Show HN: Meals/Feels - Log your meals and feels to spot food allergies | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Meals/Feels - Log your meals and feels to spot food allergies

mealsfeels.com

83 pointsk33l0r41 comments

As someone who suffered for 7 years being treated for dermatitis when I had chronic undiagnosed IgE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunoglobulin_E) issues, this looks perfect.

The effects of my intolerances as they are referred to is that whenever I ingest anything containing (almost 160+ other things) eggs, dairy, cereals, fructose, vinegars, anything with Soy/Tofu, apple skin, tomato skin, yeast, and over ripe bananas I have serious mood changes, not to mention GI issues, and suffer with dermatitis on my face and arms. It is also characterised by bloody boils deep in the skin in fatty (I'm 70Kg, 183cm and 13% body fat, so that's relative) areas of my body.

This went undiagnosed for so long, that I never counted on a cure, and, in fact there isn't a cure, my body has become allergic to those foods for some reason, and eventually it may be that my immune response subsides, and I can once again enjoy them.

(Note about how thrilled I was to hear about Soylent, and then how dismayed that they decided to hone in on the cheapest possible recipe, at the expense of the "Pea" protein variant which might have been suitable for me)

I think the meals/feels app could make a difference to any hackers who take the time to use it.

For anyone else, who thinks they may have allergies/intolerances similar to mine, beware that topical allergy testing won't catch it, but a focused blood panel for IgE response might. As far as typical reaction times go, GI disorder can set in anything from instantly, to 24 hours later, and the effects on my mood, and skin, etc have lead time of anything from 24-100 hours, and a recovery time of as much as three weeks.

My youngest has a fairly strong intolerance to soy. And we've just gotten to a stage where he can eat eggs that are cooked into stuff (muffins, pancakes, etc) but not just by themselves (fried, scrambled, etc). We haven't even tried nuts with him yet. When people think of food allergies they think nuts because that is the more common one and more likely to cause anaphylaxis. Less attention is given to intolerances (maybe because they are not typically fatal). That is starting to change though. When I tell people he's intolerant to soy they don't really grasp what that means. It is probably 100 times easier to avoid nuts than it is to avoid soy. Soy is in practically everything. Particularly the things kids like to eat. My kid is too young to really benefit from this app since he can't really tell me his mood. All I could do is notice if he starts throwing up or has nasty diapers. But I can totally see this helping people who need to track their reactions to foods.

Should you be trying to see how much pressure his body can take re: eggs? I know there's a difference between raw egg and cooked egg, though I'm sure there's still irritation going on - just not all at once - if the egg is distributed with other food in the body. Just wondering if this is what's generally advised.

I think what you are asking about is referred to as a food challenge: Dose. Wait. repeat. His Allergist sets the plan. We started with really baked eggs (muffins, cakes, etc). At first it was in the Dr office with controlled dosage and interval. He passed so we went home and continued to feed him muffins and such. When that went fine for a few weeks we started with lesser cooked eggs (pancakes & waffles). We will not be trying just cooked eggs (fried, etc) for a bit. And that will be back at the Allergist's office.

Prior to eggs, we did the same challenge with soy in the Dr office. Tiny sip. Wait 15 minutes. Slightly larger sip. Wait 15 minutes. 1/4 oz. Wait. Half oz. Wait. Dose. Wait. Dose. Wait. After the final dose we had to wait another 90 minutes before we could leave. At about 85 minutes he just started vomiting. All. Over. It was horrific. I'm glad we were in an examine room and not at home. The nurses handled everything perfectly.

I have a similar issue, though I suffered no diagnosis instead of a misdiagnosis. One doctor did try to prescribe me steroid cream. I know what you mean about the boils deep in the skin, I get a minor case of those.

Thanks for the information. I don't see any new leads for me here, but if you have any, please share. I'm on a strict diet of beef, fish, and that's it. (Other non-shellfish meats are OK too.) There are very few things I can eat. Sometimes I cheat with things I'm slightly allergic or intolerant to. I have to be very strictly gluten-free.

I'm undergoing ongoing testing with professional help to try to find causes.

