Corporate Research Group’s Weblog

1. Pancreatic cancer symptoms: After the death of Steve Jobs from pancreatic cancer
2. Listeria: After 29 people died from eating cantaloupes contaminated with the food-borne bacteria
3. Bullying: Following the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, who was being taunted because he was gay
4. Dukan Diet: Following unconfirmed rumors that Kate Middleton went on the diet to lose weight for her wedding to Prince William
5. Bath Salts: Slang for synthetic recreational drugs banned this year by the DEA

…until you read about Larry Smarr’s “10-year personal quest to increasingly quantify my body.”  (Hat tip: Infectious Greed).  Smarr, who is founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, makes use of a wide variety of consumer tools to track his health and wellness, including Zeo (Myzeo.com), Your Future Health (Yourfuturehealth.com), 23andme.com, Navigenics, Bodymedia.com and Patientslikeme.com:

I started my quantification program by stepping on a bathroom scale every morning and writing down my weight – and ended up having to synthesize more than five dozen blood markers, multiple stool markers, microbial population distributions, and a variety of imaging modalities to try to understand the state of my body’s health and how to improve it. Yet this is precisely what the digital revolution in healthcare is all about.

His findings are eye-opening.  Here’s one interesting observation by Smarr about weight loss:

What gradually became clear to me was that one should think not in terms of weight loss as a goal, but rather think of altering your food intake to better match the biochemical systems of your body. The sub-components of our food (protein, fats, carbohydrates) and their ratios drive not only our digestive system, but much of our complex hormonal system which communicates to all organs of the body.  After changing my nutrition to more of the “Zone” approach, introduced by Barry Sears…., and increasing my exercise, I lost 20 pounds over four years.

And here’s another regarding sleep after using the Zeo sleep monitor:

An even bigger unknown to most people than the minute-to-minute caloric burn of their bodies is the nature of their sleep during the night. I had no idea what mine was like or how important good sleep is to health….Waking up early cuts into my REM in a way I hadn’t realized before. Also, the length of sleep is critical to what Zeo computes as one’s “ZQ” – a score of the quantity and quality of one’s sleep each night.

And here’s one more about what our blood tells us:

I have blood tests four to eight times per year [since insurance only covers certain tests, his out-of-pocket cost for blood tests is $5000 annually] and keep a spreadsheet with all the values….I had no idea that blood samples can reveal whether you need to take vitamin D, if your liver and kidneys are in good shape, if your zinc or molybdenum levels need supplementing, or if you have mercury contamination; today, however, I routinely use food and supplements to “tune my numbers” to more optimal levels. For instance, when blood tests showed that my vitamin D had dropped to 30, I took vitamin D3 supplements till my tests showed it had come back up to 50.

From Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift, published by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor in Nutrition Science.  (Hat tip: Infectious Greed).

Current guidelines recommend that “overweight” and “obese” individuals lose weight through engaging in lifestyle modification involving diet, exercise and other behavior change. This approach reliably induces short term weight loss, but the majority of individuals are unable to maintain weight loss over the long term and do not achieve the putative benefits of improved morbidity and mortality. Concern has arisen that this weight focus is not only ineffective at producing thinner, healthier bodies, but may also have unintended consequences, contributing to food and body preoccupation, repeated cycles of weight loss and regain, distraction from other personal health goals and wider health determinants, reduced self-esteem, eating disorders, other health decrement, and weight stigmatization and discrimination. This concern has drawn increased attention to the ethical implications of recommending treatment that may be ineffective or damaging. A growing trans-disciplinary movement called Health at Every Size (HAES) challenges the value of promoting weight loss and dieting behavior and argues for a shift in focus to weight-neutral outcomes. Randomized controlled clinical trials indicate that a HAES approach is associated with statistically and clinically relevant improvements in physiological measures (e.g., blood pressure, blood lipids), health behaviors (e.g., eating and activity habits, dietary quality), and psychosocial outcomes (such as self-esteem and body image), and that HAES achieves these health outcomes more successfully than weight loss treatment and without the contraindications associated with a weight focus.