How Could Eating Well Be Easier?
It’s hard to eat healthily. In the US, in particular, there is a lot of unhealthy food out there. You have to go against the flow to eat well. If you lose focus on the goal, you will likely start eating badly. Then you might get discouraged and think: “why not have one more drink, my diet is already shot for the day.”
It can be hard to even know what you’re eating. Nutrition information is not always available or easily accessible when eating at restaurants. You can look things up and record what you eat using a food tracking app like MyFitnessPal, but the data is imperfect, and it’s another task you have to remember to do.
Eating better can be intimidating. Cooking more is one way to have more control and avoid the temptations of restaurants and other pre-made food. That takes time, and cooking is not a skill everyone already has.
Ideally, a person could have fresh, tasty food with minimal effort, low cost, and high speed. And it would be very easy to track what you were eating. We are moving towards that. We have easy-to-use delivery apps that can get food to our door in 30 minutes. We have apps that make it reasonably easy to track what you are eating.
How could it be better? What if you had an intelligent diet assistant? You would tell it your current state and goals. You would develop a working plan with its help. It would enable you to easily track your food with image recognition and integration with your food orders. It would learn your meal timing and suggest a meal based on your tastes and dietary needs at just the right time. It would recognize when you had a dinner planned with friends at a restaurant and suggest the best meals for you when you arrived. None of this is technologically infeasible, and it will probably happen in the coming years.
Another big advance would be easily getting fresh food even when at home, without needing to cook. Perhaps a combination of cloud kitchens with largely automated food preparation and autonomous delivery will make it cheap to summon good food to your door in 30 minutes. And having an intelligent food assistant on hand would make it easier to choose healthier options, which would, in turn, drive demand and supply of healthier options.
Good tools are already available. You can use a smart scale to easily keep track of your weight and a food-tracking app to easily track your inputs. But over time, this should all become easier and ultimately make health easier. And that’s very important.