FOOD COACH
Most of you know that my professional career began in the pharmaceutical industry.
I worked for two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and after 10 years I realized that the American sick-care system isn’t designed to create wellness. It is made to respond to illness and injury, which means quite often, wellness is a personal journey.
Currently, it’s estimated that most Americans are metabolically unwell - up to 93%, in fact.
“Researchers evaluated Americans across five components of health: levels of blood pressure, blood sugar, blood cholesterol, adiposity (overweight and obesity), and presence or absence of cardiovascular disease (heart attack, stroke, etc.). They found that only 6.8 percent of U.S. adults had optimal levels of all five components as of 2017-2018.” - Tufts University. Read the publication in the Journal of the Amercian College of Cardiology here.
Thankfully, it isn’t as difficult as you might think to make meaningful changes to improve physical and emotional health, especially when people who have “been there, done that” create tools to make it easier!
HELP THOSE WHO ARE HELPING OTHERS
I love connecting with people who have big goals, so when Victor Morgan called and shared his “big hairy, audacious goal” with me, I wanted to help!
Victor has created an app to help people make dietary and lifestyle changes by simply scanning their grocery receipts. The app helps to track three primary health goals: protein, fiber, and reducing sugar. That’s it. It’s simple - and effective.
Victor has been through several improvements of the app and it’s ready to be in users’ hands - like yours!
The best part is the FoodCoach App is already available, for free, on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Download FoodCoach and allow it to assist you, and your family, with improving metabolic health!
A WELLNESS INTERVIEW
Victor Morgan is an entrepreneurial mechanical engineer living in South Carolina who has founded two companies focused on making massive amounts of disparate data human-consumable and actionable. He “discovered” the link between nutrition and health in his own life and through this lens saw systemic problems in the current US health-care system.
I asked Victor to answer a few questions so that you could learn more about his powerful mission to change people’s health for the better.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW with VICTOR MORGAN
1. Who are you?
Hi. My name is Victor Morgan. I'm an engineer by training, living in Upstate South Carolina. I discovered the connection between how I felt physically, my mental clarity and the food I ate when I had back pain several years ago. The back pain would increase when I ate unhealthy food and my mental clarity would fall off a cliff. Eventually I was able to tie the food that I was eating to how I felt and showed up for the first time in my life. My biggest surprise was when my back pain increased when I was eating food advertised as "healthy" but wasn't.
My “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” is to make the current US health-care system implode under its own colossal weight by starving it of the 80% of funding spent on preventable lifestyle disease. - VM
2. What did you create?
I created FoodCoach, a free, easy to use and easy to understand nutrition (not calorie) tracking app.
FoodCoach is the first step towards the “big hairy audacious goal.” It is an easy-to-use tool for users to improve their nutrition, so it can be used long enough to make lasting changes, for users to become healthier, to reduce their healthcare costs, to reduce population healthcare costs and force the entire system to adapt or implode.
Check out this short Instagram video from Victor.
3. What inspired you to create this APP?
Two reasons.
The first reason I created FoodCoach was to solve my own needs. Existing apps like LooseIt or MyFitnessPlan require logging what food you eat, when you eat it, and estimating food amounts. While potentially accurate, I found that even though I'm a "numbers guy" and was very motivated, I wasn't able to track reliably. It felt like I was manually balancing my checkbook, all day, every day. It was annoying, and I stopped using the apps before my health improved. I knew I couldn't be the only one that had a hard time tracking with existing apps and decided to try to make something easier to use.
The second reason I created FoodCoach is I hate the US sick-care system. Through FoodCoach, I want to make the US "health-care" system implode by removing 80% of health-care funding that is currently spent on preventable, lifestyle based disease. The US spends nearly 18% of GDP on healthcare. This amount grows every year and the more we spend, the sicker we become. This is a financial and public policy problem made real by our poor health, lower quality of life and shorter life expectancies all around the country. Regardless of your politics, the current process is broken and is unsustainable. The solution FoodCoach proposes is simple: help people change what they eat, to become healthier, to reduce healthcare spend and force the entire system to adapt or implode.
4. What problem do you solve?
With FoodCoach, nutrition tracking is made easier, to allow people to track longer, to give them time to make gradual and lasting changes to their nutrition. It tracks a user's nutrition with just a picture of their food receipt. From the food receipt, it has three simple, easy to understand goals and provides food-item specific recommendations to help you meet your goals, all based on foods that you've already purchased.
