1. WHAT IS HEALTH, AND HOW DO WE MEASURE IT?
I am passionate about being healthy and helping others to be healthy. But what does healthy
even mean these days? Healthy in my eyes has 2 components: (1) mental and emotional
happiness, which is harder to measure objectively, and (2) biochemical or biometric health,
which is easier to measure. One of the things I’d like to promote is for everyone to look more
closely at and monitor their biomarkers in the same way that many of us monitor our bank
accounts. Just like we watch what goes in and out of our bank accounts each month in an
effort to be financially healthy, we should look at what goes in our bodies each month (the
input, food primarily) and relate that input to our internal biochemistry each month (the
output). Is our diet helping or hurting us? Aren’t these biochemical measurements—
cholesterol, lipids, blood glucose—the real measure of quality health? We eat every day, right?
So given that food is our source of energy and directly affects each cell in the body, isn’t the
effect of food on our cells the real measure of health? I know that not everyone will agree with
me, and that’s fine. How else can we measure health? Let’s have a discussion.
These days, there’s a lot of talk about healthcare innovation, “apps” and how we can make
medicine better, and people healthier. Personally, I would like to see (and want to promote)
the evolution of medicine to include personalized nutrition. What is that, you ask? Simply, it’s
using food as medicine to be healthy. More specifically, a customized nutrition plan based on
what foods are good for your body. It’s so simple, yet is often overlooked in society and in
medicine, which traditionally has treated disease instead of promoting health.
OK so you eat all this healthy food…now what? How do we measure whether it’s actually
making you better, or worse? Did all that spinach and broccoli last month improve my
cholesterol and blood sugar? Did that cheeseburger or 2 last month really do any damage? To
test this, we’ve got to be able to test ourselves, look at the data, and monitor this data every
week, month, or year (whatever we figure out is a reasonable time period). On that note, I
recently attended a conference related to technology in healthcare in London
(http://ukehealthweek.com/). Some important themes from that conference:
(1) It has been difficult to get general health practitioners to use Health IT. The National
Information Board (UK) has a report out on this "Adopting Tech in General Practice"
see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/personalised-health-and-care-2020/using-
data-and-technology-to-transform-outcomes-for-patients-and-citizens
Even the UK government has noted it's difficult to get doctors and other medical professionals
to use technology. So if doctors are lagging in its use, do we as consumers take the lead and
cause “the system” to change?
(2) The big challenge in health informatics is to create a scalable infrastructure for creating a
learning health systemthat can evolve into something useful. "Big Data" in and of itself is not

2. enough, we need to learn from the data and be able to apply it to actually make people
healthier. We need to find the right intersection of technology and medicine, where sufficient
health data can be used to prevent illness and promote health.
The implications of this issue are huge, including the use of that data to achieve real quality and
customization. Imagine being able to create your own account (somewhere in the “cloud”), log
in via your mobile device, be able to see all of your blood test results from the past year or
more, and track those results as they relate to your dietary intake. This type of analysis would
truly allow us as a population to monitor our health, just as we do our bank accounts. We as
educated consumers need to be more active in our health and I want to be a pioneer in this
field, educating and promoting the importance of personalized nutrition and medicine and
motivating others!