I don’t have to tell you smart cookies that good nutrition is key in preventing and curing metabolic diseases. Thanks to Jane Fonda, Oprah, Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod, Shake Weights, and, um, that quack Dr. Oz guy who is always talking about people’s butts, I think we as a society have figured that out. The hard part is breaking down the essential nutrition information that we know matters so much and finding a way to know our true food intake .
I know you are thinking, “Christie, there’s an app for that”. But hear me out.
InTakeX, a team of healthcare, technology and nutrition professionals based in Toronto have teamed up with us at HeroX to create the What’s In My Food!? Challenge.
What’s the goal of this challenge?
IntakeX and HeroX challenge innovators to transform the world of nutrition by enabling people to make informed choices about the food they put into their body. Let’s change the way people eat.
What, St. Martin? Yeah. Wait for it.
What’s the problem we would like to solve?
Restaurants today often have some form of listed nutritional information regarding their menu but this information is not always easy-to-access, nor is it available for all dishes. When at home, calculating nutritional information based on food labels can often be inaccurate. In fact, studies have shown that these labels carry up to a 20% error in the numbers. That label that says the food you are eating has 500 calories could be off by as much as 100 calories. You did NOT invite those extra calories over for dinner. Unwelcome dinner guests are the worst.
While we see these labels everywhere on our food in North America, governments and regulators do not have the resources to check the accuracy of all food labels, making this a more challenging issue for us to govern our own intake.
We ALL deserve reliable and easy-to-understand information to make healthy, informed food decisions.
Understanding what’s in your food could slow the development of metabolic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity, which could enhance individual lives and save the healthcare industry billions of taxpayer dollars. It could also help us be really, really good looking. Bonus side effect to good health?
While there has been some great products in development that attempt to address this concern (SITU Smart Food Scale, TellSpec, SCiO’s Handheld Scanner, MyVessel, and Health Watch 360 to name a few), these solutions are not complete.
How do we plan to do this?
We are calling individuals and teams from all backgrounds to design and develop a solution to this important problem. Find the innovators in all of us to invent a fun to use, accurate, reusable, portable, affordable, and consumer acceptable prototype that can determine the nutritional contents (calories, carbohydrates, dietary fibre, cholesterol, protein, fats, sodium, and sugar) of any food item within a 5-10% margin of error against the government standard laboratory test.
The crowd can do this.
What you can do?
If you think you have what it takes to transform the world of nutrition by enabling people to make informed choices about the food they put into their body, sign-up for the What’s In My Food!? Challenge. Show the world what you can do! The winner of this challenge will receive a sizeable purse, a platform to help launch the product, media attention, and other supports to help commercialize your product. The crowd will back you.
How much does a future product like this mean to you and health? Pledge to help support a sizeable purse for the innovators who can build it. Join the HeroX community and lets find out what’s really in our damn food.
Make sure to follow #WhatsInMyFood and @IntakeX and @HeroX on Twitter.
