This weighted average graph did more to keep me on track than anything else. Sometimes you just need the encouragement to persist through the ups and downs.
sigh Knowing how to eat healthily isn't a hard problem. The problem is sticking to the diet. But that one's hard, so instead we're constantly solving the first, solved, problem.
I find the easiest way to force myself to eat healthy is to just not have any “undesirable” foods around, planning my grocery trips in great detail before hand, and to cut back on how much I eat out. Cutting off any sources of unwanted foods and focusing on only desirable foods cuts away any of the self control or discipline problems.
Indeed, proper diet is no secret, and you don’t even need to do exercise (not that you shouldn’t, but it’s not a strict requirement for weight loss at all). It seems that it’s easier to keep blaming the “solved problem” so yet another product can be sold.
I find the hardest part of eating healthy is at the time of making the choice of what to eat.
A.I could potentially suggest restaurant orders, grocery lists, and recipes. If I had confidence that the system had my best interets "at heart" and it had enough expert knowledge built in I'd probably let it make 95% of my diet choices and count myself lucky to make one less type of decision while improving my health.
I have to disagree. Everyone knows that they should eat a salad instead of a cake. But what does healthy eating look like normally, when it gets more nuanced, and when you might actually enjoy eating it? Does a healthy meal look like a steak with a fried egg on top and a side of vegetables? Or does it look like fat free yogurt and a Coke Zero?
< I had several glucose spikes as high as 160 milligrams per deciliter of blood (normal fasting glucose levels are less than 100, but we don’t yet know what level is normal after eating).
Except anyone with a glucose meter...?
The fact the author, a cardiologist, was surprised that oatmeal spiked his glucose is concerning to say the least, and certainly speaks to the eduction doctors get on nutrition.
I'd highly recommend self experimenting for a week or two, to establish 1. Fasted glucose 2. Fed glucose on your normal meals.
This is big in the keto space, with a lot of data being collected and shared, but apparently beyond the scope of the Times.
Bacterial persistence is weird. There's a Radiolab episode[1] where Robert Krulwich and Neil deGrasse Tyson shake hands and then measure the bacterial cultures on their hands repeatedly. Both shared bacteria, but the half-life of Tyson's bacteria on Krulwich's hands was short, while Krulwich's bacteria never seemed to disappear from Tyson's hands. (I don't remember how long they took measurements for, though, and I don't think it was very long.)
This trend of micro managing and optimizing every single details of our lives is very weird to me, some people seems to spend more time optimizing than living.
On one hand you'll get your DNA sampled and an "AI" to tell you what to eat, on the other hand we spend 10+ hours a day sitting, live in heavily polluted cities (light, noise, air), don't do anywhere close to enough physical activity. If you eat what's considered a healthy diet [0] these things will impact your life quality much more.
What people need is self control and education, we use food as a source of pleasure instead of seeing it as fuel (this could be a symptoms of an unhealthy lifestyle in general, but that's another topic). People eat 3 times a days + regular snack even if they are not hungry. We lost our ability to listen to our bodies, but luckily it's not very hard to learn it back.
No one needs an AI to know that a bottle of coke a day, a bag of m&m's or a 500g cup of non dairy, gluten free, #FeelGood, #BodyPositity cup of ben& jerry's a has a net negative impact on your body.
The whole system is fucked from top to bottom, look at supermarkets, half of the aisles are full of colorful, family sized bags of candies, chocolate, ice creams, frozen junk and sodas with cute little mascots to attract kids. Society lost its way so bad that we now celebrate obesity and ill health. The obesity epidemic is an insult to humanity.
Sure, a tiny minority of people have very specific needs due to rare diseases that could benefits from these kind of studies. But for the rest of us avoiding processed food and not over eating is more than enough. If you gain a kilo every 3 months and have a sugar rush after every meal your brain is more than capable to know what's happening, it's a matter of taking personal responsibilities and facing your problems.
