Edgy Developments

For quite a while now, I’ve been interested in how foods affect health. Amongst family and close friends I’ve often heard speculation as to what sort of foods cause various health woes: migraines, stomach upsets, a fussy baby. This question has certainly been looked at before, primarily in two ways:

First, clinical studies have established foods that affect a lot of people with a particular ailment. The downside to this is that it only finds very generally applicable food effects, and misses individual variation.

A second approach is to figuring out food culprits is to keep a food diary, and then try to look for patterns that correlate with health. But unless the patterns are very obvious, they’ll probably get missed. Why? I think some patterns are subtle, and will only be seen if you look at a long period of time, which is hard to do when just leafing through a food diary by hand. Another reason is that what’s affecting your health may be a particular ingredient shared by the foods you eat, and you won’t see that just by looking at the name of the foods you’ve eaten.

I’ve decided to tackle this problem, and create a web application that helps people figure out foods that are affecting their health. To that end, I’ve formed the company Edgenic, and this blog to chronicle my experience in making this web application.