Forget the Calories, Eat More Rainbows
Last summer my friend Laura (a food fanatic) and I (an engineer), decided to put our heads together to try and solve problems around personal health. We wanted to build a small project that could help a few people but had the potential of helping many more. We decided to change our diets and eat more rainbows after being inspired by diving deep into publically available research, and one book in particular, How Not To Die by Dr. Michael Greger. The result? I felt great! My mother commented on my complexion more than once (which never happens), and I noticed that my mornings became very, well… regular. Full disclosure, during this period, I also transitioned from being an omnivore to being mostly vegetarian and sometimes opting for fish. I believe this had a lot to do with my changes also. Enough shallow anecdotes, onto the science!
For disease prevention, berries of all colors have emerged as champions. — Dr. Michael Greger
Dr. Greger states that many of today’s ailments are due to poor diet, which isn’t surprising. He goes on to claim that food can be used to remedy specific illnesses at the same or higher efficacy as pharmaceutical drugs. Before you ring the woo-woo alarm, it should be known that Laura and I aren’t easily swayed, we need to see the data. The good doc doesn’t disappoint here, as his book contains many endnotes referencing research pitting food directly against medicine and often winning.
In a section of the book the author describes a heuristic called “eating the rainbow”, in other words eating a diverse variety and color of unprocessed whole plant-based foods; sorry Impossible Burger. It turns out that the colors in fruits and vegetables are due to their phytonutrient content. These plant-based nutrients aren’t essential for survival but are used to keep your body working properly.
Making rainbows
Upon a quick search on the app stores, we immediately recognized that most food-related applications were centered around calorie counting. While these apps could be useful for managing weight, we wanted to focus on getting proper nutrition into our bodies. We seemed to be unique in this way, and that was a great start.
Minimum learnable product
At first, we were curious if keeping a journal of our color-based diet would help us develop a habit of eating more veggies. We also hoped to gain a general feel for this type of food journaling and see if it was at all motivating.
Laura, a level-32 spreadsheet wizard, whipped together a journal in Google Sheets for us to track our daily consumption.
How did it feel using the spreadsheet? A great first impression, but eventually more painful than helpful due to it being highly manual. We immediately recognized the need to build an underlying food database and automate the counting to remove the pain of input. I decided to brush up on my rusty programming skills and build a prototype using React-Native and Firebase while Laura tackled the food database.
Building the app
We had humble ambitions with our prototype. We weren’t expecting to change behavior at this point and instead maintained focus on solving the pain around tracking a rainbow diet.
The three assumptions we made for the prototype were:
- To build an app that’s easier than using a spreadsheet
- Provide a way to visualize progress
- Target the innovators, those that already understand the rainbow diet
Together we put our ideas onto paper and couldn’t help but get a little carried away with our creativity. The design could have been quick and dirty but with open-source libraries making it look half decent was incremental. Also, why take the fun out of it?
Some of the libraries we used to get started are:
- React Native Elements for UI elements
- React Native Firebase for cloud storage, social sign-in, and offline-mode
- React-native-svg-charts for graphs
After a few months of mostly me fighting React-Native and losing, we managed to release a working app on iOS and Android. Here are some early screenshots of the prototype:
The rainbow (road) ahead
Launched in January of 2019, we are currently helping 1000 monthly active users make healthy food choices. We have users all over the globe, most of them coming from the US and Europe, but a handful in Africa, Asia, and South America. Knowing that we’re making an impact, even in this small way makes us feel good inside. 🤗
Back then, our goal was to get the app into the hands of some early users to gather feedback for improvements. Since then, we’ve added many upgrades and while feedback has been very positive there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Our current goal is to focus on retention rates, which I’ll cover in a future post.
The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families. — Dr. Michael Greger
Food is our medicine. Whether you’re a vegan or an omnivore, sustainably adding a variety of plant-based colors to your diet will vastly improve your health. Our long-term goal is to use science to help you eat the foods that actively work towards your goals, be it for more energy, better digestion, or flying powers.
We have a goal of helping improve the diets of 1m people by 2022. If you’re an expert on the topic or know of other ways you can help us spread the health, please send us an email at eattherainbowapp@gmail.com.
You can also download, rate, and share our app with your family and friends! (App Store, Google Play).
Thanks for reading! For more on us, find us on LinkedIn
👉 Laura Heely and Matt Kim
