
Let an algorithm tell you how to eat - petethomas
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/diet-artificial-intelligence-diabetes.html
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taneq
If you're interested in weight loss, I can vouch for this algorithm which has
been around a fair while:
[https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html)

(I used a way more informal version but the spirit of the exercise was the
same.)

~~~
drivers99
Good old Hacker's Diet. Calorie counting with a target adjusted by a moving
weighted average of daily weight measurements.

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.

~~~
taneq
I made it informal basically by being lazy. :P If I was more than 2-3kg over
my target weight then I'd just eat the minimum calories I can get away with
without getting cranky (~1500ish). Once I reached my target weight I totted up
crude calorie counts in my head each day (sandwich = 400, biscuit = 100, plate
of nachos = 800, that sort of level of detail), keeping the total under my
current target. Then I weighed myself every morning, and if I was over my
target weight for the whole week, I'd reduce my target calories by 100 or so.
If I was under for the whole week, I'd increase my target calories.

It's kept at my target weight (barring a couple of brief lapses of
willpower... I'm a bit tubby at the moment!) for most of the last decade. :)

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moomin
_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.

~~~
stringgames
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.

~~~
sj4nz
I'm working on something just for this, no A.I required. Most of the problems
with eating healthy in my opinion is just being prepared with the stuff to
make and deciding what to make in advance. Most of the problems I've found
with existing "food/recipe sites" is they quickly devolve into "branded
advertising", "data collection", and/or "choice overload." Does any site
really need over 10,000 choices of "chicken soup" recipes? The other problem
with the Internet (there are always more problems with the Internet) is when
you search for recipes in the uncurated web, every recipe is prefixed by an
intensely personal story about the family you don't even know. Once you find
that recipe, it's in a tiny hard to read box (I don't know who made this
template) that naturally has been made very hard to copy and paste elsewhere.

Its a terrible user experience.

My idea isn't ready yet, but I'm furiously working on the MVP.

~~~
theNJR
I'd be interested in this.

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theNJR
< 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.

The meter I, and most people use: [https://www.amazon.com/Precision-Glucose-
Monitoring-Freestyl...](https://www.amazon.com/Precision-Glucose-Monitoring-
Freestyle-Lancets/dp/B01N9NRDVI)

------
grondilu
I don't quite understand why the microbiome should matter so much. Shouldn't
it adapt to your diet if you stick to it long enough?

~~~
Jeff_Brown
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.)

[1] [https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/handshake-
experiment](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/handshake-experiment)

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lm28469
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.

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-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2166207-discriminating-
algorithms-5-times-ai-showed-prejudice/)

"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.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> 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.

~~~
theNJR
Having worked in the health and fitness space for half a decade, this is so
incredibly true. I was a chubby and inactive kid who discovered weight lifting
and nutrition thanks to some helpful forums. I developed the habits, routines
and discipline to get in shape, and maintain it for decades. In so doing, I
thought since I could do it (the chubby non-athletic kid), anyone can. And
should.

Yes, reduce your calories and you will lose weight. But that is missing a
vital part of the causality chain. A nuked gut biome, thanks to your
overworked and underpaid parents feeding you microwaved carbs in sugar sauce
every night, is very hard to overcome. As is decades of government propaganda
telling you to eat the exact opposite of what you should be.

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ChlorophZek
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.

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Gunstig2Snath
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.

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beamatronic
How does the algo measure success? It it running analysis on my human, uh,
“outputs”? If so then, sure, maybe.

~~~
stringgames
This algo was measuring after meal glucose levels and optimizing against
glucose spikes. Read the article before asking questions about the article.

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ramoz
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"

God forbid it ever mention "keto"

~~~
lars512
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.

~~~
ramoz
microbiome is ephemeral & adaptive.

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nwah1
The first attempt at this ended in failure.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler_diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler_diet)

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darkerside
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?

~~~
theNJR
Most likely a Dexcom G6.

But if you are interested in testing yourself, get this:
[https://www.amazon.com/Precision-Glucose-Monitoring-
Freestyl...](https://www.amazon.com/Precision-Glucose-Monitoring-Freestyle-
Lancets/dp/B01N9NRDVI)

You extract a pin drop of blood and it shows your glucose in a few seconds.

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juskrey
no thank you

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nilskidoo
"Siri of thousands of years from now, exactly how did the conditions which
eventually prompted the Butlerian Jyhad begin?"

------
ycombonator
No thanks I don’t want to give away my last piece of freedom.

~~~
glial
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.