Rather than tracking your total calories from any source, the three goals of FoodCoach are:
1. Meet your dietary protein goals. Eating protein dramatically reduces hunger.
2. Meet your dietary fiber goals. Eating fiber is filling.
3. Reduce your dietary sugar and added sugar. Dietary added sugar is linked to 40+ medical conditions.
FoodCoach finds the foods that you are already buying that are highest in protein and fiber and recommends that you purchase more of that specific food item, with a picture of the food item. It also finds the foods that are the highest in added sugar and recommends you purchase less, and then tracks your nutrition over time to help you see the progress that you are making.
5. What excites you most about it?
I'm most excited by the simplicity of FoodCoach. It's designed to be simple to use and simple to understand to help improve the lives and health of users.
6. Who can it help?
Nearly everyone. 2/3 of Americans are overweight or obese. Nearly all of us eat too much sugar and not enough fiber. Added sugar is in nearly all processed foods in America, it's very difficult to avoid. While tracking calories works, it's time consuming and difficult to keep up with. Changing the source of your calories is sufficient to lose weight, feel better without feeling like you are starving yourself.
If you are a man who wants to get to 8% body fat, count your calories. For everyone else, change what you eat to change your health with FoodCoach.
7. HOW CAN THIS APP HELP?
With FoodCoach, the goal is to help slowly change WHAT someone eats, knowing HOW MUCH they eat and their health will follow.
FoodCoach wants to help you help you become healthy without calorie counting. With a goal of continuous improvement, the app is responsive to your inquiries. Each additional user makes the tool easier to use and more accurate for the following user.
Today, FoodCoach allows users to upload grocery store receipts to determine the source of the users calories, compares the users actual nutrition to simple protein, fiber and low-sugar nutrition goals, provides food-item specific recommendations to move towards their goals and tracks nutrition over time.
In the near future, FoodCoach will link nutrition to health outcomes with the goal of providing users the most common path to move from one nutrition / health sub-group to the next.
Additionally, because dietary changes are a leading indicator of future health changes, FoodCoach will motivate users to continue eating better by projecting their future health based on their current diet.
8. Where can THE APP BE FOUND?
FoodCoach is available, for free, on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
9. How is it different from what's available?
Its simplicity is what makes it different. With FoodCoach, nutrition tracking for your entire family can be made under 4 minutes per month, allowing you to track longer, to learn how to make lasting nutrition changes to help you lose fat, improve your health and mental clarity.
10. Is there anything else you'd like to share?
I often get two questions from FoodCoach users.
The first is from families who use FoodCoach, and is "What if I buy a food item but don't eat it? My kids/spouse eats that. " If the food isn't healthy for you, it's not healthy for your kids or spouse. You shouldn't eat it AND they shouldn't eat it. Also, if the food is in the house, the food is a constant temptation, you have to be strong all week instead of 20 minutes once a week at the grocery store. I buy icecream for my son, but if it's in the house, I'm going to have a little after a particularly long day when my willpower is weakened. The solution is to not keep the food in the house.
If you're still not convinced, you can delete any specific food item from FoodCoach and it recalculates.
The second question is "What if I buy a food item but I don't eat it that week?" FoodCoach averages your nutrition over the prior month. If it takes you 1 month to eat a jar of peanut butter, you'll buy peanut butter once a month on average and the nutrition from that peanut butter is averaged over the entire month. If you purchase a food and it spoils before you've eaten it, it's likely fresh produce. Fresh produce is low in calories so it won't impact your protein or sugar targets, but it will cause FoodCoach to overestimate your dietary fiber. If you're concerned, you can delete the specific food item from your purchases.
11. How can someone contact you for more information?
Through the chat feature on the app, responding to this post, victor@thefoodcoach.app or any of our socials.
MY FAVORITE PART
My favorite part of the Food Coach app is the ability to scan a food’s barcode (Single Item Scan) to see if the food is working for me or against me. I love how simply it breaks down specific macros for my favorite foods and compares them to my nutritional goals. (See the image of my yogurt).
I hope you enjoyed learning more about this powerful and simple tool that empowers you to improve your own wellness.
Victor welcomes all feedback related to the app as he is continuously growing and making functional improvements based on your feedback.
Can you think of anyone this may help? Please share this article with them!
Thank you, and be well!
-Jacquelyn Benjamin
