Active Low-Carber Forums - Tracking Your Health & Privacy

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Tracking Your Health & Privacy

Very interesting article from the Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and...ivacy-1.4692851

We often talk about addiction on this forum as it relates to food consumption, but what if we are developing a dependency on the very devices sold to track health with the promise to make us healthy? And what is being done with the data resulting from all this, particularly if that data is conveniently stored on some "personal" cloud account for you? We ought to be aware of the consequences here, as everyone would like to press an "easy" button to achieve better health, myself included, but along with this technology come unintended consequences as well. The following is an excerpt from the article, I've put in bold a statement in the last paragraph:

Quote:

"There is no doubt that the device, the FreeStyle Libre, which the HSE has been reimbursing some patients for since 2018, is a revolutionary way to monitor blood-glucose levels for people with diabetes. Rather than prick a finger and squeeze a drop of blood on to a testing strip, a patient could stick a coin-sized sensor with a tiny probe to their upper arm. The painless probe barely pierces the arm, measuring glucose constantly via liquids just under the skin and giving a readout with the swipe of an electronic reader.

The system promised way more data and control for people with diabetes, who try to avoid dangerous peaks and troughs in blood-sugar levels. Soon they could pair their phones with the sensor, keeping a record in an app without ever having to draw blood. It was a life-changing marriage of medical and consumer technologies."

"Laura Douglas isn’t diabetic, but a few years ago she began experimenting with one of the sensors, which is made by the US health corporation Abbott Laboratories. In the simplest terms, spikes in sugar levels can induce hunger. You eat a biscuit and your levels go up, then crash: you want another biscuit.

“I found it almost rewired my brain,” says Douglas, a 29-year-old engineer and health researcher based in London. “If I saw a spike I’d know what had caused it and avoid that food, because I had the memory of the spike, rather than weighing myself every day and thinking, It’s going okay overall.”

In 2018, Douglas founded MyLevels. The startup, which is in the testing phase, pairs FreeStyle Libre sensors with its own app to understand the effects of foods on an individual’s glucose response, using artificial intelligence to recommend a personalised diet. “A lot of diets will tell you not to eat when your sugar levels crash,” says Douglas, who is from Edinburgh and has a master’s degree in machine learning. “We say: ‘Don’t spike too much in the first place.’”

MyLevels has sent sensors to about 300 trial customers around the UK; it plans to launch fully in a few months. (A 14-day programme costs £139, or about €165.) Customers are invited to eat test foods, such as a bar of Dairy Milk, to get a range of individual baseline responses, and log what they eat. Foods are then scored as part of a new recommended diet that aims to avoid sugar spikes.

Douglas is not alone. “The use of continuous glucose monitors in healthy individuals is an exploding area,” says Sarah Berry, a senior lecturer in nutritional sciences at King’s College London and an expert in postprandial metabolism, or the way we respond to food."

As this technology evolves, I think about the article Janet posted on the tool, Compass, from Tufts University. If these begin to inform people about which foods are healthy to consume, who is making that decision? I think I'll stick with the simple principles of DDF . . . . . . .

As much as Marty Kendall tries to discourage the use of CGM's for Data Driven Fasting, he has written an article about it now because so many members found DDF through other Fasting support groups and arrive wanting to continue using one. I really had no idea about Zoe, Day 2, NutriSense and Levels Health..everyone wants to be a bio-hacker now. So yes,...the use of a CGM is exploding, and from the members who post their minor BG excursions comparing 5 different foods...it is a subset of very healthy people who really have no issues.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JEY100

..everyone wants to be a bio-hacker now.

Come on, we all do! :wave:

Why else would I have joined DDF :lol:
I sent my success story that Marty published to old college friends…and the reaction was…. I didn’t understand it, this is too technical, what are you doing? :lol: And I don’t even use the CGM. I forget that we live in this bizarro world focused on detailed nutrition nuances.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JEY100

Since starting DDF I have found myself thinking about mentioning what I am doing to various friends and family and then deciding not to because I know that they will react with the same bewilderment they always do when faced with my eating habits. From my side I guess I am equally astounded that they can eat so thoughtlessly and continue to feed themselves in ways that seems less than healthy to me. I don't express that opinion either. It too elicits eye rolls in my direction. I remain quiet, for the most part, on dietary choice and health and continue to do my own thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JEY100
Why else would I have joined DDF
I sent my success story that Marty published to old college friends…and the reaction was…. I didn’t understand it, this is too technical, what are you doing? And I don’t even use the CGM. I forget that we live in this bizarro world focused on detailed nutrition nuances.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cotonpal

Yes, us fellow ascetics on this board have much wisdom and little opportunity to share except among ourselves. :lol: :lol: :lol:

For the first six months of 2019, I used a tracker called Carb Manager. My eating choices were saved in the cloud and yes, they are subject to piracy.

If anything, we should arrange to anonymize and donate this kind of data. Let them analyze what people actually eat :)

My Fitness Pal already anonymizes data, makes it available, it helped Marty Kendall develop DDF. Now he has his own data sets to add to it. But this is what he used:

Quote:

Our analysis of half a million days of food logging data found that people tend to eat fewer calories when they eat two meals per day. We tend to choose more energy-dense foods when we’re ravenous, so we often eat more with one meal a day than two meals a day. It is also easier to meet your vitamin, mineral and protein needs if you spread it across two meals rather than trying to get it all in at once.

Half a million days of logging! https://optimisingnutrition.com/how...-you-eat-a-day/

https://optimisingnutrition.com/data-driven-fasting/

The CGM article includes a short summary of how fats, carbs, protein, alcohol all impact blood glucose. He links to the longer explanations, but the short version: "A diet with fewer carbs and more fat will allow your glucose stores to be depleted, but may still keep your body fat stores locked away if it contains too much fat. "

How to lose weight using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and Data-Driven Fasting

https://optimisingnutrition.com/how...driven-fasting/

I would trust Marty with my nutritional data, and I carefully consider others using data on a case-by-case basis, as they are not all as benevolent and committed to guarding privacy as the Optimising Nutrition team. Many, in fact, simply want your stuff, profile, other for marketing and sales purposes. In addition, some of these are the entities that host many of the social media outlets to which people subscribe. Many are "free" or priced very low. The devices and outlets available today cover the continuum from good to bad. Today, MyLevels may have good intentions in using the CGM data collected, tomorrow, they may be purchased by a larger company which has a very different agenda. Those who decide to participate must perform due diligence and maintain a wariness if there are any possible misgivings about the sharing of one's personal information beyond how it was originally intended.