry. 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”.
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.