Healthy eating is a challenge, and not just due to a lack of willpower. Today’s information-saturated world has made it difficult to know which foods are good for us. The internet is full of online articles and videos on the subject – most of them without any scientific basis. So what exactly is healthy food?
Nutrition is a science, and as such can be difficult to master as a mere hobby. Even if we know which ingredients to buy, we are still faced with another challenge: how to prepare them? Baking, frying and boiling an ingredient results in chemical reactions that change the micro and macro nutrients in our food. Additionally, an artificially-grown Western European tomato cannot be compared to its organically cultivated Mediterranean counterpart. Nutrition is full of small but important nuances.
This past year, we have worked with great scientific minds, dietists and technical engineers. Together we have developed an accessible solution to this problem of complexity: Lifana, the nutritionist on your smartphone. Lifana helps users make decisions about what to eat, enables them to keep track of everything that goes into their body on a given day and suggests personal recommendations – based on a user’s own goals, principles and tastes. Our team of nutritional scientists have made sure that all the nuances described above (and many more) have been taken into account. This makes Lifana highly accurate and precise.
Additionally, the app is full of important information about nutrition, and what amounts to living a healthy lifestyle. It answers all your nutrition-related questions: is it unhealthy to start eating at noon? Do we really need breakfast? What happens if we stop eating as soon as it gets dark? Why is it important to drink lots of water?
Lifana is the result of a complex collaboration of parties, funded by the European Union’s AAL program and ZonMW in the Netherlands. Retail organisation Sonae offered their knowledge of delivery services and retail, while the Cereneo clinic brought in the team of nutritional scientists that developed the scientific formulas behind the technology. List brought to the table their knowledge of intolerances, allergies and other personal dietary restrictions, to ensure that the app does not exclude anyone, and Fraunhofer laid the groundwork for the project with their technical expertise. Our team at Gociety, lastly, has infused the app with creativity, content and our signature easy-to-use interface.
We believe that possessing the tools needed to be fit and healthy is nothing short of a right. We have spent years developing tools that keep our users safe, healthy and fit, so that they can live their most active lives. Our solution already combined the benefits of a caregiver, an emergency service and a personal trainer – all in one compact device. As such, we have made assisted healthy living largely available to anyone with a smartphone.
Still, being healthy is about more than just being active: it is, in large part, about the things we put into our bodies. We are therefore very excited to be part of the Lifana program. After months of hard work, we are now finally ready to start the pilot – and take another important step towards a world in which everyone has access to the tools needed to live a healthy lifestyle.
