Health management and trigger foods

Although I focus on how finding trigger foods is helpful (yes, with a tool such as TriggerFood), I think it's also important to consider how identifying these problematic foods should fit into a larger scheme of health management. Let's take the example of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Now I'm no medical professional, but here are the pieces I can think of, ranked in order of importance:

#1: Seek professional medical care
It's very tempting to try to self-diagnose for conditions like IBS, and try to manage it on your own, but this approach raises some major concerns. First, it's possible that you have an entirely different problem that might require a completely different approach than IBS. It could be something entirely curable, in which case you'd be enduring a lot of grief for no reason by treating it as IBS. Or, in a worse scenario, it could be something that could cause you long-term damage if not attended to by a doctor promptly. Second, even if it is IBS, a doctor may be able to help with your symptoms substantially. Although the effectiveness of different medications varies substantially, for some people they've been shown to dramatically improve quality of life.

#2: Seek more professional medical care
IBS is tricky to treat, so if one doctor isn't able to help you, try another. I certainly know of personal experiences that have led individuals through a number of doctors before finding seemingly miraculous help. Knowing that this has eventually panned out for other people can provide hope and keep you from deciding you're beyond help.

#3: Find and eliminate trigger foods
Once you've exhausted your medical options, or perhaps in conjunction with them, use a food diary and/or elimination diet to see if you can find foods that trigger your IBS symptoms. Although they can be tricky to track down in some cases (hence the creation of TriggerFood), eliminating trigger foods is a relatively easy way to improve your symptoms.

#4: Try foods that might help
There are a number of commonly advised dietary supplements for IBS, such as peppermint oil or probiotics. The effectiveness of these may be dubious in some cases, but they're easy to try, so why not give them a shot?

#5: Make lifestyle changes
This certainly would rank higher on my list if it wasn't for the fact that it's so hard to do. Plus, many life situations don't allow for major changes, so why worry about something you can't do anything about. Still, there are things such as meditation that can be incorporated into one's life to reduce stress, for instance.

So there's my take on the repertoire of tools at one's disposal, but I think it's important to note that it often an individual will bounce back and forth between these over time, since IBS tends to wax and wane over time.

TriggerFood launches: Use it to find your trigger foods

After a year and a half of development, I'm pleased to announce that TriggerFood is finally publicly available. For those who haven't followed its development, TriggerFood is a web application that lets people track what they eat and how they feel, and then analyzes these food and health entries to see what foods might be causing them to feel bad. It's based on the proven practice (often advised by doctors) of keeping a food diary and then looking for patterns. The advantages of using TriggerFood are that it has a database of over 10,000 foods, so it can keep track of food ingredients for you too, and then analyze the foods, their ingredients and your health in a systematic way that would be incredibly difficult by hand.

So who would benefit from using TriggerFood? Well, what inspired me to write this software was personal experience with family and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). IBS sufferers often find themselves guessing and second-guessing what they eat, trying to figure out what they might be causing them so much trouble. I thought it'd be great if someone had developed software that let people keep a food and health diary and did some sort of analysis, but after quite a bit of searching I found that there really wasn't anything that fit the bill. So I started writing some software, originally just intending it for my own family's use, but eventually came to realize that this could benefit many people, and started getting it ready for public use.

Want to check it out? Head over to www.triggerfood.com. For a tour of how it works, be sure to take the tour at www.triggerfood.com/tour.