Hacker News Reader

Comment by lastofthemojito | Hacker News Reader

How comfortable do you feel making these kinds of recommendations?

I feel like during my lifetime overall nutritional guidance has swung on plenty of things. One example would be eggs - "those are good for you, no wait they're bad and drive up your cholesterol, no wait, the cholesterol in eggs doesn't seem to raise cholesterol in humans who consume eggs".

I can see where you'd feel you have an edge by measuring each individual's blood over time and you can see how test results change after making changes in diet or behavior - except maybe you aren't factoring in so many other changes. Maybe I moved somewhere colder and I'm getting less sunlight. Maybe I got COVID. Maybe I took up swimming. Ok, so now a blood test is showing that I'm at a slightly higher risk for a disease - do I follow Iollo's dietary guidance? Do I try to get more Vitamin D? Do I just write it off as noise?

View on HN

Regarding your first question on recommendations, and potential changes in established interventions (the egg example). In the earlier phases, we will mostly focus on established interventions that affect the metabolome and health and that have already been published by others, such as the DASH diet and exercise regimes. As you build your metabolomic trends over time, we'll then transition into more of our proprietary interventions.

Regarding your discussion of potential confounding factors due to changes in lifestyle parameters (swimming, sunlight etc.). That's an excellent question and important topic. For some metabolites, this does not matter. For example, if your glucose or Hba1c levels go above a certain value, you have diabetes, and it doesn't matter how it got there. For other metabolites, there might indeed be some external factors that influence the results. As you said, maybe you move somewhere cold, your metabolite levels suddenly switch, and the report says "warning". We have two answers for this: (1) For a lot of metabolites, these types of environmental factors and whether or not they play a role have been investigated in research studies and we thus know them. (2) Prior to each test, we will ask for as many lifestyle parameters as possible so we know that a certain change occurred and we can account for those in our analyses. Also over time, as we build our database, we will be able to automatically detect these changes for you and account for them (similar to Apple Watch's movement detector).

> I feel like during my lifetime overall nutritional guidance has swung on plenty of things. One example would be eggs - "those are good for you, no wait they're bad and drive up your cholesterol, no wait, the cholesterol in eggs doesn't seem to raise cholesterol in humans who consume eggs".

I feel like the major trend is acknowledging that there aren't many singular things which are bad enough for you to materially move the needle. Health (especially as you age) has a lot luck involved.

Sure, you're not going to fare very well if you're constantly stressed, never exercise, eat terribly, do a ton of drugs, and have an awful sleep schedule.

But whether or not you put kale or romaine in your green smoothie is not going to move the needle in a way that matters. Just like whether or not you have some eggs for breakfast most days or not is not going to materially move the needle.

It seemed like the "health craze" really started somewhere around the early 90s, when people started thinking about all these different vitamins they should be taking and foods they should be eating. I'm guessing this is just when people really started to market and push these products. It probably took 30 years to undo that and convince people they can settle down and there's way more important health decisions one can make than whether or not you eat eggs.

> It seemed like the "health craze" really started somewhere around the early 90s

In the 1700's people were literally blowing smoke up their asses. In the 1800's the Kellogg brothers invented the consumer packaged health-foods market. There's nothing new about health crazes. Maybe the 90's is when you entered the demo of "possible health craze customer" and you started see it?

In Annie Hall(?) a character mentions "Everything our parents told us was good for us, is bad for us. Sunshine, red meat, college, everything they said was good for us is bad for us!"

The Sleeper?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com