5 things you didn't know about the Zoe personalised nutrition test
Here are five surprising things about the Zoe test that I didn't know when I bought it from the website.
1/ Food survey, Blood test, Gut test and CGM
Thing number one is that you do four things before you really get going. The first thing is you tell Zoe about your current diet. The next thing is you wear a continuous glucose monitor that goes in your arm. Thirdy, you do a blood fat test. So in order to do that, you eat these pre-canned scientifically developed muffins that they send you. And then, after a period of time, you measure your blood response after those muffins. Fourthly, you also do a stool test, which is looking at your microbiome. And all of these tests unlock scores for individual foods.
2/ Lessons in the Zoe app
Thing number two is do you get these lessons in the app. Today's lesson is about understanding sleep and your diet. What they've done a really good job of is a mixture of education and quizzes to help the knowledge sink in. There's these cues to make sure that you interact with the content.
In general, the lessons reflect the different types of tests that you do. So there's some lessons about blood sugar, there's some lessons about blood fat, there's a lot of lessons about gut microbiome. And then, as you can see, it explores deeper into areas like sleep. So they've really worked hard to make a very holistic health and wellness plan out of your test.
3/ Personalised nutrition guide
Number three, when the results come back, you get a personalised list of all the different food categories there are, and then how these score for you. So each food is scored against blood sugar response, blood fat response, and how it builds your gut microbiome. And then they're categorised by the following:
Gut boosters
Gut suppressors
Proteins
Snacks
Eggs
Dairy
Vegetables
Fruits
Dried fruits
Meat and poultry
Beans
Breads and flowers
Fish and seafood
Pasta and grains
Okay, let's have a look at spreads and nut butters. Almond Butter and hummus are quite good at 92 and 86. Cashew butter 64. So I'm going to tap on that. We can see here that this is great for blood sugar, not so great for blood fat, and very good for gut health. Every single food has this categorisation of how it matches against those three tests that you did at the beginning.
4/ Scoring your meals, not counting calories
Number four. So when you log your foods, you get a score for each food and that rolls up into the score for the meal. And when you put in your meals and then you get a score for the day. What Zoe wants to do is help you score highly for the entire day, over 75 points.
And that is the average of all the things you have eaten taken, in consideration of when you eat them in the day, how close to bedtime, and the quantity of food you ate. So you might have something that's super healthy, but it that’s only a tiny lettuce, that's not going to be powerful enough to counteract the three burgers that you had at lunchtime.
Looking at yesterday, my breakfast was 43 points, my lunch (which was yogurt) was 95 points, and then dinner (which was of kind of like another breakfast actually—I had eggs on toast with avocado, kimchi and some mushrooms as well), that was 76 points.
But then I had one like one glass of rosé, and that was enough to take my entire score down to 69, whereas before that it was actually quite a lot higher.
5/ Meal planning tips
So number five, when you add your meals, you get tips for the next day. So jumping back in, you can see here that I logged all my meals. And I've got this message which is keep an eye on your fats,
“Low quality fats or too much fat has reduced your score. To help your body clear blood fats and avoid inflammation, avoid fat rich foods in the next meal of your day.”
So that is a really handy tip that will help me structure my diet for the next day. And all of these things really just help you reflect in more detail on your food and why you're making the food choices you're making and the effect they have on these different metrics of blood sugar, blood fat and your gut microbiome as well.
That's it from this video. Check out the other videos on the channel, like this one about Zoe,and I'll see you soon.
