myhealthproject

[myhealthproject]

What about beverages?

My nutrient database is getting pretty cool, but it's a bit dry.

Just like I did for food, I started to populate a fairly complex spreadsheet to massage beverage data, but then I realized to what point my daily routine includes always the same few beverages.

I'm not building an encyclopedia of food, I'm just trying to improve my health, so I took the easy path and came up with a short list:

Water

Coffee

Black tea

Green tea

I added my three usual Starbucks drinks, which are all variations on iced coffee:

Shaken blonde espresso

Vanilla sweet cream cold brew

Salted caramel cream cold brew

I don't really drink anything else. On occasion I'll have a can of soft drink, a beer, or a small chocolate milk, but it's not even a weekly occurrence so I'll just tag those as "bad stuff".

I am now reasonably satisfied with my small database, I only need to start populating the daily journals.

[myhealthproject]

data is hard

I've been scouring the interwebs to find food data, and it has been an ordeal.

There's no central authority (at least none that I trust) so I grabbed data right and left, and this led to a pile of data elements with no unified structure.

Just looking at all the "chicken" variations (breat, white meat, BBQ, rotisserie, breaded, chicken wings, etc.) tells me that trying to get a data set that is exhaustive and correct would be a fool's errand.

Thankfully, this is a personal project that has nothing to do with academia or business, so I should be fine with a crude first iteration and go from there. I'm not starting a nutrition school, I just want something convenient that will allow me to improve my life without an insane amount of coding or data processing.

So I came up with a simple model based on 4 data entities:

a list of nutrients

a list of food sources for the nutrients

a list of drinks

a journal to track things I eat/drink

The plot thickens

Turns out that even that is not easy, because the "servings" size for nutrients comes in many different units (g, mg, IU, name it).

To solve the problem, I made a simplified formula and turned everything to mg - this would make a nutritionist or physician freak out, but I have to start somewhere.

Same thing with food servings - data comes in many units, from oz to "one small apple". I did the same conversion, which is probably quite wrong on some items but it's a good first step.

The database

I put all my nutrients and food stuff in a database, and I ended up with a decent inventory:

23 nutrients with the recommended daily allowance

117 food items

206 associations between a food item and a nutrient

Good or bad?

I decided to only track "good" food items. Everything else I won't track in a granular way, I will just log times and approximate quantities when I eat something bad, such as:

Junk food

Pizza

Candy

Cake or pastry

Ice cream

Popcorn and chips

Convenience store food

This means that whatever nutrients I get from eating fast food will not show up in my aggregated totals, but that's fine.

Thankfully I'm not in a point in my life where I have to accept bad food as part of my routine; I will likely slip once in a while but I don't want to get heavily into bad food tracking. I'll just journal those in a "bad stuff" table and focus on the good.

[myhealthproject]

Food? What is food?

The more I read about diet and nutrition, the more I realize to what point I know nothing about food.

In the movie Idiocracy, agriculture is dying because fields are irrigated with a power drink since it's got "electrolytes".

Like most people, I've seen that "electrolytes" thing on bottled beverages. And until I started to really look into improving my diet I wasn't too clear on what it meant. Even after a quick lookup I knew that electrolytes are the "ums" (sodium, magnesium, etc) but what role those played in my own body was vague to me.

It was about time to educated myself about that topic.

Nutrition and nutritionism

As I was reading about nutrients, I noticed a pattern: many authors look at nutrients separately, as if they were ingredients in a recipe.

This leads to a fragmented approach to diet. Your magnesium level is a little low? Take a magnesium supplement. Your vitamin C level is a little low? Take a vitamin C supplement. Etc.

This feels wrong to me, for a number of reasons. For instance, it appears that wheat bran interferes with the absorption of calcium (which limits the benefits of drinking a glass of milk while eating whole wheat toasts). This tells me that a healthy diet doesn't come as a sum of various nutrients in specific quantities; the sequence and combination also matter.

With that in mind, I think it's best if I take the good part of nutritionism (identifying the nutrients required for human health) but disregard the part that involves monitoring levels extensively.

The wildcard of bio-availability

I'm not gonna lie: I don't like spinach. I don't like the taste, I don't like the texture. But it's allegedly a superfood so I used to buy a bag of spinach at the grocery store and throw a handful of leaves in salads, hoping I wouldn't notice the taste.