> specific food recommendations in order to avoid glucose spikes
Healthy people (aka the vast majority people) don't need any "AI" or "machine learning" for that, just basic nutrition education and a pair of eyes to look at the nutritional facts of the products they're about to buy.
There is a step after which the returns are greatly diminished, and for the vast majority of people that step is way closer to "pay attention and educate yourself" than "do what this AI tells you to".
> Using machine learning, a subtype of artificial intelligence, ... . In that way, an algorithm was built without the biases of the scientists.
"We are endowed by Nature with an interest in our own well-being; but this very interest, when overindulged, becomes a vice. Nature has intermingled pleasure with necessary things – not in order that we should seek pleasure, but in order that the addition of pleasure may make the indispensable means of existence attractive to our eyes." - Seneca
[0] we all know what a healthy meal is, let's not pretend it's a secret, eating healthy doesn't mean hitting all your blood test metrics with a nanomole precision.
> What people need is self control and education [...] People eat 3 times a days + regular snack even if they are not hungry.
Don't underestimate the effects of addiction, spurred on by gut bacteria manipulating your cravings. It is much less a matter of knowledge and will power than you think, it is very difficult to defeat your own brain.
The trend of optimising every detail of our lives is kind of inevitable. This realisation is what created the transhumanism philosophy.
Natural selection and evolution doesn't just happen at the biological level, it also happens on the informational and decision making level. If you're not optimising all your life decisions, you cede to someone who does.
Are you sure we don’t know what normal blood glucose ranges are after eating? I’m pretty sure they are between 120-140 as an upper limit. I also thought post-meal BG was exactly how we diagnosed diabetes? Clarification on that point would be helpful.
Dr. Topol is making some reasonable observations and then extrapolating wild and wholly unsupported conclusions from them. The Mediterranean diet data is better than many pharmaceutically funded drug studies that medicine bases wide ranging guidelines on. It’s harmful for scientists to be led into such wild speculation when there are plenty of studies with endpoints like death that are measurable and real vs these bizarre end point measures.
Oh man, now you can pay to have AI tell you not to eat high-glycemic, insulin spiking foods. Wait until people figure out the algo wants them to eat less carbs ... "Terminator ... Skynet ... The Matrix"
The magic here is that some foods which we would expect to spike blood glucose don't for some people, whereas others that we would expect to keep blood glucose stable in fact spike it. It's making the case that people's blood glucose response is in fact highly individual, due to our highly individual mix of gut flora.
Complaining about the philosophy aside, I'm trying to figure out the tech here. How was blood glucose monitored? A continuous blood monitor, or something over the skin?
I don't think people use these to deny themselves. Rather, they use these to achieve goals they've otherwise had a difficult time achieving. In some way they gain freedom - freedom to achieve important long-term health goals, and freedom from short-term appetites.
[+] [-] taneq|7 years ago|reply
(I used a way more informal version but the spirit of the exercise was the same.)
[+] [-] rmwaite|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drivers99|7 years ago|reply
You've had success with it? What did you do to make it informal?
I used his Palm Pilot app which tells you how long ago I first tried it.
[+] [-] moomin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausbah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drivers99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outime|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stringgames|7 years ago|reply
A.I could potentially suggest restaurant orders, grocery lists, and recipes. If I had confidence that the system had my best interets "at heart" and it had enough expert knowledge built in I'd probably let it make 95% of my diet choices and count myself lucky to make one less type of decision while improving my health.
[+] [-] bvinc|7 years ago|reply
You'll get a lot of different opinions.
[+] [-] theNJR|7 years ago|reply
Except anyone with a glucose meter...?
The fact the author, a cardiologist, was surprised that oatmeal spiked his glucose is concerning to say the least, and certainly speaks to the eduction doctors get on nutrition.
I'd highly recommend self experimenting for a week or two, to establish 1. Fasted glucose 2. Fed glucose on your normal meals.
This is big in the keto space, with a lot of data being collected and shared, but apparently beyond the scope of the Times.
