By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

When a company brings a new product to market, it is natural to talk first about the technology, the features, or the problem it is trying to solve. All of that matters. 

Our more important starting point here is how we are taking care before we ask people to use the product.

The purpose of our food intelligence product

At MoveFlux, we are preparing to beta test our AI-supported food intelligence product. It is designed to help people make smarter food decisions and gain better real-life insights at home, in grocery stores, in restaurants, while traveling, and in the everyday moments when food choices are made quickly and often with incomplete information.

Food is not just another consumer category. It touches health, family, culture, stress, sleep, work schedules, budgets, medications, allergies, and sometimes serious medical risks. A product that helps people think about food choices has to be useful, but it also has to be careful about what it claims, what it asks users to share, how it uses that information, and how clearly it explains its limits.

Read more

By MakeUsWell | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

Hi MakeUsWell Community!

Your network — our network — has cool, smart people with real range.

One such person is the talented Sean Brawley.

Sean grew up in the unforgiving, Hunger Games–like world of junior tennis — rankings shifting constantly, relentless travel, discipline early and real. He became a Top 10 nationally ranked junior and won the U.S. Boys’ 16 Doubles title.

Read more

By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

Within the next two weeks, we will begin inviting some of you to use our new food intelligence product. Over the past several months, we have been exploring a deceptively simple question: why is it so hard for people to know whether the foods and beverages they consume are actually helping them?

The answer is that nutrition is not one decision. It is a chain of decisions, conditions, and uncertainties. A food or beverage does not have a single fixed value for every person in every circumstance. Its effect depends on where it came from, how it was grown or produced, how it traveled, how it was stored, how it was prepared, what else we consumed with it, and what was happening inside our bodies and minds at the moment we ate or drank it.

There are thousands of nutrition apps, food-rating systems, calorie counters, ingredient scanners, and diet programs. Many are useful. But the next generation of food intelligence must be more ambitious, combining artificial intelligence with human judgment, personal memory, and disciplined evidence review.

Read more

By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

For all of the advances in medicine, nutrition science, and artificial intelligence, one of the most poorly understood conflicts in health remains the tension between what is “evidence-based” and what is “personalized.”

We often speak as if they are the same thing. They are not.

Governments regulate medicine, medical devices, foods, and beverages largely on the basis of evidence generated through research. In medicine, the gold standard is the randomized clinical trial: carefully designed studies that isolate the effects of a drug, therapy, device, or procedure and compare outcomes against a control group. The goal of both the randomized clinical trials and “evidence-based medicine” is to assess the effects of whatever is being tested with respect to a large population.

This framework has saved millions of lives.

But the best evidence is never as certain as we want it to be. It never completely enables us to assess the complete effects on every individual. 

Read more

By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

Last week, this blog focused on guiding us in how we prepare food. But most of us have a significant percentage of our meals at restaurants. Most people who care about nutrition focus on ingredients, organic produce, lean proteins, and healthy fats. But there’s a hidden variable that often matters just as much, if not more: how the food is prepared, handled, and served.

Unlike when we control food preparation, we rarely see the kitchen. What you do see is the menu, and if you know how to read it, the menu can tell you a great deal about how much nutritional value may have been lost before the food reaches your table.

Read more