Anyone tried Zoe - a nutrition app?

Yeah. To clarify I was talking about capitalism rather then this particular company.

 

Okay, so it turns out I didn’t remember what this Zoe testing thing was all about. Having read all your replies, thank you people, it has all come flooding back to me, re my dislike of the man.

Back when he was pushing this product hard all over the media I had decided I didn’t ever want to do this. I thought it sounded expensive exploitative and generally like a lot of clangs bangs smoke and mirrors, content spread thin hype spread thick.

If you’re an app loving wealthy business person into every gadget and gimmick on offer and little time to do a mundane thing like decide on your own meals, this is probably the perfect product to add to a collection of similar products so you can mix and match if any one is found wanting. But even in this best possible customer scenario you’d be paying them to harvest data from you? Really?

Anyway, I had misremembered it as a thing available more as a one off or occasional check in as and when you felt like having some microbiome data for some reason or other and that this was still in my vague memory over priced in terms of likely benefits, and a significant privacy risk but at least not mentally or physically onerous.

The man presents himself as a saviour of mankind whose made a unique and amazing discovery. Credit to him he has found a niche in an area understudied by other lab scientists. But I don’t actually think he’s saying anything about the general principles I haven’t learned decades before I heard of him.

Although I haven’t read it I imagine his book is the best he has to offer and worth a read especially as it would now be low cost paperback/ebook or perhaps borrowed.

If Spector does decide to do something humanitarian and ground breaking and offer his products for a more accessible price and or advertise more transparently then I will adjust the negativity dial accordingly.

Right now I think we could all buy a lot of actual food with that fee which seems like a better deal for the little critters hanging out in the intestines. All they need really.

 

I have spent years trying different diets to try and control my stomach problems. Can't see how the Zoe system could help me at all. It's not going to know when certain foods cause stomach cramps etc. I already know all of that.

 

That's why I 1ooked into it the past too.

I had a he11ish time coming off the 1ong term PPIs, terrib1e GERD for the first 6 months, gradua11y decreasing as the months went on (it's a11 good now). But with a11 my 1ung infections over the 1ast 2 years I wanted to get back to a natura1 diet and stomach acid production, as I'd read good qua1ity research showing there is an increased risk of pneumonia and other infections with 1ong term use of PPIs (not that my GP has ever mentioned this of course, despite a11 the severe chest infections I've had over the 1ast 2 years*).*I've had these repeated infections despite 1iving a1one and being housebound, so basica11y sti11 'shie1ding' re1ative1y effective1y.

So from my point of view I fe1t it was worth the pain and gut symptoms to get to the end goa1 (I'm not recommending this to others, obvious1y coming off meds shou1d idea11y be done under medica1 supervision, it's just medica1 supervision is hard to come by in the UK depending on where you 1ive or your individua1 c1inicians).

But of course you can't just order one off testing of your gut microbiome with Zoe, despite a11 their c1aims of being a wor1d 1eader in testing! And you have to sign up to give them a11 your data and resu1ts. This is definite1y something peop1e considering using them shou1d carefu11y consider.

 

Yes.

My understanding going by what I have so far observed is that somewhere between a metaphorical 99.9.9% being optimistic and 100% being realistic, of all dietary programs and interventions claiming to be individualised or personalised or tailored are in fact, either virtually or totally not actually this at all. There are set templates for a few broad categories and there is copy and paste of preset guidelines from these.

There are two main difficulties with any nutritional plan or program. One is that the plan is going to be an instruction to eat more food’s known currently to be nutritious and ‘healthy’ short shelf life usually, and less food’s known to be ‘unhealthy’ long shelf life usually. The majority of people interested in such a program almost certainly already know this. But people have various reasons for not being able to adhere to it already. Reasons the plan can’t address.

Then the next problem is a good plan nutritionally speaking is usually based on or building an understanding of certain biological processes or factors. I think Zoe TM counts as a good plan by this measure. But the knowledge and theory will be incomplete, especially because this field is new to these researchers themselves.

