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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 . . . . . . .