Issue no. 3: The rise of personalized nutrition apps: What you need to know

🔥🔥 Samsung launches into personalised nutrition

Healthcare professionals have long advocated for personalized nutrition guidance because it is preventive and everyone has different needs.

As a result, personalized nutrition has become a popular market, with many companies and apps entering the space.

Samsung is the latest of these companies. The global electronics company has announced Samsung Food, an AI meal planning app that does many things, such as:

• Recommends recipes based on your dietary preferences and nutrition goals

• Lets you build your own cookbook by saving any recipe you find online.

• Lets you cook hassle-free by sending cooking settings from recipes directly to your oven (of course only to a Samsung oven!).

• Lets you shop seamlessly by giving you recommendations based on your preferences and available ingredients (of course only from a Samsung fridge/freezer!).

😒😒 This is health…ish

Before you rush to buy everything Samsung and sell your old appliances, consider this:

On its own, this is hardly useful. But Samsung plans to integrate Samsung Food with Samsung Health, a well-being app that can track different metrics of your life, such as physical activity, diet, sleep, and menstrual cycle insights for the Galaxy Watch.

This could be quite interesting. If you can track calories in (food and drinks) and calories out (exercise) in a seamless way, it should be easier to support diet management.

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⁉️⁉️What does this mean to you?

The good. 

The race to develop the newest, most seamless, and easiest personalized nutrition app attracts investment, helps launch new technologies and features, and reduces the price tag.

Personalised nutrition has seen many new entrants:

• January AI, which translates biometric data into real-time food and lifestyle suggestions.

• SnapCalorie, which generates a nutritional breakdown from photos of food.

• Diagnostic companies, such as Viome and ZOE, which use at-home tests to understand which foods you should eat more of, limit, or avoid.

• A retailer in the USA, which has added a feature to its app that allows you to track the micronutrients of foods in your shopping basket while in the aisles.

Tracking habitual intake provides the opportunity to better understand dietary challenges and barriers to healthier intake. This information is crucial for any type of change.

The bad. 

When everything is tracked and reduced to a number or score, the focus is exclusively on the nutritional composition of food. Calories and micronutrient counting become everything.

But this approach falls very short of assessing food quality! No importance is given to:

• The interaction between nutrients, such as how some nutrients in plants impair iron absorption.

• The combined effect of food on gut health.

• How the order of food in a meal affects blood sugar control.

• The effect of cooking methods on gut and hormonal health.

• Eating disorders.

• Environmental factors that influence food intake, such as home environment and family support.

• Et cetera.

This is where dietitians and healthcare professionals come in. The nuggets of wisdom and experience of a dietitian are still irreplaceable when it comes to optimizing health and nutrition. Healthcare professionals can bridge the gaps where AI still falls short.

The ugly. 

If you're concerned about your data usage, you may be shocked to learn about the lack of transparency. These apps collect a lot of specialized data about their users, including nutrition information. Some of this data is not classified as health data and therefore is not subject to stricter regulations, despite being related to your health.

Surprisingly, most apps lack technical documentation regarding data export, the implemented terms of use, and privacy policies. Usually, users own their data, but data vendors are granted irrevocable and royalty-free licenses to commercially exploit user data.

📱📱And finally!

Samsung is the newest entrant, but certainly not the lats. Here’s to another app coming soon!

To your health!

Paolo

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