Thought Triggers

Analyzing Your Food Diary To Find Trigger Foods

2009-03-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I described how to keep a food diary that would provide a good foundation for doing an analysis to find trigger foods. I suggest taking a look before trying to apply the sort of analysis that I describe below.

So what's the simplest method for analyzing a food diary? The first thing that comes to mind is to just look at the times where your symptoms are bad, and look to see what foods you ate prior to that. At first glance this approach seems reasonable, but consider what happens with foods that you tend to eat more often than others. Let's say that someone's favorite snack is chocolate, and they have some almost every day. Well, odds are that if you look at every time their symptoms flare up and check what they ate prior to these flare-ups, you'll find chocolate pretty often. Does that make it a trigger food? It's possible, but this analysis isn't providing good evidence of that. What's needed is some way of dealing with the fact that different foods/ingredients vary greatly in how often they're eaten.

How do you deal with this variability in how often things are eaten? Well, rather than starting by looking at symptom flare-ups, you could start by looking at the foods. Take each food that was eaten, find every time it shows up in the diary, and look at whether it was following by a flare-up. A simple way to rate each food would be to take the percentage of the time it's followed by a flare-up. You could then rank the foods by their percentages, and the top foods would be your possible trigger foods.

This method of analysis forms the basis for how TriggerFood works, with some extras added in like taking symptom ratings into account and looking at entire food categories like dairy foods or fried foods.

Keeping a Food Diary to find Trigger Foods

2009-03-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

I wanted to write a piece on how to analyze a food diary to find trigger foods, but realized that it'd be useful to first talk about how to keep a food diary in order to have the necessary information for this kind of analysis. There are plenty of other places where you can learn about keeping a food diary, but here are some key points for finding trigger foods that are often missed:

Track everything you eat. Your analysis will only be as good as the data that you feed into it. If your diary is missing entries, you'll probably need to keep a diary for much longer to be able to reliably find your trigger foods. If you're going through all of the effort to keep a food diary, you might as well be complete, and hopefully not have to keep your diary going as long as if you're missing data.

Track what's in the things you eat. It's a lot of extra work, but recording the ingredients of your foods can make your analysis much more powerful. For instance, you may have a number of different foods that are triggers for you that all have an ingredient in common. Unless you record that ingredient, you'd have no way of knowing that it's the root of your problem with those seemingly different foods.

Record things as soon as you can. It's easy to think that you'll have no problem remembering what you've eaten, and postponing recording things in your food diary until the next day, but it's amazing how quickly we forget. This is especially true for between-meal snacks and beverages, so recording things quickly will make for a much more complete diary.

Rate your symptoms. When recording symptoms, rate your symptoms in some sort of systematic way. For example, in TriggerFood you can rate symptoms as "mild", "average", or "extreme". You could also rate them on a scale from 1-10 or something like that. The point is to come up with ratings that you can compare to one another, rather than having just descriptions that don't lend themselves well to a systematic analysis.

So those are the key points to keep in mind for a food diary that should produce the best results when analyzed. Next time I'll discuss systematic but simple ways to analyze a food diary.

Health management and trigger foods

2009-02-20T18:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-05T12:13:00.000-08:00

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.

IBS trigger foods: one size doesn't fit all

2008-12-22T06:38:00.000-08:00

Searching the web for IBS trigger foods will lead you to a number of sites that provide lists of foods that commonly cause trouble for people with irritable bowel syndrome. These common trigger foods are valuable in that they can give you ideas for what foods to be careful of, but it seems like there are a couple of risks in this approach.

First, there's an inclination to focus on the items that are on these lists, and perhaps not pay enough attention to other foods that might be your trigger foods. For people new to IBS, this might stem from not realizing that IBS varies quite a bit from person to person. IBS is certainly a complex disease, that may have both genetic and environment causes, and the fact that it's so poorly understood gives further evidence that it's tricky to figure out.

The other problem with a one size fits all approach to trigger food lists is that they could keep you from eating things which, although problematic for others, have no adverse effects whatsoever on you. In fact, some of the lists are so extensive that I wonder what's left that a person could actually eat after eliminating all the items.

So what better approach can I offer? Well, it's nothing new since doctors advise this all the time, but taking the effort to keep a food diary with what you've eaten and when your IBS symptoms manifest themselves is one method. For those interested in a more advanced approach to keeping a food diary, take a look at www.triggerfood.com.

Research shows finding IBS trigger foods helps IBS sufferers

2008-07-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

A recent Reuters story describes how research is showing that irritable bowel syndrome sufferers can greatly improve their day-to-day-health by learning certain self-management skills. This in itself may not seem too surprising, but what does come as a surprise is that self-management skills in some cases are just as good as behavioral therapy administered by a professional:

...simple, self-care strategies learned through a home-based program - such as jotting down "trigger foods," keeping a diary of symptoms and managing stress - may be as effective as more traditional, therapist-directed behavior therapy...

This is precisely why I created TriggerFood, to help individuals to take charge of managing their health. For folks suffering from health conditions like IBS, traditional health care routes such as medication may not be sufficient, and this sort of participatory health care becomes quite useful.

That being said, it's important to seek professional health care options for whatever help they can offer.

Empowering people to manage their health: "Health 2.0"

2008-06-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across a new term today: "Health 2.0" Although it's a bit hard to define (like it's cousin web 2.0), I think it's fair to say that a major part of health 2.0 is a movement toward people having tools to take charge of managing their own health. For more specific attempts at defining it, see the health 2.0 wiki.

Health 2.0 also seems to be a phenomenon mainly taking place through web-based applications, which makes sense. One of the hallmarks of web 2.0 has been social networking, which can be harnessed to do things like connect groups people with similar health concerns (see Patients Like Me). The web also makes it much easier for small startups with great ideas to get their neat health-related software out into the world where people can use it--and many of the great ideas for empowering people in caring for their health are going to come from small startups.

So clearly, TriggerFood can be considered part of this larger health 2.0 movement. It's a simple application, and serves a small market, but hopefully it can be a big help to that niche (myself included).

Food, Health and TriggerFood

2008-06-03T06:45:00.000-07:00

Interested in how foods affect your health? This blog will be an ongoing investigation of various health concerns, and the important role that foods play. It will also follow the development of TriggerFood, our online software that helps track food that you eat, how you're feeling, and figure out what foods might be giving you grief.

For those interested in the more technical aspects of TriggerFood's development, keep an eye on Edgy Developments.