h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One thing about being laid up ill, is you get time to think. So I’ve been doing that the last couple of days, and I think I’ve come up with a good idea for an app. You’ll have to bear with me while I explain the thinking behind this though, as well as how it would work.

Firstly, I’ve always believed that your body tries through cravings to tell you what vitamins and minerals it needs. Really fancy a fish finger sandwich? Perhaps that’s your body trying to let you know it needs some omega 3, that kinda thing. Unfortunately these cravings aren’t always real ones, but can often be nothing more than the effects of marketing. Really fancy a burger? That’s more likely you’ve heard a tune similar to one that ends with “I’m loving it”, or you’ve smelled something hot and greasy, and associative memory has kicked in. The problem is, not all our cravings are “natural” ones, so there’s a difficulty in filtering them out.

I also think that with care, the idea of structuring a diet around your natural cravings is a good one. Only eating what you crave isn’t good, because it would lead to a very rollercoaster diet, one day it’d be lots of Vitamin C, the next lots of Omega 3, followed by a day high in carbs, and another high in fat. This isn’t dieting, it’s binging. Also, I don't think that dieting should be about losing weight, I think it should be about making sure your body gets the right foods, and not the wrong ones.

So here’s what I’ve been thinking, if it was possible to create a personalised diet plan based on what your natural cravings are, that also made sure you ate everything else that you were supposed to.

And here’s how I think it can be done with an app. Firstly, you’d need to create a user account and profile which would be completely anonymous of course, and fill in a few details such as age, gender, height, weight, exercise routine (how much in general, not every exercise done) and dietary preferences such as vegetarian, vegan, lactose or gluten intolerant, etc. This would give the system a base to work from.

Each time you then had a meal, you’d be given a serious of flash cards of foods and ask which you would currently prefer. These would be chosen based on their high, medium or low levels of different nutritional values. From answering about ten of these “would you prefer fish and chips to burger and chips” sort of questions, it would be possible to know what the person is currently craving and then provide a range of recipes that cater to those wants.
For the first week though, it’d have to give a series of average recipes to reset the body’s cravings, but after that it should be able to provide the user with a steady supply of different recipes that help cater to what their body needs, and still works around what they want. Such as chocolate.

The app could also allow users to mark dishes that they particularly enjoyed, so it could recommend them again in the future, and take note of what combination of nutritional values and tastes they held, helping to make future recommendations better.

A further thing that it could do, is cater to multiple people in the same meal. Not everyone cooks just for themselves, most people don’t, so the system could allow two or more accounts to be attached for either individual or multiple meals, with each user entering their own cravings, and the person selected as the cook picking up the recipes.

All told, this isn’t an idea to try and tell people what they can or can’t eat. It’s an idea to try and give people a selection of recipes they can cook that provide the right nutritional needs.

Interesting idea, I'll give you that, but you do know an egg contains all the vital vitamins and minerals except vitamin C, right?

And that red bell pepper is richest in vitamin C of all fruits and veggies, with the exception of berries.

Still, I'm interested and would be willing to test it out.

So long as it recommends choclate and bacon, and cheese, it sounds like a good idea...

Yeah, it's really strange when you look into foods, what vitamins and minerals they actually contain.

I'm currently reading up what I can about diets tailored to cravings, but it so far falls very much into the extremes of "Airy Fairy Happy Clappy Hippy" or "ALL CRAVINGS ARE BAD, KILL YOUR CRAVINGS!!!" Which isn't much help. The only sensible one I've found so far is youngandraw.com which take a much better approach to it, if still a little on the hippy side

Chocolate with a high content of cocoa, I hope

Are there actually any scientific papers to do with food cravings? I'm sure bacon is an important source of multiple nutrients... hmm...

There are scientific papers yes, but finding them is difficult