Its a shame about Zoe

I have been using technology to consciously manage and track my personal health for 11 years now and in that time I have road tested many different devices and mobile apps. My aim has been to not only understand what helps me to age healthily but also to be able to share my practical experiences with others. Amongst the devices and apps that I have used over significant periods of time are:-

• Jawbone UP (2)
• Withings Activite POP
• Activat8lives Buddyband
• Withings Smart Scale
• Fitbit (2)
• Muhdo (Epigenetics)
• J-Style Smartwatches (3)
• J-Style Smart Ring (2)
• Zoe

This article is primarily about my experience of Zoe diet and nutrition app and why I believe it is a sad and expensive missed opportunity to contribute to preventative healthcare and improve the lives or many more people.

To understand the context behind my criticism of Zoe, I need to share my whole lifestyle medicine journey and how and why Zoe came into my life for a brief period.

I have described how I discovered what I now know as lifestyle medicine many times in many locations around the world and how a combination of circumstances led me to gamify my health in 2013 using a combination of enabling wearable technologies and gamification strategies. My aim was to better understand and manage my health through exercise, diet and sleep. This combination of circumstances, technologies and gamification-driven motivation enabled me to lose 21kg in 3 months and, in the process, improve both my physical and mental health.

The trigger for starting out on this journey was nothing to do with health problems but more to do with friends' comments about my my obesity and, through a DNA analysis, to learn that I had a 50% chance of getting Diabetes 2. It happened at a time when there was a new fitness band on the market called the jawbone UP which has a mobile application that showed a dashboard of physical activity (steps), energy consumption/expenditure and sleep quality. Over the ensuing years, I explored many different wearable devices and mobile applications to assess their effectiveness in helping me understand and better manage my health through lifestyle medicine and the dashboards shown below give an indication of how these devices use targets to measure lifestyle influencers and provide motivation.

This combination of technology and gamification enabled me to not only lose weight and improve physical and mental health but also to realise that the original mantra of 10,000 steps per day was only a small part of the jigsaw and the diet/nutrition was more important than exercise and that sleep, hydration, relationships and alcohol are also crucial factors and these six elements comprise what I came to learn are the six pillars of lifestyle medicine.

It led me to discover the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine (BSLM) just over 2 years ago and to become a passionate evangelist for their work. At the first BSLM conference I attended in 2022, Tim Spector, Founder of ZOE, was one of the keynote speakers on the topic of evidence based diet and nutrition for healthy ageing and preventative healthcare. Earlier this year, I decided to try ZOE for myself to not only see how effective it would be for my situation, but also to share what I learn from trying ZOE.

Zoe is designed to provide subscribers with personalised and gamified diet and nutrition advice based largely on the evidential benefits of a plant based diet on blood health, blood sugar and gut health. A ZOE package begins with tools that include a Freestyle Libre blood sugar monitor, and blood test kit and a stool sample for gut health followed by a program of diet exercises to both measure the impact of your diet on blood sugar levels and to educate you on personalised best practices with targets for the quality of diet and the timing of meals.

The Best Bits of ZOE

ZOE has one of the best gamified diet assessment and management programmes on their mobile app that I have seen. It uses targets, nudges and feedback to educate users and can help you to develop better eating habits that are personalised to you. It makes logging the food you eat as fast and simple as it can be. In my case, I now have a far better dietary routine for most of the day until the evening meal when, because it is shared with my partner and based on our joint food tastes, is not optimal for me and would be difficult to change.

Thanks to ZOE, I now have better eating habits and have lost another 4kg without trying.

The Worst Bits of ZOE

ZOE is expensive and whilst the initial sum for the testing kit?(￡300) and first 4 months of use of the mobile app (￡160) was worth it to me, the ongoing membership of around ￡40 per month is, in my opinion, exorbitant.

ZOE collects all the information you provide about your dietary habits and is able to use that data for research with your permission. What is appalling, in my opinion, is that if you decide not to continue your membership, you not only lose your diet assessment tool and scoring but also access to all the data you have provided during your membership.

?“Hell hath no fury like a ZOE scorned!!”

?I wish I could say that ZOE could make a vital contribution to shaping preventative healthcare and tackling the obesity crisis but its pricing structure puts it out of reach of those people who need it most. What makes me angry about ZOE is that, although it has one of the best gamified tools for assessing, motivating and advising on diet and nutrition, it relies on users to spend time to provide the app with diet and eating habits and does not offer any support for the other important lifestyle medicine pillars of hydration, exercise, sleep, relationships and harmful substances. In addition, unlike wearable technologies, it does not track and changes in your actual vital signs or health.

At a monthly subscription of almost ￡40, in my opinion ZOE has put profit before public good and although I would happily agree that the initial 4 months with ZOE did me some good, I feel that the ongoing subscription is a rip-off!!