Little did I know that, in order to benefit from all the good nutrients (i.e. maximize their bio-availability), spinach must be cooked. I ate all that raw spinach and didn't get the most out of it!

Does that mean that all veggies must be cooked? Apparently not, since cooked garlic lose a big chunk of nutritional value.

What now?

Instead of just keeping all this information in my head and forgetting most of it by the time I get to the grocery store, I think I need some kind of tool that will allow me to track what nutrients I'm eating and what nutrients I'm missing. This project is starting to feel like an app project.

First step: build a comprehensive list of nutrients and food sources.

[myhealthproject]

what about physical exercise?

As I started to rethink my diet, I realized that I didn't know much about the benefits of exercise. So just like I did for the nutrition/diet stuff, I binged on books about exercise and fitness.

Once again, I realized that there are many opinions out there, but fewer convinced me. After reading about a dozen books on this subject I already had a good idea of what makes sense to me.

The common sense approach

Getting healthy is 90% diet, 10% exercise

Even though we mostly have sedentary lifestyles, many lean and healthy animals in the wild are less physically active than modern humans (pre-pandemic).

The body is no fool

The human body is amazing at adaptation. If the same exercise plan is used all the time, the body adjusts itself to meet the demands of that specific plan (i.e. it becomes increasingly easier to perform that specific activity at the expense of other forms of activity). Getting in shape is therefore a constant game of cat & mouse with the body's ability to learn.

Timing matters

Cardio is best first thing in the morning, as it helps speed up the metabolism and also seems to help with brain functions. Strength training is best in late afternoon, when stamina is at its peak. Also, strength training is better than cardio for weight control

Based on these findings, to enhance physical fitness these are the things I need:

Some form of cardio in the morning

Some form of weight training before dinner

Randomly vary the frequency, duration and focus of those sessions

Take random time off every few days, instead of having a rigid weekly schedule

I also decided that at this point I wouldn't get a gym subscription, for a number of reasons (including the pandemic).

For cardio, based on my interests and physical condition, I selected the following: jogging, biking and doing Zumba in my living room (following beginner YouTube videos).

For strength training, I selected the following: basic calisthenics (ex: push-ups) and resistance training (I bought the TRX straps).

It's not perfect but this is a good start allowing me to slowly get healthier while I focus my research and mental energy on the diet part.

I'm quite happy with the progress I'm making with my understanding of diet and fitness, but knowledge is not enough. I will need some kind of system to keep me on track.

[myhealthproject]

the ensemble technique

As I started to look into adopting a healthier diet, I realized that there is a lot of confusion out there as to what is good or not good.

In the world of machine learning, good predictive models are sometimes based on a set of weaker predictive models, like a bunch of decision trees. This is called an ensemble technique, and the concept seems like a good fit (pun intended) for my situation.

Since I didn't find one expert that I can blindly trust, I will identify the ones that make the most sense to me and I will combine their advice.

Specifically, those authors convinced me the most:

Jason Fung: that guy is all about fasting. I stumbled upon one of his YouTube videos and I really liked the way he explained things. Why fasting works, and how. I then read his books and I learned a lot about how the body works and how metabolism is a tricky thing.

Dr Gundry: the thing that resonated with me from his book is how some plants developed mechanisms to defend themselves against predators (including humans) so we have to be careful when selecting and/or preparing plants.

Susan Peirce Thompson: her approach is based on four "bright lines" (lines not to be crossed): sugar, flour, meals and quantities. It made a lot of sense to me.

Each of those authors has built a program around their approach, and I would suspect that following any of those programs would yield positive outcomes. However, I wasn't overwhelmingly convinced by one over the others, so I will merge the key points of their distinctive approaches and use that as a basis for my own lifestyle.

Of course if I'm to succeed I need something more tangible than just a set of ideas, but at this point I'm still in the research phase of my project.

[myhealthproject]

confusion

As King Crimson would put it:

Confusion will be my epitaph

I want to improve my health, so I started to educate myself.

I devoured (pun intended) nutrition/diet book after nutrition/diet book, only to realize that it's really muddy out there... And I'm not talking merely about comparing specific diet plans (South Beach or Paleo? Ketogenic or Atkins? etc.), I'm talking about people with convincing credentials not agreeing on what is good and what is not good.

