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The future of diets

Jan 2002

I put on another 3kg over the Christmas break. I am far from fat, at a reasonably lean 70kg, but I was only 65kg two years ago. At that rate of increase, I will hit 100kg in twelve years, and will certainly be fat. So at some time in the not too distant future I might have to contemplate eating less, and join the large part of the population that spends its life on a succession of diets. But help is at hand. We had an idea a while back, which I’m sure must have been thought of earlier by other companies - edible electronics. Patients have long since swallowed electronic devices that monitor their digestive systems, but they are usually encased and come out undigested. However, with polymer electronics making rapid progress, it can only be a matter of time before we have Jelly Babies that scream when you bite their heads off, and novelty sweets that seem quite normal until after they are swallowed and then complain loudly all the way through that they’ve been kidnapped and held in a dark prison.

Edible electronics will allow us to routinely swallow tablets that diagnose the state of our inner health, measuring cholesterol levels, digestive bacteria populations, acidity, anything that might give clues to how we should change our diet. In principle, they could easily signal this information to a home computer or all the way to a clinic. The use of this information will be greatly increased because in the same time frame, food packaging is becoming much more sophisticated. Instead of a simple barcode, chips will be used. Prototypes that already cost less than 3p will soon be mass produced at less than a penny each and will contain identifiers as well as some information on the product. The last part of this is almost irrelevant. Once you have an identifier, you can easily access any information the producer is willing to let you have from their web site. Your kitchen computer should be able to interrogate these chips remotely too, so that it can build a complete inventory of what is in the fridge or the cupboards. I don’t personally subscribe to the smart fridge concept with the fridge automatically reordering the milk as it runs out, but only because this is more easily and usefully done by a general purpose computer somewhere else in the kitchen.

Since diets fail because it is too hard to gather the information we need, and to much effort to police our intakes, kitchen computers should be a big help. They know exactly what we are eating since they are probably controlling its production. If the food contains edible electronics too, it may even be possible to take account of how much we actually ate. They know what alternative ingredients may exist in the kitchen, or can recommend changes to the next shopping trip. Data mining the global recipe databases should be able to greatly improve our diet, nutritionally and calorifically, while hardly impacting the amount we eat or its taste. They should help us maintain a much better balanced diet, which is about the only food advice that is still unchanged after countless trials. And of course if we need nagging, they can do this more tirelessly than any mother-in-law. Furthermore, since many of us already pay for our canteen lunches or snacks with magnetic cards, these could also become a part of our automated diets, since they will soon be chipped too. The Mars bar you ate in the afternoon could be automatically detected and the evening meal reduced accordingly. The electromagnetic lock on the fridge door could stay locked and the microwave inert, until you’ve spent an hour at the gym.

The final straw though may be linking all this into our medical insurance policy. It will soon be possible for doctors to order us to follow a particular regime, and to directly police it, instead of just taking our word for it. It could be very hard to cheat, and if we do, the penalty for being found out could be a refusal to pay by the insurer. The electronics capsule that we had to swallow should be able to monitor g-forces and orientation, so could tell whether we actually jogged for three miles, and did a hundred sit-ups, or sat on the sofa all night. As with almost every area of so called progress, electronic assistance in our diets will come with a downside. Personally, I think I’ll go to the gym voluntarily and eat fewer Mars bars so that I never have to worry about it.