A generalised program for people with varying degrees of difficulty in breaking down food and absorbing nutrients from their food, will have certain limitations. A program cannot possibly take into account all obstacles. So personal experience and knowledge sourced from a much wider pool, usually from other sufferers of certain digestive conditions is needed. As well as direct from traditional sources knowledge of plants and soil health. This all cannot be distilled into a commercial product.


Instinct is an important tool for individuals as what should go into the body. But instinct can become less useful when you don’t have cultural knowledge to balance it with. Still I don’t think instinct or cultural understanding can be replaced with a particular program.

This program seems to me a case of the privileged segment of mainstream scientific European culture taking credit for re appropriating the knowledge of others. Then mixing it up a bit into their own signature brew.

Since a larger proportion of town and city dwelling Europeans were brutally separated from land centuries ago and with it a majority of traditional cultural knowledge, we are hungry for getting some back. So it can be sold back to us, if either we can afford it or don’t have access to other resources and are desperate for relief.

It feels unpleasantly familiar, middle class professionals being amazed at themselves for ‘rediscovering’ this knowledge that people around the world have maintained with great difficulty under continual attack and threat of cultural annihilation. While centuries of brutal colonialist repression dispossession, and murder, equals thousands and thousands of years of human knowledge including ancestral healing techniques and cultural food selection and preparation practices has been destroyed.

I have not read the books and it maybe that these devote a significant portion to crediting the cultures and individuals who’ve shared their knowledge with the author and his team. Also maybe a good portion of his profits go to them. I feel like I might of heard this somewhere? If so, that’s great.

In all his interviews on the first book I’ve heard him mention various peoples with traditional knowledge. I think he spent a long time learning it and is very curious and enthusiastic. I might of imagined this but think I saw a tiny part of a TV program of him with the Maasai(?) people, I didn’t see enough to form an opinion. I have heard quite a few radio interviews, podcasts segments, perhaps I got an unrepresentative sample, but I felt more than a bit uncomfortable hearing his interviews. I can’t quite describe why, it was a time ago.

I do recall I felt Spector was over playing the uniqueness of his work at the expense of others. Also his descriptions, generalisations of what we are all like and how we eat in England seemed to come down to how he and his class eats, good but not good enough. Or a stereotype of how working class lower income people eat, just terrible. Again maybe I got an unrepresentative sample.

However I found Spector difficult to tolerate over COVID and Indy Sage also. You could say I was already prejudiced against him by his previous statements, and you’d be right. But I was also primed to give him the benefit of the doubt and just appreciate his work on this one, because Zoe was measuring and taking COVID seriously while UK gov not so much. I trust his and his teams findings to be useful and I’m grateful they undertook them. So figured an ally on this one.
But both him and Alice Roberts, who I previously really liked, were talking about low income and poor people as if we were a different species. There were comments about “interesting” data points in a casual or upbeat manner and these related to actual human people dying or being at risk of dying. They were obsessed with “Obesity” and they were sometimes slightly better in comments about increased ethnic minority risks, sometimes not. Their general aim was presented as humanitarian. But their language and tone often wasn’t in accord with this.

So overall I’d be worried about giving Zoe my data in any case, especially as a disabled person.

 

‘Personalising stuff that doesn’t matter’: the trouble with the Zoe nutrition app

"Like other companies working in this space, Zoe has all the hallmarks of serious science. Its US equivalent Levels counts among its advisers many respected scientists, including Robert Lustig, famous for raising the alarm about the harms of refined carbohydrates such as sugar. Zoe is fronted by King’s College London scientist Tim Spector and claims to be “created with world-leading science”.

The problem with personalised nutrition industry is that this is still a young research field, and there is not yet good enough evidence across the field to believe that we have yet found worthwhile novel interventions that are more helpful than standard advice. Although a Food Standards Agency report stated last year that “glucose monitoring and gut microbiome analysis may prove to become more robust and actionable” it spoke for many experts when it concluded that “the benefits of PN seem somewhat marginal when compared to what is already understood about a healthy diet.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/science...trition-app-diet-tim-spector-wellness-science

 

So, help me out. During the pandemic I was doing the Zoe survey, then fast forward and Zoe and Tim Spector are selling a diet device. To be honest I found just that distasteful and have ignored it as far as possible.

 

Urgh that’s even worse!