Just in the heated area of plant-based nutrition there are many schools of thoughts, and of course everyone claims to have facts and science on their side.

(I think it's an interesting paradox that when multiple experts with academic credentials disagree about something, we have to pick which one we're going to believe in - but that's another story).

The truth is not out there

What I realized by reading all those books is to what point actual data is hard to get and even harder to interpret. Some authors cited the same study but came up with totally contradicting conclusions as to what it meant.

It irks me and I'd love to know which one is right, but the truth is that I don't want to spend the next 5 years studying this field, and I also don't want to pick a guru and follow that one blindly at the exclusion of everything else.

Where does that leave me? In the absence of a clear answer, I probably should start by listing the few things that make sense to me. Ultimately it's my health, so I need to be accountable.

The common sense approach

After reading over thirty books about nutrition/diet, these are the things that make sense to me:

The best diet is plant-based, with some fish, and a little bit of meat, some dairy, and an even smaller amount of fruit

Sugar is bad

Some things are essentially sugar: milk, fruit juice, white bread

Some types of fat are okay

Grain is not a no-brainer

Calories are a meaningless way to control food intake

What matters it not just what I eat, but when; in other words, intermittent fasting is a good thing

Just because it's a plant doesn't mean it's healthy

How food is prepared and stored matters

If it's easy to eat, it's probably not too healthy (i.e. processed food is bad)

I'm still a bit confused but I can sense that there's some kind of framework emerging from this mess.

[myhealthproject]

the hunch

The lockdown during the second wave of the pandemic made me go back to a bad lifestyle (fast food, pizza and TV), and worrying symptoms appeared. I didn't get a formal diagnosis but psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis seemed to fit the bill.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking but I think I can beat this by adjusting my diet and lifestyle again.

I don't think I have to solve one specific problem, but address four issues::

Something unhealthy in the food I eat

Something missing from my diet

Not drinking enough water

Not being active enough

I donn't want to leave it to chance, and I also don't want to head to see a doctor because I know the answer would just be some kind of pills or medication. I'm not opposed to modern medecine but I think it's mostly focused on solving specific conditions while my issue at its core is a bad lifestyle.

Just like one cannot grow a healthy lawn by painting it with a vibrant green, I don't want to fix symptoms, I want to get healthy from the ground up.

So I'm going to learn about the kind of food I should be eating or not eating, and about fitness in general.

Time to spend a few bucks on my Kindle collection!

[myhealthproject]

The canary is singing

After months of semi-lockdown due to the pandemic, I became a bit lethargic. Not a lot of energy, not a lot of drive; sleeping a lot, wasting hours in front of the TV watching dumb shows or playing video games... and finding no pleasure in it.

Going to the grocery store became an ordeal, with strict rules, long lines, etc. so I progressively switched to three main sources for food: fast-food drive-thru (especially for breakfast), food delivery (especially pizza), and late night drive to the convenience store for snacks.

After a few months of this lifestyle I noticed a small rash on my elbow. Like most people I went online and looked up all possible explanations, and the one that seemed to match best was a bit disturbing: psoriasis. I did my best to ignore it, and silently hoped it would go away on its own.

Then after a while I noticed that toes on my right foot were stiff and sore.

At that point the lockdown rules loosened, and I found myself going out for fresh air more often, and going to the grocery store again. I didn't switch to an immensely healthy diet right away but veggies, nuts and fish reappeared in my regular meals. Almost immediately the stiffness in my toes went away, and while the rash on my elbow didn't entirely disappear, it dwindled quite a lot.

Then the second wave of the pandemic hit, there was another lockdown, and I slipped back into the bad lifestyle immediately. Of course it still wasn't fun; I hated my days wasted watching dumb TV shows or playing video games, but somehow I wasn't able to do anything else.

Then the rash on my elbow was back with a vengeance, and a small one appeared on the other elbow. And after a while, I noticed that one of my fingers was sore. Not a huge throbbing pain, but some discomfort whenever I would try to bend it.

Back to the online search, and the most likely explanation: arthritis, which in theory I'm too young to be a serious candidate. Which leads to a specific type of arthritis: psoriatic arthritis. I read the article on the Mayo Clinic website and it terrified me.

I figured it was time to do something about it.