The meter I, and most people use: https://www.amazon.com/Precision-Glucose-Monitoring-Freestyl...
[+] [-] grondilu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jeff_Brown|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/handshake-experiment
[+] [-] lm28469|7 years ago|reply
On one hand you'll get your DNA sampled and an "AI" to tell you what to eat, on the other hand we spend 10+ hours a day sitting, live in heavily polluted cities (light, noise, air), don't do anywhere close to enough physical activity. If you eat what's considered a healthy diet [0] these things will impact your life quality much more.
What people need is self control and education, we use food as a source of pleasure instead of seeing it as fuel (this could be a symptoms of an unhealthy lifestyle in general, but that's another topic). People eat 3 times a days + regular snack even if they are not hungry. We lost our ability to listen to our bodies, but luckily it's not very hard to learn it back. No one needs an AI to know that a bottle of coke a day, a bag of m&m's or a 500g cup of non dairy, gluten free, #FeelGood, #BodyPositity cup of ben& jerry's a has a net negative impact on your body.
The whole system is fucked from top to bottom, look at supermarkets, half of the aisles are full of colorful, family sized bags of candies, chocolate, ice creams, frozen junk and sodas with cute little mascots to attract kids. Society lost its way so bad that we now celebrate obesity and ill health. The obesity epidemic is an insult to humanity.
Sure, a tiny minority of people have very specific needs due to rare diseases that could benefits from these kind of studies. But for the rest of us avoiding processed food and not over eating is more than enough. If you gain a kilo every 3 months and have a sugar rush after every meal your brain is more than capable to know what's happening, it's a matter of taking personal responsibilities and facing your problems.
> specific food recommendations in order to avoid glucose spikes
Healthy people (aka the vast majority people) don't need any "AI" or "machine learning" for that, just basic nutrition education and a pair of eyes to look at the nutritional facts of the products they're about to buy.
There is a step after which the returns are greatly diminished, and for the vast majority of people that step is way closer to "pay attention and educate yourself" than "do what this AI tells you to".
> Using machine learning, a subtype of artificial intelligence, ... . In that way, an algorithm was built without the biases of the scientists.
I'd like to know how they determine that. "AI" and "machine learning" aren't unbiased by nature: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2166207-discriminating-...
"We are endowed by Nature with an interest in our own well-being; but this very interest, when overindulged, becomes a vice. Nature has intermingled pleasure with necessary things – not in order that we should seek pleasure, but in order that the addition of pleasure may make the indispensable means of existence attractive to our eyes." - Seneca
[0] we all know what a healthy meal is, let's not pretend it's a secret, eating healthy doesn't mean hitting all your blood test metrics with a nanomole precision.
[+] [-] esotericn|7 years ago|reply
If you walk into a supermarket, ignore the processed food, and essentially eat as much as you want of everything else, you'll be mostly alright.
Theoretically someone could gorge themselves on a million avocados or solely eat pork fat or something but they're not going to do that.
Almost all of this stuff comes about because people treat non-food as food.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
Don't underestimate the effects of addiction, spurred on by gut bacteria manipulating your cravings. It is much less a matter of knowledge and will power than you think, it is very difficult to defeat your own brain.
[+] [-] kuzehanka|7 years ago|reply
Natural selection and evolution doesn't just happen at the biological level, it also happens on the informational and decision making level. If you're not optimising all your life decisions, you cede to someone who does.
[+] [-] ChlorophZek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirishnareturns|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Gunstig2Snath|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beamatronic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stringgames|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramoz|7 years ago|reply
God forbid it ever mention "keto"
[+] [-] lars512|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwah1|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler_diet
[+] [-] darkerside|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theNJR|7 years ago|reply
But if you are interested in testing yourself, get this: https://www.amazon.com/Precision-Glucose-Monitoring-Freestyl...
You extract a pin drop of blood and it shows your glucose in a few seconds.
[+] [-] kirishnareturns|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Proven|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] juskrey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilskidoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ycombonator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glial|7 years ago|reply