Would it be helpful if, given a list of symptoms you input: - Based on the most likely solutions others with similar symptoms had, give you a list of the most likely things to try? - A health professional with good allergy expertise respond to your questions?

Would that give you the support you need do you think?

I might also add that I didn't realise that always being in a negative mood, having no drive to proceed with life, having no ambition, not sleeping well, etc seem like the characteristic "early 20s" mood that most people "go through"… I didn't recognise until after I became healthy what healthy really feels like.

Now I run 15-20 miles per week, I'm 30Kg lighter than when I had allergies, and since my diagnosis I've had the drive to found my own agency business and (almost) get a SAAS platform out of the door.

Same here. Lethargy and motivation were largely a matter of health.

Congrats on your success in finding the problem!

That might be helpful, yes. Even just presenting me with relevant terms to research (such as "IgE") based on symptoms might be very helpful, especially to someone just starting out.

Out of curiosity, what can you eat?

> As far as typical reaction times go, GI disorder can set in anything from instantly, to 24 hours later, and the effects on my mood, and skin, etc have lead time of anything from 24-100 hours, and a recovery time of as much as three weeks.

That's wild. How on Earth did you zero in on your issue? Was it a case of "literally nothing else would explain things, so I may as well get this blood test"?

And what do you eat on a typical day?

Meat, rice, fish and salad (without dressing… vinegar and dairy based are pretty much all you find anywhere; I eat a lot of olive oils and citrus juice)

Nothing indian (all creamy, milky), very few asian recipes (i.e no sushi, I'm intolerant of the green stuff they roll it in), anything with coconut milk is a decent start.

Most "egg replacement" for baking contains stuff that I just can't eat, so anything baked is out of the question.

I was fortunate when I moved to Germany, my company's recommended doctor was the only one I could find who spoke english, and he was a sports physiotherapy specialist with a side training in homeopathy; for all that I believe it's quack science, the holistic approach to "maybe you have bad skin because there's something wrong somewhere else" was a valuable insight.

My health insurance paid the first €200 in blood testing (€50 basic panel, 150 wide panel), having established that there's no "cure", they won't insure the condition any further, but that's OK.

I can tell within minutes when I've eaten something that contains gluten. The more unpleasant effects happen later, but I feel different almost immediately. In my case, a friend just offhandedly suggested to me one day that I should try cutting gluten from my diet and I was 'cured' within 48 hours of taking her advice.

This was our team's Rails Rumble 2013 entry.

More details on our blog: http://blog.kiskolabs.com/post/64607343183/meals-feels

Interesting. My PhD research is on precisely this topic-- nutrition diaries + machine learning for identifying the effect of foods on people with chronic illnesses, such as Crohn's or MS.

I think this site is a good idea. It'd be even better if you could add in amounts and somehow standardize the entries. Even better still if you could break foods down by ingredients.

Also, if you get a few users and want to have someone analyze your data in super cool Bayesian ways, email me!

My girlfriend has Ankylosing spondylitis. The exact cause of the continued inflammation is unknown. It has been hypothesised that the cause is a gut bacteria feeding off of gluten/starch/sugar/etc.

We are super excited about trying out an elimination diet with Soylent, but knowing the real possibility of placebo and other factors, such as stress, we are trying to come up with a systematic way to measure the effect of Soylent diet on the wellbeing.

Do you have any advice on how to go about conducting such a (food) experiment, what and how to track things and anything else to consider? Thanks!

Unfortunately, it's pretty tough to do it as just one person. All of my models assume you have a population of patients that are tracking their diets. With one person, you probably are best off just tracking your foods, medications, and how you feel (numerically, say [0,10] or something). Then after a while you can do a regression based on how much of a given item you think you have in your system.

Hypochondriacs everywhere rejoice.

Seriously though I think it's a cool idea, might try it myself.

Does this do some kind of analysis to help spot what foods might cause problems? That would be useful. Otherwise would this be any more useful than a spreadsheet?

This is way more web 2.0 than a spreadsheet and is just as hard to take to your doctor.

Sounds like a winner.

