Zoe

There’s a new woman in my life. We began to meet online. Then she shared some videos with me. And I was hooked. But T need not worry. I’ve not joined a strange Russian dating site. Zoe is a nutrition and gut health improvement programme run by eminent scientists from Kings College, London, and Harvard Medical School. And I’ve just become one of their thousands of guinea pigs.

Oddly enough, you begin the progamme by eating muffins. But not any old muffins. The specially prepared ones they send you. After the first meal of muffins you monitor your blood sugar, via a sensor in your upper arm. After a second meal of muffins you monitor your blood fat, by doing a pinprick blood test. Then you send them a sample of your poo. To some, this might sound a bit off-putting. But it’s very easy to do. Your results arrive fairly quickly.

My blood sugar response was graded good (in comparison to all participants) and excellent (in comparison to people of a similar age and sex). So my body processes carbohydrates very effectively and I’m not at risk of diabetes anytime soon. My blood fat response was graded poor in relation to both sets of comparators. To some extent I already knew I had a problem in this area. I’ve been taking a statin for some years to lower cholesterol. But now I need to do more. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my microbiome was graded as excellent. The poo sample showed that my gut contained a preponderance of good bacteria and very little bad bacteria.

So what next? The Zoe app has inputted my results. When I log the food I’m eating into the online diary, it scores every item on the impact it will have on my blood sugar, blood fat and microbiome. It also puts each food item I’m eating into four categories. Eat rarely. Enjoy in moderation. Enjoy regularly. Enjoy freely. Zoe has an enormous database of foods, so you can look up different items to see how they have been scored. Then you can change ingredients or substitute healthier alternatives. This is helpful, as I’m trying more actively to control the level of fats in my diet.

Joining Zoe isn’t cheap (it costs several hundred pounds for one year). But it’s already proving to be a valuable investment.