I like your sense of humor, but that's kind of mean. This is decent for being built at a hackathon. If the creators wanted to take thsi further I think analysis would move it from "OK, but what good does it do me?" to "I might use this to help find out what foods trigger my allergies/Chron's/etc."

you may be interested in this company trying to solve that problem. here is a link to short video: http://www.nexj.com/resources/nexj-connected-wellness-video/

I'm working on a personal analytics system that's very similar. My goal is to track more horizontally, not just one aspect like diet. I really like what you've done here, and I think the UI is very clever.

Some folks here are asking why this is better than a spreadsheet. For the same reason that people use CRM instead of a spreadsheet. That, and you can obtain time and location data passively.

Might be good to have landing pages directly targeted at people with Crohn's disease, people on the diet of the month, etc.

This looks great. I kept a food diary on paper a couple of years back and discovered a correlation to MSG and headaches. I remember a discussion about food allergies here on HN a while back that I lurked on. I was surprised by how many people seemed angry that anyone might be sensitive to MSG. Keeping a food diary helped me tremendously.

'feel' is a quality lacking from existing food trackers like MyFitnessPal. While I'm not aware of having any food allergies, I track how I feel when I train in the 'notes' box on MyFitnessPal so I can assess the impact of diet/sleep/training volume on performance. This works for me and makes sense in the context of food allergies.

Trying to spot an allergy also won't require the level of detail of MyFitnessPal/similar so I like the stripped down interface.

Any chance you'd consider open-sourcing the code, or at least the horizontal calendar portion? This would be incredibly useful in a number of applications.

It does look quite sharp.

Cool idea, a couple notes after trying it out.

- Despite the save and delete buttons being big and obvious I looked right past them the first time I entered data and lost all of my entries. I expected that it would just save automatically when the entry fields lost focus. - A 12/24 hour time option would be nice. - I somehow ended up with a duplicate October 23rd. It went away when I refreshed the page.

I really like this, it's so easy to navigate and at the same time have a view of the overall 'feels'.

Wow this is awesome, I just recently started doing this but in my head, a lot of intolerances and mild allergies can only be diagnosed by self testing. I just discovered that I was gluten intolerant, and perhaps many more. This is going to be quite useful, thank you so much!

Hmm, should I see a list full of logged meals the first time I visit that site?

I have been wanting to create a tool like this for some time. I'm curious about what (if any) data analysis you're doing. The general area here is called lag sequential analysis.

A third entry for that day's exercise level would be great, though difficult to fit in as a rhyme. Meals/Feels/Wheels? Meals/Feels/Burnt Caloreels?

I'll use this. I have severe acid reflux and this might actually help me fix my diet.

I did most of the design for this app. I also suffer from bad acid reflux right now, and designed this app for someone like me. :)

A year ago I figured out separate, gluten-based problems by using iCal in this manner: log meals in blue, symptoms in red, see what I've eaten ~24 hours before a red entry.

Right now this is a nicer and more focused version of iCal or a spreadsheet for this purpose, but we're planning on adding some correlation analysis similar to http://skygazerlabs.com/wp/

This is going to sound seriously snarky, but I promise it's not and I am asking a genuine question out of curiosity:

Why would this help you fix your diet when all the other ways of tracking anything (notepad, the above mentioned spreadsheet, journal etc.) apparently hasn't?

Trying cutting down on wheat based foods. If you are troubled at night, don't have any dairy before going to bed. In fact have your last food several hours before going to bed.

A good idea. But it very much needs a privacy policy.

I thought negative reactions to food can take days to play out, and potentially a week or two to completely resolve. People who are gluten sensitive, for example, exhibit the immune reaction for weeks after exposure. This application presents symptoms as tied to the day of consumption.

This is why some nutritionists talk about a strict 30 day elimination diet. For 30 days eat nothing but completely innocuous foods: no dairy, eggs, nightshades, vegetable oils, or grains. If two or three weeks in you feel a lot better or certain symptoms have subsided, then you need to more systematically try to find what the problem is.

Even if things take days to pop up and/or go away you still need to keep track of it. So even if you did you 30 day thing and felt fine and wanted to start adding new foods, you still want to track it. This app doesn't tie symptoms to consumption. It seems to just give you an easy platform to log what/when you ate and how/when you felt. Patterns will emerge organically eventually. You can speed that up by taking a systematic approach to what you eat. But you still need to track it.

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